There is one goal for your marketing campaigns: generate revenue either through sales or brand awareness that leads to future sales. However, your ability to effectively maximize your profits from investments in social media, e-mail, PPC campaigns, SEO, and blogging hinges on your ability to integrate all of these tools into a focused, cohesive strategy that uses each channel to build up the other. Here are 5 tips on how to develop an integrated marketing strategy.

Integrate E-mail with Social Media

An e-mail campaign is an effective way to directly connect with customers. When your promotion lands in customers’ inboxes, you have their attention since they most likely signed up for your list expecting something valuable. If you create something they want, then it stands to reason that you need to provide simple ways for customers to share your e-mail campaign on social media.

Many e-mail marketing programs offer options to share a campaign on Facebook and Twitter, but don’t forget to include social media calls to action within the body of your e-mail message such as “Share this message now…” DJ Waldow at the Social Media Examiner suggests adding incentives, such as a prize, discount, or publicity for those who share your campaign on social media.

Integrate Blog Posts with E-mail, Social Media, and PPC

As you work on creating effective PPC campaigns that attract customers to your blog by targeting keyword phrases, make sure you send these visitors to a relevant landing page on your blog that will drive conversions such as sales, blog subscribers, newsletter subscribers, and social media shares. When you’re organizing a campaign to promote a product, you’ll certainly want to write a lot of content on your blog in support of it, but when you’re linking to your site from a PPC campaign, the landing page should be specially tailored for those visitors.

A good landing page, according to Corey Eridon at HubSpot, should offer clear value to customers, include sharing buttons, minimal links to other parts of your website, and provide clear calls to action.” At the bottom of your landing page, consider adding additional links to related posts on your blog, such as the E-mail Marketing landing page at Copy Blogger. In addition, you can evaluate your conversion rates in order to find which keywords are most effective on your blog and then write more content related to those keywords in order to boost yourself in that niche. Sarah Goliger of HubSpot writes, “You should be paying less attention to volume metrics (like number of clicks and number of impressions) and more attention to performance metrics like cost-per-click (CPC), cost-per-acquisition (CPA), and conversion rate. These will show you how well each of your keywords and ad groups is doing for the amount of money you’re spending.”

Integrate Your Blog with Social Media

Share your blog posts automatically and set up additional shares so that your top content gets more exposure. Your blog is a powerful tool to increase engagement with your customers. Zach Hofer-Shall writes for Forrester Research, “too many companies have siloed data practices, keeping marketing and business data on one side of the organization and social media data on another. But as I often say – if you only listen to social media, you only learn about social media. To get the most out of marketing to your customers, you must integrate it with other data.  Leveraging data and making use of both 1st and 3rd party data to tailor content appropriate to you audience will drive more viewers to your blog.”

Integrate Your E-mail Marketing

Coordinate your e-mail marketing efforts. According to HubSpot, there are many different kinds of e-mails your marketing team could be sending out, such as “automated emails to blog email subscribers and leads who have been entered into a lead nurturing campaign, weekly/monthly newsletters highlighting your top content, or individual dedicated sends just to promote your new offers.” You need to know who is receiving which e-mail and where your various leads are in the process. The key to successfully nurturing leads is to collect demographic data. HubSpot is particularly effective at this and offers a 10-point list of what you need to collect, such as job title, role at company, and pages viewed. With better data in hand, you can effectively funnel your leads to the correct e-mail marketing list and build relationships with customers.

This guest post is written by Lior Levin, a marketing consultant for a company that offers a variety of Pre shipment inspections, and who also consults for a psd to html online company.

Editor’s Note: Below is guest blog post contribution. ProspectMX isn’t opposed to accepting guest blog posts, FYI. If you’d like to contribute to our blog, email [email protected] and one of our team members will get in touch with you to discuss the details. Happy reading!

Recent and relevant content breathes new life into a website and increases the chances of being found by search engines. While a blog is a particularly common way of attracting customers to your website, there are plenty of other ways beyond your blog to improve your search engine ranking, to provide important information, and to generate new leads and customers. Here are five ways you can update your website with new content:

Create a News or Media Section on Your Website

Every business creates reports, press releases, award information, and event information that can easily be posted in a news or media section on a website.

