First up, I’m hopeful for these books:

Social Media Marketing for Dummies

I know it’s a “Dummies” book – but they aren’t all bad. In fact, sometimes these are the best tools to introduce novices to new techniques and ideas. They’re simply written and easy to follow, and the format makes it easy to find exactly what you want or ingest bite-size chunks when you have time.

If the Table of Contents of Social Media Marketing for Dummies is any indication, I’m particularly interested in Chapter 4: Launching SIM campaigns. I’m hoping it actually contains some practical advice, and not just a bunch of platitudes and 10,000-mile view. This hope might be overly optimistic… but I’m going to buy it and see.

Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day

The other book I’m optimistic about seems to be a much more likely option. Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day appears to have some nice, focused, practical advice on developing, implementing and measuring a social media campaign. This is the updated second edition, but the first addition has a lot of positive reviews, and the Table of Contents is very promising.

I’m buying this in addition to the Dummies book, and while I intend to look at the Dummies book first, I’m more excited about what this one might contain. If I’m lucky, this will have the information and strategies I want to convey to my clients, so I can just recommend the book instead of reinventing the wheel every time I work with a new startup.

Promising General Social Media Books

What I’m currently looking for is books that will help my clients develop and execute an integrated social media strategy. But I’ve inadvertently discovered a couple of books that appear as though they might offer some good tips on developing a brand, creating good content and engaging followers and customers. I’m looking forward to checking these books out as well, although the priority isn’t as high for me. But if you’re in the market for this type of book, check out:

• Likeable Social Media: How to Delight Your Customers, Create an Irresistible Brand, and Be Generally Amazing on Facebook (& Other Social Networks)
• Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business (New Rules Social Media Series)

I’ll be working my way through these other books in the meantime, and hope to have a solid recommendation (or begin drafting my own social media marketing book) by the end of the week!

My client responded with something that made me very happy:

I think it’s a good idea – timely content for real time communication. We still want to be relevant on fb and twitter!

This is something that so many individuals and small businesses don’t understand – they focus on the be all and end all – SEO. But when you focus too much on SEO and promoting yourself, you sometimes sacrifice substance – and that is ultimately a losing proposition. Relevance is too important to overlook.

SEO Without Substance is Fail

SEO is a tool you can use to drive people to your site and help promote your business. But SEO without substance can only get you so far. If there’s nothing relevant for your user to consume when he or she gets to your site, they’ll click away somewhere else and you’ve lost that user. The same thing goes for your marketing campaigns; the most successful campaigns strike a balance between self-promotion and providing relevant, substantive content for your users. Focus on SEO and self-promotion to the exclusion of relevant content, and your users will abandon ship.

How to Strike a Balance

Ideally, your communications – be they on your site, on your blog, on Facebook or Twitter or via email – should consist of a balance between self-promotion and relevant, timely communication. It’s ok to promote yourself sometimes. Your users expect it. You’re a business and you have to make money.

But reward your users for sitting through the self-promotion. Give them relevant content they can connect with sometimes – even it that content is completely void of self-promotion. This will keep them coming back in spite of the self-promotion. And if you do the self-promotion right, it can be perfectly-balanced blend of marketing and relevant content.

I personally use a ratio of specific types of content to keep the reader from growing bored with too much of one type of content, and that includes a small ratio of fresh, timely, relevant content that isn’t necessarily related, or may be only tangentially related, to the target site.

For example, the client in question above is a retail website that specializes in niche products for women. The article I posted today included a list of outside-the-box, romantic ideas to celebrate Valentine’s Day. The article was generic enough that it could apply to women or men; ladies who read it could use the suggestions to surprise their guys on Valentine’s Day, or they could give it to their guys and say “Do this for me!”

Nothing in the article directly promoted the site; none of their products were mentioned by name and it may not make them a single sale. But it does keep them relevant, fresh and timely on social media, where they post links to their content, and it’s a great resource that women can pass around amongst themselves. If every women who reads it passes it to five of her friends, with some note like “you and your boyfriend/girlfriend/fiance/husband/ should try this” – that has now spread awareness of the site exponentially. Some of those people are bound to be in the target demographic, and will hopefully come back when they need the products that this retailer sells.

Determining What’s Relevant

When determining relevance, you have to decide what would appeal to your target audience. Yes, you may occasionally want to produce content unrelated to your primary objective as long as it appeals to your target demographic. But you don’t want to produce completely unrelated content – then the relevance is lost because you in no way serve the target demographic.

