The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success, Second Edition

Chapter 40. Integrate Strategies

Integrate Your Existing Strategy into the Trinity

The third step in your Five Steps to Social Media Success is Integration. This is when you take all of what you learned from Step 1, Analyze Your Existing Media, filter out what is ineffective with a low ROI, what you learned in Step 2, the Social Media Trinity, and combine the two into one integrated cohesive marketing strategy. Remember, social media isn't a stand-alone set of tools that must be dealt with as a separate strategy. It has to be integrated.

I am often asked when consulting with Fortune 1000 companies, "Does my company need to do social media marketing?" or "How much should my company spend on social media marketing?" I say, remove the term social media and ask those questions again: "Does my company need to do marketing?" or "How much should my company spend on marketing?" When put that way, it sounds silly. Just like in the previous chapter, you will now need to develop an integrated strategy that includes your existing conventional marketing and the new digital tools.

Selecting the Best of Both

When you develop your integrated marketing strategy, you will need to identify the best media for each demographic. Sometimes it will be conventional marketing tools such as selling RVs to the retired; direct mail might still be the best way to reach your targeted demographic. Sometimes it might be a combination such as selling RVs to the retired. The fastest-growing demographic is the 54-plus-year-old. ...