A new year is coming soon and with it new goals and thinking about new efficient ways of directing businesses, marketing and strategies. This small article articulates an elaboration of a 7 short list of key ideas and insights for social media, SEO and PPC strategy for 2011.

1. Define clear roles, guidelines and goals for each discipline in the overall marketing, business and communication strategy. Social Media, SEO and PPC are critical but need different approaches, resources and efforts.

2. Understand that Social Media has an holistic approach inside a company that comprehends not only business, but also communications, PR, customer service and CSR Corporate Social Responsibility. Social Media needs a special treatment as an area that comprehends a lot of challenges and needs a different angle.

3. Create strong synergies between strategies, campaigns and budgets. PPC, SEO, Social Media (and other media buying strategies, whether online or offline) are generally put in rivalry inside marketing departments in companies. Most of the times it feels they are fighting each other for budgets, resources, along with all the other marketing channels. Worst sometimes they do not communicate correctly. This should not be the case. It is necessary a rational contention and the need of a huge effort of synergies and sharing of budgets, data, strategy and setting objectives. PPC is easy to target, track and gets the results faster so most of the time gets most of the budget. This decision needs to be analyzed in a business short, medium and long term strategy. SEO is less expensive, most of it is free, though it needs resources, technical development and continuous work. It is critical to work business strategy, lead generation /e-commerce efforts together between these two disciplines and making sure the rationality includes ROI (return on investment) and ROA (return on Attention). Also the synergies and joint efforts needs to include lead generation, referral traffic, branding, PR, social media synergies. Google and Bing and including in their algorithms Twitter and Facebook as critical factors for ranking.

4. Share PPC, SEO and Social Media research and analytics as much as possible. Both the tree areas use the same tools and techniques, so it is rather fundamental to share knowledge data and set goals together. A lot of wins can be achieved and ultimately it is a win win for everybody. So the analytics, research and strategy needs to be drawn together and in total good communication efforts.

5. Some days you’re going to have SEO wins. Some days you’re going to have PPC wins. It’s important to celebrate each others wins. Avoid dividing efforts or lacking a proper weekly, if not daily effective talk between convergences. SEO and PPC work related. Also bear in mind SEO is becoming increasingly close to a total web optimisation. You need to start thinking in optimising for search, for social, for mobile and for applications…

6. Design campaigns together, this is key. It doesn’t necessarily mean have your SEO writing all copy for your PPC campaign, but be there close and share as much as possible. Be there with information, data and talk all the steps about implementation. Make sure that the PPC landing pages are going to be structured on the correct SEO site architecture. Make sure that they communicate and agree in what are they going to look like? Remind that the landing pages and campaigns need to be follow / index. Make sure they are not blocked by robots.txt. It is necessary a critical assessment that works in general ideas that are the target. The same thing with SEO, is it communicating with the copy of the PPC campaigns? What message/s is conveying through the URL structure? How is it going to affect the general PPC quality score?

7. Think customer! Do this with proper data and analytics. Most of the marketing, media buying, e-commerce campaigns need to bear in mind more and more the customer. All work needs to have joint efforts in mind. The social media world where we live obliges us to have this in mind no one can have a successful business strategy without understanding how the customer /s react towards their products, campaigns and brand identity.

Some extra interesting research to co-relate my humble insights:
Top 250 Blog Posts – Advertising, Marketing, Digital, Media & PR
http://www.spotlightideas.co.uk/?p=677

Related articles

• SEO.com Predicts Top 9 SEO Strategies for 2011 (seo.com)
• Experts View 2011: With many recent figures suggesting a ‘mini-revival’ – do you think 2011 will be a bumper year for search (holisticsearch.co.uk)