It may be easy to think that to achieve favorable search results on Google, Bing or Yahoo, simply putting up a video, blogging or posting to Facebook and Twitter will get the job done. However, to achieve optimal results, the combination of search marketing, organic search engine optimization and social media necessitates a cohesive strategic vision. Moreover, this vision is not an end-game approach, but rather an ongoing and flexible process. The need for flexibility stems from the constantly shifting changes in search algorithms and consumer behavior. We are often asked at Get Page One how each of these components operates in tandem to reach results.

While the answers are not always simple, search engines begin the course of online visibility through a complex combination of factors. More than just heading tags, anchor text, backlinks and advertisements, each component in the search process works together to develop placement on search engines, where the best place is, of course, a top ranking. Ideally, through the progression of increasing views and interaction, organizations convert search results into consumer demand and new sales. In a sense, it is akin to a professional baseball team playing for a World Series title. Each element, from pitching and hitting to defense seemingly operate separately. However, these components do not win championships by operating independently. The manager must know when to bunt and steal bases and when to pull the starting pitcher and rely on the bullpen.

Likewise, search marketing, SEO and social media marketing all seemingly function as separate entities. Yet, each has its own objectives. Choosing the right keywords, effective use of ad elements such as targeting and call-to-action, engagement through social networks and measuring results are just a few pieces of the puzzle.

On the Internet, you want to be in the right place at the right time, when the consumer is looking. Each building block in the practice of search marketing helps to realize this goal. Optimal search results typically occur when each building block combines within a comprehensive strategy. Therefore, like a World Championship baseball organization, achieving top Internet ranking is a team effort.

Analytics are a good thing. At Get Page One, we love analytics. After all, they can tell us whether our efforts at search marketing and social media are working to develop awareness and drive repeat business. Bounce rates, click-throughs, likes and re-tweets all provide great benchmarks from which to measure results. However, a raging sea of analytics, customer data and just plain numbers can overwhelm anyone’s mind. Numbers can be deceiving and do not always tell the whole story. So what are some companies overlooking by only focusing on numbers?

The answers may reside in understanding the psychology of your brand, your own customers and the consumer at large. As business leaders, we all tend to think bottom-line. Rational, logical and strategic are part of our DNA. We focus so intently on outcomes, results and analytics that we tend to forget why our customers buy from us, why they seek us out and why they might keep coming back in the future.

Thinking in terms of the physical world, consumers visiting a brick and mortar business in person become involved in the brand experience created by the organization. This experience touches each phase of the sales funnel starting with awareness and hopefully leading to initial and repeat purchases. And offline, just as online, the brand attempts to influence customers and inspire referral business.

Experiential marketing is nothing new; however, just as brands provide a certain experience offline, the Internet experience is equally important. Online, the combination of search marketing, social media marketing, analytics and consumer experiences can combine to tell a more complete story, turning raw data and numbers into useful information. For instance, web analytics can provide unique information about page views and the length of time viewers spend perusing a website. A high bounce rate might indicate an area of the website where users are leaving due to lack of interest and thus affecting conversion rates. Social media marketing analytics such as Facebook page interaction or re-tweets on Twitter can tell a story of how an audience perceives their online experience with the brand outside of a webpage or search engine.

Market research professionals talk about how together, quantitative and qualitative data help chronicle consumer behavior. Quantitative data is like analytics; however, combined with the attributes and descriptive information of qualitative data, we can begin to draw a more robust picture of the customer experience.

What is the value of a customer? It is an important to many business owners. Last week, we discussed how both search marketing and social media can provide several benefits including driving awareness and providing communications channels for customers. And through efforts to reach out to existing customers and new prospects via the Internet, search and social can have profound influence on purchase decisions. However, going beyond the immediate to thinking long-term, there is another way of looking at the bottom-line value.

Bringing in new customers is typically an immediate and necessary goal for any organization. Customer retention and reputation management can lead to enduring success. However, over time, customers have their own intrinsic value beyond simply an initial purchase. Yet, the question remains – what is that value? Are we measuring our long-term efforts at search and social media marketing to uncover their true potential?

Customer lifetime value (CLTV) is typically an average of costs incurred, relative to the benefits (profits) received from attracting and converting a prospect to buy a product or service. Retaining customers and influencing them to buy more and to buy more frequently over their lifetime relationship with the company is an important measurement to consider. The formulas for calculating and measuring CLTV are too long and complicated to cover in this blog. There are many books and websites that can help understand and calculate CLTV.