One of my clients, for example, sells blog posts to mortgage websites. Most of the blog posts are completely unrelated to the mortgage industry, but are relevant to people who are looking to buy or sell homes. These articles may include things like tips for moving, advice for shopping for a home, techniques to winterize a home, how to spot energy-efficient housing – none of these are directly related to obtaining a mortgage, but they’re all relevant to people who may be buying or selling a home. And people who are shopping for a mortgage are typically buying or selling a home. So the information appeals to the target demographic, even if it doesn’t directly promote the business.

Conversely, you wouldn’t want to write an article about how to shop for a demolition contractor on a website for a flower shop. The content has absolutely zero relevance for the target site, and even if you attract visitors with the content, there will be nothing for them to do on the site. (Unless it serves as a reminder that tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, and it’s time for the person trying to hire a demolition contractor to send some flowers to his sweetie!)

Relevance is largely determined by the target audience. Think about the types of content that would interest your target audience, and give it to them. It’s even better when you can tie it back to your product or service.

Offer Timely, Personalized Communication

It’s a proven fact that psychologically, in most cases, consumers would rather do business with a person than a company. Personalize your company with timely, personal communication. Take time out around the holidays to write your clients a personalized “Happy Holidays” email or article. Offer a Valentine’s Day-related article, if your demographic supports it. Mention recent news articles in your area, and give your opinion.

It’s always a good idea to inject a little personality and timely content into your consumer communications. This demonstrates to your clients that there is at least one real person at the helm, and makes them want to do business with you – the person – even if they’re impartial to your business entity.

As a bonus, with timely communications, there’s always a chance they can be re-shared – which expands your reach. An article with personal commentary about an issue important in your local community is more likely to get re-shared around the community than some impersonal marketing material. This spreads awareness of your business, and gives you reach you literally can’t pay for.

1. Email

Email marketing has been around for a long time, and many businesses now eschew it as old news. It may not be new or exciting, but it remains one of the most effective forms of contact. Effective email campaigns to opt-in email addresses continue to produce higher conversation rates than any other marketing technique. All you need to do is give people a good reason to opt-in, create effective messages that target your audience and send them out at the appropriate intervals.

2. Social Media

Social media was the new hotness a year or two ago, but now it’s become an accepted part of many businesses’ online presence. If you’re a major player, it’s surprising to find that you don’t have a Twitter account or Facebook page, and more and more businesses are now adding Google+ and LinkedIn, too. Effectively utilizing social media can be a great tool for drastically expanding your scope. But social media requires a lot of up-front time investment, and the return on the investment for most businesses is not proportional to the resources that go into this marketing avenue. This is one of those things that you should maintain because clients expect you to, but in general you’ll find more bang for your marketing buck elsewhere.

3. Article Marketing

Article marketing involves submitting articles relative to your field of expertise to article directory websites. Popular article marketing sites include eZine Articles, Hub Pages, Squidoo – more than a hundred article directories exist, some of which have a unique style and flare, and others are little more than link-building directories. Article marketing can provide you with inbound links and improve your SEO. However, avoid spamming article marketing sites, as Google frowns upon duplicate content. If your article shows up in a hundred different places, your article marketing efforts can actually hurt your website’s reputation.

4. Press Release Marketing

Press release marketing functions much like article marketing. You can submit your press release to one of many press release directory services, or submit it directly to various news services. In an ideal world, a major news service will take your press release and run with it, providing you exposure to thousands of new viewers. But doing press release marketing right takes an experienced professional; too many press releases read like an ad for the company, and don’t get picked up by news services.

5. Landing Pages

A landing page, or lead capture page, is designed to get your audience to take some action; typically to sign up for an email campaign or create an account. A landing page should always have a clear call to action, and many businesses customize a landing page for a specific traffic source – making it easy to see which traffic source results in the largest number of people responding to your call to action, and also making the landing page more effective because it’s tailored to a specific source and audience.

6. SEO

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of taking a website and optimizing it to rank highly in specifically-tailored search results. SEO may include internal HTML and code tweaks, content changes designed to target specific keywords, and website structure changes. Effective SEO boosts the page rank of your site for certain keywords, and makes it easier for your customers to find you in a Web search.

7. Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing, or SEM, is a type of internet marketing designed to increase traffic as a result of paid search engine placement. SEM techniques may include contextual advertising, paid placement and paid inclusion. SEM for a niche site may be relatively inexpensive and effective, but it’s difficult to compete in SEM for popular, high-demand keywords.