Pamela Seiple of HubSpot suggests making your company’s contact information easy to find on your news page and then carefully selecting what you share on your news page in order to avoid cluttering it. She writes, “if you’d like to showcase your award wins or a list of the media coverage you’ve generated, you might provide a snapshot of highlights in your newsroom but also link to separate pages you’ve built to house more detailed information.”

Create a Resource Center for Long Form Content

Whether you merge your blog posts into E-books or create tutorials for your customers, a resource center or product information page can be a powerful tool for attracting customer interest and generating more leads, especially if you add a sign up form that customers must fill out before downloading your resources. Provided you keep the sign up process free and simple, you could both draw in new leads and increase the relevance of your website for customers.

Corey Eridon of Hubspot suggests, “Simply draft an abstract or select a poignant excerpt from the content to publish as a sort of preview. Then, direct the visitor to the landing page where the content can be redeemed.”

If necessary, you may also want to create another section about your products that addresses specific questions that new customers may have. This is different from a resource center that covers the needs of existing customers.

Write Original Product Details on Your Website

Unique product details aren’t just important for targeting your customers. They can also help your search ranking. Armando Roggio writes for Practical eCommerce, “Compelling, informative, and unique product descriptions can help your ecommerce business increase sales. Moreover, original product descriptions can help avoid Google’s so-called ‘Farmer algorithm’ penalty, which can affect retailers that copy product descriptions from competitors, or that use the exact descriptions suggested by suppliers.”

Unique product copy can be especially helpful in your SEO plans. Corey Eridon at HubSpot suggests, “Take advantage of this space to write unique, keyword-optimized content that describes the product, compels readers to take action, and helps you rank for important search terms.”

A Website’s Learning Center

A learning center is a place where you can share your own videos, slide shows, or customer videos demonstrating how to use your company’s products or demonstrating the way you work with customers. Content such as podcasts, webinars, and learning videos all should be easy to find on an organized page.

For example, domain registration service Register.com has a fairly extensive Learning Center that covers topics that are important for customers who own websites. If you create content for your customers or for SEO, don’t let it go to waste in a place where customers can’t easily find it.

Reviews, Testimonials and Case Studies for Your Website

Reviews are an essential source of information for customers. A recent Search Engine Land survey reported the following results: “Approximately 72% of consumers surveyed said that they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations, while 52% said that positive online reviews make them more likely to use a local business.”

Collect reviews and testimonials on your website and make them easy to find by including links on your home page, media center, about page, and especially on product pages. Don’t let distributors and search engines own all of your product reviews. You can even add incentives to draw customers to your website to leave reviews.

Content creation requires learning how to both reuse and organize what you’re already creating. Sometimes you may need to write original content, such as new product descriptions or press releases, but every new press release, learning article, or video you upload to your website provides stronger SEO optimization and ties with your customers. The payoff for writing fresh content for your website can be huge.

This guest post is written by Lior Levin, a marketing consultant for a company that offers a to do list app for businesses and individuals, and who also consults for a customize neon sign store that provides various neon signs.

In the coming months, we will be working towards rebranding and redesigning the ProspectMX website. When I joined ProspectMX in 2008, the original website was still in place and for the most part we were happy with it. The following year we began brainstorming ideas about what we could do to change the site and make it more user friendly. In the course of discussions we settled on the idea to add common questions to the site, have a team centered motif, and use a wood background that would permeate all of our print marketing. All of these are still in place as of February 2010.

It’s my pleasure to announce that we will be changing once again. It’s been nearly two years, and in that time a lot has changed, we’ve learned a lot, and we’d like our website to reflect. I will be charting the progress through blog posts until the site is launched. It’s my hope that you will follow us on our journey and chime in with your thoughts. Also, it will be a peek behind the curtain of a web design that will hopefully be enlightening to others thinking of redoing their site.

What can you expect from ProspectMX’s new design?