However, search marketing and social media fit into CLTV in very unique and strategic ways. Driving awareness of new products or services, upgrades, special offers and package deals via search and social media can affect long-term profitability. Connecting and measuring sales conversions through these channels can also illustrate the viability and return-on-investment resulting from using search marketing and social media marketing as an influence and awareness technique.

The trick is to set up proper measurements and connect the dots as a customer follows the path through the sales funnel and over the lifetime of the relationship with your organization. There is an old saying in business circles that we believe applies – ‘You cannot manage what you don’t measure.’

Many C-Suite executives and marketing managers know both search marketing and social media are important. For some organizations, much of a customer’s initial awareness about products and services is likely to derive from search engines, social media or both. Yet, in terms of their affect on the bottom line, the thought of allocating substantial dollars to these channels may sometimes be a tough decision. The challenge reflects bottom-line thinking; getting the mind around where search and social plug-in to a business can be puzzling. Although, when we uncover the various benefits and connect search and social with business objectives, we begin to see a clearer picture of the overall importance of social and search.

Location, location, location. This cliché is true for real estate and for brick and mortar operations. It is also true for the Internet. If we use our Yellow Pages today, it’s often as a fire starter; otherwise, it just sits collecting dust in a drawer. Today, the search engine has effectively replaced the Yellow Pages for online users. To be found, location in the search rankings is becoming almost as important as physical location and in some cases, more important. Restaurants, for example, are discovering that Internet traffic can very well lead to foot traffic.

Numerous organizations get new business via referral from existing customers. Interestingly, many referrals now are made via social media rather than around the water cooler. Additionally, customer retention has become a significant focus with social media marketing, by augmenting and adding customer touchpoints that are more relevant and more frequent than the once-a-year sales call or monthly newsletter. This “top-of-mind” strategy using social media not only builds product or service awareness, but also creates a more consistent brand message through customer engagement.

Conversations are happening about brands all over the Internet, and reputation management can affect the bottom line for a business in both positive and negative ways. Consumers seeking information via the Internet often get their first impressions of that brand by what they discover via search or social media. Thus, it’s vitally important for a company to participate in online conversations and boost the positive while mitigating the negative.

When businesses consider search and social as important aspects of their marketing that directly touch the consumer, the benefits and justification for adding search and social to the marketing budget are much more clear. In essence, connecting search and social with everyday operations can provide significant value to a company’s bottom line.

Technological innovation between search engines and social media seems to have taken somewhat divergent paths in recent years. While search engines and social media have seen some integration, recent changes by Google adding a Google social search feature could make the blend between search and social even more relevant.

At Get Page One, we’ve monitored the evolution of search and social, and we are excited about the future prospects in technology and relevance to business. Because many organizations bring in new customers through a combination of online visibility via search marketing, SEO and word-of-mouth (or word-of-web), the latest innovation from Google can possibly be a boon to business.

Google Social Search, as reported by Mashable, feeds information from your social graph into search results. The information shown to the user stems from shared connections and shared information linked to Flickr, Quora and Twitter, social feeds with which Google integrates. In other words, if one of your Twitter friends shared a link to Get Page One, the share would show annotated below the search result.

Marketers and businesses realize the importance of how consumers share information via the social graph, including the trust they have in the recommendations of their Internet friends. Google Social Search adds an element of both visibility and word-of-web.

With the advantages come potential disadvantages. If your organization happens to be experiencing a public relations crisis, the negative publicity might not only feed the search engines, it may also feed more negativity into the social graph, snowballing when picked up in a Google search. At Get Page One, we can help you prepare for and react to an online public relations crisis via our reputation management services.

Despite any disadvantages, advancements between search and social media provide a unique opportunity for companies to extend their reach and influence.

We know that search engine optimization and search marketing do the dirty work of creating brand visibility online. Web marketers strive to hit top pages of search engines on Google, Bing and Yahoo. What many marketers and brands sometimes miss happens to be the human influence on the overall search process. This is the blend of both traditional search behavior and the ability for influencers to have an affect on search rankings.

