To help guide answers to questions such as these I suggest following 5 key steps:

1. Define Your Objectives
2. Define and Segment Your Target Audiences
3. Understand the Role Each Online Channel Plays and How it Can Contribute
4. Choose a Combination that Suits Your Business
5. Implement, Measure and Adjust as Needed to Improve Performance

Step 1. The objectives part is pretty straight forward and involves laying out marketing objectives specific to your business.   Typical objectives include generating new leads; making new business connections; getting customer/client feedback; improving website search engine results; increasing marketplace visibility or establishing authority in your area of expertise.

Step 2.  You can define and segment your target audiences by examining your existing customer base and creating segments (homogeneous groupings) based on their interests, needs, past purchase behavior, demographics, etc.   I would also suggest doing some research to determine which social media networks they are part of and participate in. You can then review their profiles, and examine their online behavior to learn about their interests and what are they talking about. (You can read more about this kind of research in a prior blog post Using Social Media Research to Develop Your Messaging in All Media.

Step 3.  You then need to make a determination based on the characteristics and relative strengths of each online media channel and how well it is likely to perform in terms of meeting your specific business objectives.   While each online medium is generally better at accomplishing certain objectives (e.g. increasing your authority and generating website traffic with blog) these can vary for every business depending on how they are used.

Step 4.  One way to plan and quantify online media combinations is to construct what I call a “decision matrix” to help review the alternatives and choose what you think will be most effective at meeting your objectives.  On a spreadsheet, list those objectives specific to your business.

Step 5.  Regardless of what you start with the only way to find out what ultimately works best is keep testing, measuring and making adjustments.

Test everything.
Hold on to the good.
(1 Thessalonians 5:21)

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Attributes such as:

• Targeting, attracting, and making yourself heard with an audience interested in a specific topic
• Making connections and sharing information with readers, followers and other bloggers
• Establishing your credibility and authority on a topic
• Attracting links that increase search engine results
• Segueing visitors to your website
• Track-ability (you can track subscriptions, comments, inbound links and  search engine results; and, since it is a website you can use web analytics to measure visitor traffic and on-site behavior)

To take advantage of its attributes and realize these objectives, your blog needs to meet some basic content criteria and incorporate certain “structural” elements.

Content criteria include:

• A topic that is related to your business and contains information that is useful, interesting and timely
• Use of an appropriate name related to your topic
• Content that is well written and easy to read
• Content that stimulates thought and encourages discussion
• Maintenance of a regular publishing frequency interval (e.g. – 1 post per week or every other week)

Additionally, one should leave thoughtful comments on related blogs (to make connections with other bloggers and attract links to your blog).

Structural elements that aid success include:

• Use of a search engine friendly blogging platform such as WordPress or TypePad
• Having the blog under your business’ domain name (url) to build equity in something you own, and to generate increased search engine traffic to your website
• Incorporating important keywords in the blog post title and body content
• Use of both RSS feed and email subscription options
• Options to share with others via email or by posting on various social media networks
• Utilization of categories and tags so that specific posts can be easily searched and located
• Linking to appropriate parts of your website

HubSpot (a marketing services provider) conducted a survey of 1,531 of its customers (mostly small and medium-sized businesses), comparing those that blogged with those that didn’t.  They found that, on average, the companies that blogged received:

• 55% more visitors*
• 97% more inbound links
• 434% more search engine indexed pages

*I have a client whose blog is generating more than a 100% increase in visitors to their website.

Results of the study are available at Hubspot

I think you will agree that these kinds of results clearly demonstrate a blog’s ability to produce online synergy.

In our next post we will examine social media characteristics and how they can also contribute to producing online synergy.

Stay tuned….

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So, how do you put together a combination that generates synergy for your online marketing?   We start with three initial steps.

1. Listing your specific objectives
2. Identifying the audience(s) you trying are to reach and developing profiles based on their demographic attributes along with their interests, connections, activities and the language they use.
3. Segmenting these audiences into homogeneous groupings you can target

For Step 1, let’s look at a list of typical objectives which you can choose from or add to in preparing a list specific to your business:

• Generating new leads
• Making new business connections
• Getting customer/client feedback
• Deepening existing business relationships
• Making online sales – conversions
• Improving website search engine results
• Increasing marketplace visibility
• Establishing authority in your area of expertise

In Step 2 we want to clearly identify the audiences we are trying to reach.  For example, let’s say that we are looking to reach affluent, well educated professionals who either own or work within a small business environment and live in a specific SMSA (standard metropolitan statistical area).

If we already serve this group, we can start by examining existing or recent customer profiles. We may already have a good demographic profile, know how they make decisions about purchasing, and perhaps even something about their personal interests.  To develop an even greater understanding of this group (local professionals), we can avail ourselves of some powerful online research tools – local area groups on Linkedin, professional groups on facebook, and other local professionally oriented social media.  By joining and participating, you will have access to detailed professional background information, connections, and interests. You can listen to and follow their conversations to better understand their online behavior.  Further, if you actively participate, you can ask specific questions that relate to the type of services you offer.

Lastly, in Step 3, if you are trying to reach more than one audience you can separate them into homogenous categories based on their specific interests.  The information gathered from your research in Step 2 will allow you to set up and test ways to address each group using pictures and language they relate to.

These steps should help get you started.   In upcoming postings I will discuss the next steps for creating online synergy….stay tuned.

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