8. Inbound Linking

Inbound linking is an online marketing technique that has a couple of benefits; effective inbound linking can increase your page rank, and it also makes it easier for your customers to find you. Inbound linking can be achieved in a variety of ways; through posting responses in forums related to your product or service; through paid inbound linking services and through things like guest blogging and other exchange-type interactions. It’s important to keep in mind that if you pay for an inbound linking service, the wrong link-building program can hurt your page results, and even get you banned from Google; we’ll explore this further when we talk about Black Hat marketing techniques a bit later.

9. Affiliate, Reseller and Associate Programs

These programs are designed to incentivize the promotion of your site or services. Reseller programs make it easy for people to sell your products for you in return for a cut, while affiliate and associate programs incentivize people to drive traffic to your site. These programs are underutilized in online marketing, and have substantial benefits to the right business models.

10. Contests and Giveaways

Contests and giveaways are a great way to spread the word about your company and drastically increase your potential audience in a short time. Targeted contests and giveaways, such as gift cards for your business or products that you sell, can generate a smaller pool of well-qualified leads, while more generalized contests and giveaways, like iPad giveaways, can help you expand your reach but fewer of the leads will be qualified.

11. Blogging

Blogging is a great way to build an online presence, establish authority and credibility, and expand your SEO. But blogging tends to yield slow results, and it can take months of steady blogging before you gain traction. Generally, scheduled, routine blogging forms the backbone for SEO; it’s an integral part of a marketing plan but doesn’t necessarily yield high conversion from the blog itself. Unusual or highly controversial blog posts, however, have the opportunity to be picked up and shared on sites like reddit that can get your content in front of thousands, tens of thousands or even millions of viewers.

12. Video Marketing

Video marketing, when done well, can be extremely effective. Video is the most socially-shared content on the Web, and video marketing can dramatically increase your reach and audience. If a video goes viral, you could be looking at hundreds of thousands or even millions of hits in a matter of days. Poor video marketing, though, doesn’t contribute to your reach, and can actually hurt your business.

13. Podcasting

Podcasting is another avenue you can use to reach out to your potential audience. Like blogging, podcasting provides you an opportunity to establish authority and credibility, and can help draw potential audience members. But podcasting represents a significant time investment, and should only be undertaken under certain business models and with very clearly defined goals and scope.

Ultimately, these tools can help any business reach a wider audience, and should form the core of your marketing platform. The right combination of tools in the right proportions varies depending on your business, but an experienced marketing professional can help you explore which tools are right for you.

Both B2B and B2C Marketers Agree that SEO has the Biggest Impact on Lead Generation
A conclusive 57 percent of B2B marketers report that SEO is their primary source for generating leads, beating out PPC (24 percent) and Social Media Marketing (18 percent).

Among B2C professionals, 41 percent report that SEO generates the most leads for them, versus PPC (34 percent) and Social Media Marketing (24 percent).

How Do You Allocate Your Marketing Budget?
In spite of the fact that SEO generates the most leads, both B2B and B2C professionals report that SEO doesn’t get a proportional slice of the marketing pie. In B2B marketing, SEO gets a reported 33 percent of the marketing budget, and PPC receives nearly 28 percent of the marketing budget – which seems inconsistent with the importance of SEO versus PPC in lead generation. In B2C marketing, PPC reports the highest marketing allocation at nearly 43 percent, while SEO only gets 22 percent of the marketing budget.

Are You Utilizing SEO?
Whether you’re a B2B or B2C business, the data seems conclusive: SEO generates more leads than PPC or social media – in some cases, combined. If you aren’t utilizing SEO marketing techniques, you’re missing out on potential leads. For 2012, consider reallocating some of your marketing budget to improving your SEO marketing, and see whether you can capitalize on the value of SEO in lead generation.

Email Marketing Tools

Email marketing is a very popular online marketing tool. Email marketing works just like traditional mail marketing, except the product is delivered directly to your client’s email inbox. Email marketing can get unwieldy without the right tools. Use an email marketing program, such as Constant Contact, to manage your email marketing campaign. Tools like Constant Contact enable you to create custom, branded templates, create and manage email lists, and track your results to evaluate the effectiveness of your campaigns.