Getting Social

At Get Page One,  your organic SEO, search marketing and paid search-advertising programs are hard at work tapping into consumer behavior, making your brand findable through search engines; however, there is something else hard at work about which you may or may not be aware.

The social media aspect of search is increasingly having an influence on page ranking. And while some of the information on how much influence social lends to search algorithms is vague, Google and Bing both factor social into the mix.

Influencers

The ability for social media to affect search rankings stems from influential users sharing links. This is especially true with Twitter. Shared links via tweets with respect to the overall influence of the user provide authority to the pages being tweeted. The closed system of information from Facebook is more difficult for search engines to calculate the influence of a user; yet, Facebook is still a factor.

Social Media Marketing

Many organizations who learn that social does impact search think that simply having a presence in social media will affect their page rank. Others are concerned about reputation management issues on the social web. As the gap between traditional search and social closes even more, it pays to have more than a simple Twitter account and Facebook page.

Outreach and influence from a brand can breed outreach and influence from authoritative users who can lend a helping hand to your SEO efforts. They, in turn, not only lend a human influence to search, but in essence, can become de facto brand marketers as well.

We offer full social media marketing services as an extension of our SEO work for clients here at Get Page One. But a lot of our SEO customers like to manage their Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Yelp and LinkedIn accounts in-house. They’re doing a great job, and we’re always here to help when questions come up about best practices and whatnot.

It’s common for internal marketing departments to struggle with the prospect of making connections for increased engagement on social networks. Many marketers feel pressured to pump out their own authentic, quality content with limited time and/or resources available. We’d like to share some insight we picked up from a recent post on MediaPost’s Search Insider blog, titled “Why Not Be The CMO Of Everyone?” by Derek Gordon.

It pays to get creative when it comes to generating great social content and boosting those fan and follower counts. Gordon suggested thinking beyond the marketing department when it comes to producing, networking and influencing socially. What is your company’s best asset? The people. And there’s a solid chance that a lot of those people, no matter what department they work in, are using social media personally. Most of your employees are on Facebook and probably LinkedIn, too. Some of them are probably regular tweeters and bloggers. When you begin to think of every person in your organization as a member of the marketing department, you might be surprised at what you find.

Take an audit and determine which of your coworkers are the most socially active and influential online. These individuals are an extension of your brand, even if most of their blogging and tweeting is off-topic (although you’ll often find employees sharing news and insight about your industry or company). Think about how to “activate, focus and curate” content from this arsenal of potential social media marketers. Harness their content-producing savvy and influence by drafting an unofficial panel of experts.

“Very often, employees in large enterprises are actively evangelizing their brands or products and no one in the home office even realizes it,” Gordon wrote. Even if this isn’t the case at your small business, make it happen by inviting active employees to contribute to your social marketing team. Encourage anything and everything from this panel— tweets, blog posts, strategies and ideas for boosting engagement. Ask them to spread the word about your company’s accounts, and you’ll begin to absorb their personal networks of industry peers and friends.

Growing audiences will appreciate your brand’s personable voice and insightful content. Social media is a unique, constantly evolving channel. We’ve found that being overly cautious or traditional in your strategy just won’t work. Get creative and make this essential component of modern branding work for your business. As always, contact us if you have any questions.

If you’re not using social media to promote your business, you’re missing out.

A recent study by Wetpaint and the Altimeter Group, called the ENGAGEMENTdb study, ranks the “world’s most valuable brands based on how they leverage social media to interact with customers.” Able to measure and monitor brand engagement, ENGAGEMENTdb is the first of its kind. Essentially, Wetpaint and Altimeter Group are measuring social media’s financial value. For example, how does a Twitter account actually pay off — or does it even pay off at all?

So the study took the world’s 100 most valuable brands (as measured by BusinessWeek/Interbrand “Best Global Brands 2008″ rankings) and looked at their social media use — how well the brands are engaging their consumers and how that affects their revenue and profit. What the study found was that those 100 brands are “experiencing a direct correlation between top financial performance and deep social media engagement.”

What exactly does that mean? Simply put, companies engaging in social media are more financially successful.

At Get Page One, we’re firm believers in the power of social media marketing. But you can’t just sign up for accounts on Twitter, Facebook, etc. and hope for it to pay off. You have to work hard at it and be consistent in the way you use it — you can’t just sign up and leave. Successful social media marketing involves signing up for social media accounts and actually being social — interacting with other users, regularly updating and participating.