For one, simplicity. Anyone that knows me knows that I prefer clean and simple designs. The easier to use the better. We’ve sat down and evaluated the most important things to include on our site, and what we should focus on to make visiting as intuitive as possible for the viewer. You can also expect less of a focus on the team members. While some of us like having our portraits on the homepage (and some don’t!), we want the initial focus of the site to be about the visitor. How can we serve you? That doesn’t mean the team will not be present on the site. We will have a bigger focus on videos and interactive content deeper in the site that will provide information and training. Overall, the site will be getting a new coat of paint and more relevant content.

How will the design look?

That’s the big question, and something that is still very much “in process”. We’ve freshened up the logo, keeping the same general theme while making it brighter, cleaner, and easier to use on both print and web. You can see the difference below.

Also, we’ve changed the look of the print pieces, which will tie in to the new look. This is the direction we’ll be headed. Stay tuned to see where we end up.

Google is among the best of the best when it comes to search engines. In fact, Google receives over 300 million visitors and well over 2 billion search queries on any given day. Sadly, the average people performing these searches are not using the search engine to its fullest extent.

There are a countless number of ways that you can target your search more effectively and increase your search experience. Below are a few tips to get you started.

Quotes

Use quotes around words that you are looking for together. Otherwise, you will get results that would randomly contain any or all of the keywords you list. Example: “Independence Day”.

Minus Sign (-)

Place a minus sign preceding any words you wish to exclude from your search. Example: “Michael Jackson” -“Jackson 5”. This will only display results for Michael Jackson, unrelated to the Jackson 5.

Plus Sign (+)

Place the plus sign before any words that you want to include in your search. Example: “Michael Jackson” +“Jackson 5”. Now, search results that appear will only showcase topics related to both Michael Jackson and the Jackson 5.

Site

Include the website in your search query when you are looking for something specific on any given site. Example: “Link Building” site:ProspectMX.com. The hits are only related to the topic of choice for the site that’s submitted to the operator. This can also be reversed if you’re trying to get results when you want to exclude a site from your results. Example: “Fashion News” -site:FashionNews.com.

Fail

When you’re searching for negative product reviews or even epic sports fails, consider placing the word “fail” immediately following your initial query. Example: “sports” fail.

InTitle

Starting your search with “InTitle” tells the search engine to limit your hits by containing only those terms in the text of the title. Example: InTitle: “Top 10 Vacation Spots”.

InText

Including “InText” in your search query restricts Google to contain all the words you inquired to appear on the text of the page. Example: InText: “Top 10 Vacation Spots”.

InURL

By placing “InURL” in your search, you are telling the operator to place the words as they appear in the website URL of the search results. Example: InURL: “Top 10 Vacation Spots”.

Happy Googling!

Press releases are the best and most formal way to make the media aware of your company announcing something of newsworthy value. This could include launching a new product or service, or making the public aware of a new CEO leading the pack.

The most important aspects to keep in mind when crafting a press release is to:

Engage the Reader

Keep your target audience in mind through the entire writing process. Press releases are intended for the PRESS. Just think of the amount of press releases that a reporter receives each and every day. Make the content interesting and engaging. Another way to spruce things up is to include photos, business logos, and even charts. Anything that catches the eye will do the trick!

Optimize Content

There are several online press release distribution sites that allow you to reach your media contacts as well as push your press release on the web. To get the most out of online submissions, make your press release stand out with keyword rich content. This will help potential customers find your website on the top pages of Google search results when performing a specialized search related to your product or service.

Verify that Objectives are Met

Keep your eyes on the prize. Read your press release over and over again to confirm that your objectives have been met. Are you portraying your company in the highest regards? Are you including all the details upfront; who, what, where, when, why and how? Are you promoting what you intended? These are all valid questions to make sure you’re on topic.

Include a Call to Action

Toward the end of your press release include a call to action. This can be leading back to your website talking specifically about the product or service being promoted or even to your blog. Don’t hesitate to also include your social media sites as well to gain more exposure.

Not Exceed in Length

Don’t over kill it. A good rule of thumb is sticking between 300 and 500 words for a good press release. If you’re including great detail, an acceptable press release can be up to 800 words in length.

Check for Grammar

Take time to read your press release—and then read it again, checking for any grammar or punctuation mistakes. It’s always wise to have a second pair of eyes. No matter how often you might read over something, you might be missing the fine details.