Web Tracking Tools

In order to effectively judge the success of your online marketing campaigns, you need to utilize Web analytics tools that provide you with detailed results. Google Analytics is one option for measuring your website’s performance, and Google Analytics conveniently integrates with Google AdWords to evaluate the effectiveness of your AdWords campaigns. You can also use third-party tracking tools, such as Mint.

SEO Tools

SEO tools run the gamut from HTML checkers to keyword search tools to spider simulators, and everything in between. For simple SEO, you can use keyword search tools yourself to generate high-converting keywords for your niche. Google AdWords: Keyword Tool is a free tool that can help you select appropriate primary and alternate keywords. If you want a more comprehensive range of SEO tools, SEO Chat has a great selection of SEO tools to cover practically every SEO need. SEO Chat’s tools include SEO calculators, page rank checkers, ROI calculators, and a range of other tools to enable you to tweak every aspect of your site’s SEO.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is a fairly new trend, but one that’s growing exponentially. Businesses can utilize existing social media platforms as a valuable advertising and marketing tool. I’m writing a series of articles on effectively utilizing social media marketing, which includes an overview of social media marketing as well as individual articles geared toward how to utilize specific platforms. You can utilize various aggregators and plugins to integrate your social media marketing with existing marketing campaigns and platforms.

Interactive Content Marketing

Interactive content is a way for you to communicate directly with your clients. Interactive content includes things like turning comments into content, as well as things like featuring multimedia content on your website. Video and audio are far more valuable than simple text content, and provide another reason for your readers to visit your website. In online marketing, qualified traffic is the key to conversion, so featuring interactive content on your website gets you one step closer to improving your business.

Add Dynamic Content Frequently

People have no reason to return to your website if you don’t add content periodically. Static websites provide information, but they don’t give a reader a reason to keep returning. Therefore, you might lose out on potential clients when readers have forgotten about your website weeks or months after viewing it. By adding dynamic content to your website frequently, you give readers a reason to come back. If readers come back, they’re more likely to think of your website, and utilize your product or services when they need it. Adding dynamic content regularly also enables you to broaden the keyword search terms by which people find your website, thereby expanding your potential audience.

Utilize Social Network Marketing

Social networking is the new buzzword, and it’s here to stay. Savvy companies are beginning to realize that they can leverage social media to spread word about their services or products, and to elicit responses and discussion from customers. This provides companies with an opportunity to reach consumers directly, and to respond to feedback, positive comments and negative criticism. Utilizing social networking enables you to grow your customer base organically through word of mouth and viral marketing with a minimum of effort, and simultaneously gives you an opportunity to influence how clients perceive your company.

Create Guest Blogging Opportunities

One valuable tool that can help you build followers for your website is guest blogging. Guest blogging has a few variations, but the most common technique for guest blogging is to invite someone to write an entry on your blog, and/or offer to write an entry for their blog. In this way, you reach out to the other blogger’s audience by showing them your content and a link to your website, and vice versa. If you trade guest blogging opportunities with a popular blogger, you can grow your audience by hundreds or thousands of people with one well-written post.

Exchange Links with Related Blogs

You can practice a similar strategy to grow your readership in conjunction with guest blogging, or independently: initiate a link exchange with related blogs. This is important: look for related blogs to trade links. By exchanging links with related blogs, you ensure that you have something to offer readers, and you gain a qualified audience that is interested in what you have to say. If you trade links with unrelated blogs, you won’t necessarily have anything to offer readers and your chances to increase conversion are low.

When it comes to establishing related blogs, look for blogs whose readers might be interested in your product or services, but aren’t directly competing. For example, if you have a personal injury law firm, you might want to exchange links with a motorcycle website. Motorcyclists might need your services, and you can provide them with important information about motorcycle injury statistics and how to deal with a motorcycle injury case. You wouldn’t want to exchange links with another personal injury attorney, because there is little value in reaching out to your competitor’s audience via your competitor’s page. (It’s much more useful to reach out to your competitor’s audience in other ways, where you can subtly establish why readers should choose you over competitors.)

Post to Article Directories

Finally, if you want to reach out to a wider audience and build followers for your website, consider reaching out to an audience via a large, well-established website. Article directories are a great way to reach potential clients who wouldn’t find you otherwise. When you post to an article directory, you gain the additional leverage of their weighty SEO. You can then post a resource box with a link back to your website, which is especially effective if you create a call to action in your article.

At the very least, posting to article directories gives you a chance to establish your expertise. At best, someone who is interested in your products or services can learn about what you have to offer and reach out to you directly through your website.