The importance of a synergy between a social media marketing plan and search marketing campaigns.

Most every company that spends money on advertising and marketing will likely have an online marketing plan as a significant part of the overall marketing budget. These days there are a number of distinct types of Internet-based marketing which can be pursued by any given business. Chief among these for effectiveness and return on investment are social media marketing, email marketing, and search marketing. When these are pursued independently of one another, the results turn out to be less effective than if one entity or person oversees the three areas of Internet-based marketing together in concert.

Social media marketing includes a variety of different platforms which are targeted. Facebook and Twitter are two of the principle vehicles in this category of Internet-based marketing. These advertising venues do not really require much upfront financial investment. Instead, they need incentive and time investments to be offered to two communities of people. Incentives include discounts on certain items, general sales on merchandise offered, or bonuses for purchasing a certain item. Time investments are what is principally required in working a marketing plan through either Twitter or Facebook. The communities of people will become followers of a business or sole proprietor and often will support their endeavors, if only the business persons spend some time giving something to the community more than just posts and tweets about products and sales. Useful and free information should be offered as part of it. This is where the time portion of the investment comes in to play, in finding such good information to share with the Twitter and Facebook communities and becoming involved in broadcasting such tweets and posts.

Email marketing is another of the three best Internet marketing venues. In this form of marketing, the business or individual is putting its money into building up lists and sending out email marketing campaign blitzes to everyone on the list. The expenses involved in this form of Internet marketing using a campaign are mostly in acquiring and compiling the databases of names and email addresses of individuals who agree to participate in the program (so that it does not become tagged as spam emails and violate the laws).

Search marketing, the third form of Internet-based marketing, revolves around getting a company or individual's website placed higher in the search engine major top results of a page for given keywords. This is known as optimizing, or maximizing, a search engine results placement. Expert firms can be paid to do this, or a great amount of time and study can be invested by the business representative concerned, in order to achieve success with it. The three search engines which control over eighty five percent of the entire search engine market share are Google (with more than twice the market share of either of its major competitors), Yahoo!, and Microsoft's Bing. None of the other search engines out there are really much worth going after, unless a specific niche search engine fits in with a given business' line of products or services.

Although it may not be at first readily apparent to some novice or even mid-level marketeers, coordinating an effective and interrelated strategy between the three components of Internet-based marketing, i.e. social marketing, email marketing, and search engine marketing, is not just recommended for a better return on investment dollars, it is necessary. There are some business people who lack the proper training in understanding this and are thus under the mistaken impression that it is better to spread the advertising dollars around to three different companies which specialize in handling Internet-based marketing. This concept may be true with traditional forms of advertising, such as yellow pages, billboard advertising, or publication based advertising, but it is definitely not the case with Internet-based marketing.

Among the return on investment issues which could be present in separating out the three divisions of such Internet-based advertising are the following ideas. As one example, the social marketing team might potentially stray to far away from the best and most profitable demographic audiences in their efforts. This might be avoided through employing a deep and expert analysis of data using a potent analytical platform. Alternatively, the social marketing team might not think to target the keywords which are deemed to be essential for the search engine marketing team. Again, there would be a divergence of marketing concentration in their various campaigns. In practice, this might play out like this. A business could have a website which is impressively the top ranked one and therefore receiving inexpensive Pay per Click advertising rates for the full version of the brand name. Since they might not be ranked and receiving inexpensive pay per click rates for the abbreviated version of such a brand's name, effective synchronizing of efforts would have the social marketing team to concentrate its efforts on using the abbreviated version of the brand name specifically, so that the two versions begin to equalize in ranking and resulting cost for pay per click advertising as well as search engine optimization. The two departments or companies working together could also be important for return on investment goals if the goal is perhaps to have a certain form filled out, or to bring in visitors to a sale online. Bringing in the greatest number of visitors to an online sale might require the three Internet-based marketing groups coordinating their strategies closely, as well. Obviously the social marketing team will be out hitting the tweets and posts for Twitter and Facebook to drum up interest in the sale. Perhaps the email marketing group should also work concurrently to ensure that they are blasting out email campaigns to all of the names and emails on the database about the upcoming sale as well. Together with them, the search engine marketing department might think of ways to try to get the sub page for the sale ranked so that visitors will be brought in from the search engine majors' search results as well.

The importance of having the three divisions within the Internet-based marketing group on the same page can not be overstated. This may require some cross departmental training, but scattering the resources in having the three different yet interrelated advertising formats each purse their own goals is a waste of such limited budgets and advertising resources. When the social marketing, email marketing, and search engine marketing parties all work together in concert, then there are few results that the three of them together can not achieve.