Engage in social media, be consistent and see it literally pay off.

April Fool’s Days of the past were all about classic pranks, like gluing a quarter to the ground on a busy street corner.

But April Fool’s Day seems to have become less about physical gags and more about Internet gags. It can be  pretty easy to pull off a prank online — especially since so many of us spend about every waking moment in front of a computer. Plus, pulling a prank online means you could get a ton of people at once to fall for your trick. For example, tweeting something like, “CRAZY video of me meeting Kanye West last night!” with a link to this video. Hilarious, I know. Feel free to use that one next year.

So what about company websites that take today to let loose and show everybody their wacky, fun side? Maybe you read about Google’s CADIE today, or maybe you excitedly clicked on the ad for the $99 pink leather Eames lounger in today’s Apartment Therapy email.

There’s also the extremely well-done (and daring!) Whole Foods homepage, which features a prominent ad for Organic Air that costs $6.99 for .02 oz (get it?), along with a bunch of recipes for dishes like Deep-Fried Pork Eclairs, Arugula Compost Surprise and… Toast. Mmmm.

The question is, if you’ve seen something April Foolsy today on a business’ website, how’d you find it? I’m willing to bet one or more of these things happened:

• You saw the link on your Twitter feed
• You saw the link on your Facebook feed
• Someone IMed/G-chatted it to you
• You saw the link on one of your favorite blogs (this one, obviously)
• A co-worker mentioned it during a lighthearted conversation at the watercooler

Next question: Did you tell someone about what you saw? Of course you did. That’s exactly what they wanted you to do. The April Fool’s Day joke was all about social media marketing, and by it getting passed from person to person via Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc., it was successful.

What’s more is that successful viral marketing like this means lots of inbound links to your website. That’s excellent for search engine optimization.

Maybe we won’t see as many classic pranks on future April Fool’s Days, but let me drop a pretty intense analogy on you here: By pulling off a well-done joke on a company website like Google.com or WholeFoodsMarket.com, isn’t that just the modern-day version of gluing a quarter to the ground on a busy street corner? People who first notice that quarter will pause to look closer, some bending down to try to grab it, which causes passersby to look and see what all the fuss is about. No matter what, everyone walks away knowing that there is a quarter glued to the ground.

(Whoa.)

By now, you’ve likely heard at least something about Twitter, the social networking website where users can “tweet” 140 characters at a time. People use Twitter for all kinds of stuff — keeping in touch with friends, finding out what’s going on at a particular place, joining conversations and, most important to this blog post, marketing.

How does a website where people seem to just be writing about everyday personal things — “What a beautiful day!” “Just saw a superlative movie!” “I’m eating food at a restaurant!” — have the potential to be a marketing platform? you may wonder.

Look closely at Twitter. Spend some time looking around at what people are saying, or, even better, type in a keyword at search.twitter.com. When you do that, you’ll start to notice something: Twitter has a ton of potential when it comes to marketing your business.

And businesses are no stranger to using Twitter as a marketing platform. Just look at Skittles — for one day a couple of weeks ago, going to Skittles.com brought up a search for “#skittles” on search.twitter.com, so any time a Twitter user mentioned Skittles, it’d show up in the search feed. Needless to say, a few jokers took the opportunity to write inappropriate remarks about the brand, but for the most part the chatter was positive. Skittles got exactly what they wanted: for people to talk about Skittles! And, hey, that’s exactly what we’re doing right now, so it clearly worked.

Countless other companies are already on Twitter, as they’ve quickly realized its social media marketing potential. Companies like Whole Foods, General Motors, Comcast and JetBlue use Twitter to actually interact with their customers, and they even provide customer service through it. That’s a brilliant way to use Twitter, since it seems customers truly appreciate when a human from a business actually takes the time to speak to them. A personal reply online seems so little and basic, but imagine how well this kind of customer service resonates with people.

It’s incredibly easy to make Twitter one-way and just send out self-promotional tweets, a mistake that countless businesses are making right now. Doing it that way is not only lazy, it’s a missed opportunity. Making it two-way (where you are actively replying to other users and engaging in conversation) is exactly how Twitter is meant to be used. Interaction is essential if you’re going to effectively use Twitter as a marketing platform.