Marketing to the Social Web: How Digital Customer Communities Build Your Business

Chapter 7. Step Three: Evaluate Online Conduit Strategies (And Don't Forget Search)

Who do you want to reach? What do you want to say to them? Those are the key questions to think about as you plan your conduit strategies—your plan for using the social web to reach your target audiences. The big four conduit strategies are reputation aggregators, blogs, e-communities, and social networks.

And don't forget search, for the simple reason that you want people to find you, whether they're using a desktop PC, laptop, or mobile device like an iPhone. Search comes in two flavors: unpaid—or organic—and paid. Both can offer a nice return, especially when you give people multiple ways to find you. Consider the experience of the U.K. travel company MyTravel, part of the Thomas Cook Group.

MyTravel hired a search-marketing agency to research destination-specific search terms and more general search terms that people use when gathering vacation information online. The agency indexed the corresponding key terms on every MyTravel page so the most relevant content would show up in search engine results. It also set up a MyTravel channel on YouTube and prepared branded video travel guides optimized for easy searching. Adding a MyTravel vacation blog and travel reviews helped catapult more of the company's links high in search results.

The bottom line: MyTravel's sales from organic search have grown by nearly 400 percent, conversion is up 65 percent, and spending on paid search is down.^[32] You can see ...