Digital marketing communications are ever evolving and growing.  Search, Email and Social have risen to become the Digital Marketing Trifecta. Each plays a unique and collaborative role in marketing via digital mediums and internet- based sales channels. Each of these mediums has its strengths and weaknesses and is best suited towards different goals. When used collaboratively these three forms of digital marketing create a storm of synergy that most other mediums simply cannot match. They can take your marketing programs to new levels of ROI, revenue and lead generation and unparalleled success. Used poorly, these three can break your business – permanently. So before you start that blog, twitter account or email program – PLAN. Three questions you should ask before starting any of these programs:

Do I have enough content/resources to support this channel?

Do people want to communicate with me via this channel?

Am I providing value to my stakeholders – particularly my customers?

Let’s briefly review the strengths and weaknesses of these three mediums:

Search is perhaps the best customer acquisition device ever invented. It gets your offering in front of the consumer at key times in the buying cycle, depending on the flavor of search you are doing. Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the key to driving traffic to your website. It helps to build awareness about your site/brand and allows people to find you in various engines. Done right, it is possibly the single most effective tactic you can employ to generate traffic. Search Engine Marketing or SEM is another form of search mostly thought of as the Ads by Google seen on many websites and in the top or right side of search engine results pages (SERPs). SEM comes at people slightly further down the buying cycle funnel at alternative evaluation or decision stages. It gets your ad in front of people at the moment they are looking to purchase. Also, using analytics based around search keywords provides a wealth of data, so much that it would require its own post.

Email Marketing is the key to retaining your customers and driving repeat business. Email allows you to build a relationship with your email and keep your brand top of mind. Email is the work horse, the backbone of digital communications. Without email we would not have half of the social media networks, newsletters and content services that we have today. Also it is an accepted marketing medium – people are much more open to hearing about your new product, sale or other offer via email than social media, for example. Email is the tool to drive higher ROI resulting in greater lifetime value from your customers. Email has excellent retention properties when done right because it is a permission-based medium – often it is the first (and sometimes) only point that a company/brand asks a consumer if they want to have a relationship. Email is probably the best support method for other marketing programs such as social media, mobile and other texting-based marketing platforms. After all how would I know that someone wrote on my Facebook wall, or made a new connection in social networking groups like LinkedIn or posted to my Yahoo or Google Groups without email? Email is keeps you front of mind and pulls customers back to the site for repeat purchases. Segmentation and targeting to build relevance to audience are the keys to email marketing.

Finally we have the new kid on the block, Social Media. The recent explosion of social media mediums such as the Facebook’s introduction of vanity URLs, Twitter and a host of other tools are taking digital media-based marketing to new heights and levels of intimacy. Social Media is fast becoming a mainstay in digital communications. Social Media is particularly adept at increasing communication and identifying your brand advocates. It is where we separate those that want to have a deep relationship with your brand and enables people to spread word of mouth marketing about you. It can be leveraged to become a powerful PR tool. The danger in social media is making it all about you or using it as a broadcast medium. That does not really work in social media – it’s supposed to be social; hence the name. Like email, social media communications are a conversation – involving two or often many people talking together. It is not broadcasting a text ad in 140 characters on Twitter. If that’s what you are doing you have kind of missed the point of social media. It allows brands to speak to consumers and perhaps influence but not control the conversation. Often social media is the most intimate form of digitally based communication that a brand can have with its stakeholders. However always keep in mind it is a very public form of communication – what you say in social media channels like Twitter is searchable, and who knows when a customer, co-worker, friend, or boss will read your tweet. Keep it clean, positive and friendly.

I would encourage you to try and test each of these three mediums as part of an integrated approach to your marketing efforts. Each can be highly effective on its own, but we used together than move your program to record setting revenues for very low costs. The potential ROI earned from these three media used synergistically is incredible.