What if you could target your search engine marketing (SEM) efforts in paid search and display the way you target your direct marketing efforts? Analysis of your b2b social media networks may give you that edge.
In my quest to get more out of social media than just followers and a soapbox platform, I am looking at what content my network follows, reads, and shares more closely. In my last post I talked about the analysis of hashtags in tweets, and how that could help me better understand the personas of my network.
Now I am looking at what else I can gather and what I could do with this. In particular, I am interested in the content being shared: blogs, web pages, video, etc. The titles tags, description meta tags, and urls all have keywords that tell a lot about interest areas and build a richer persona. This step got me thinking, could I tighten alignment to my network by optimizing…?
- My paid search to reflect keyword tendencies in shared content
- My display placement based on sites aligned to my market offers
- The SEO on my own website
Right now, SEM allows anonymity which creates challenges when you want to focus digital marketing efforts on existing customers or known prospects. My paid search and media plans look at broad behavior, demographics, and firmographics but specifics on their web patters at the individual level is sketchy. However, if I align my followers to my customer list and profile their specific personas compared to the broader market, I get much closer to a targeted campaign. This makes my digital efforts more closely resemble my direct marketing efforts – smaller targets, highly relevant content shared, higher conversion.
Another reason to think about b2b social media beyond influence marketing and make it work to drive revenue and customer relationships.
