As reputation management, search engine optimization (SEO) and social media continue their path to convergence, the ways in which businesses communicate with their customers, build their brand, and market their products are evolving as well. Here is a short list on how these trends can strengthen your business, your brand, and your bottom line:
- The transition to highly effective reputation management, SEO, and marketing at a lower cost – The convergence of digital marketing venues is allowing companies to integrate branding and sales departments, which eliminates redundancies, saves money, and makes client acquisition through a variety of actions more effective. Companies that have outsourced these activities can experience the same benefits by working with a single company that coordinates and integrates marketing, media, search and branding campaigns.
- Participating in social media will be required for high rankings on the search engines – The search engines continue to shift their algorithms toward signals that originate from social media sites and away from traditional content distribution and link building strategies. Reputation management and SEO strategies that don’t incorporate social media initiatives will witness deteriorating results on the search engine results pages (SERPs) as the farming out of content and links falls out of favor at Google, Bing, and other search engines.
- The convergence of sales and customer service personnel – As customer engagement migrates toward social media sites, the people tasked with customer engagement will have to possess a range of skill sets that includes marketing, customer service, brand building, reputation management, etc. Gone are the days when a staffer in customer service could put a caller on hold so that someone in marketing can talk to the customer about a product upgrade. Instead, the businesses that will achieve the best results in social media will have personnel that can provide solid customer service, speak with knowledge about products/services, and avoid reputation management issues while speaking in the context of brand building in the view of the customer and anyone else that reads the thread.
Social media is becoming such a huge game changer that even the experts and those at the forefront of the medium can’t say with certainty where it’s going to go. Even so, there are many distinct advantages for businesses that understand and adapt to the convergence of reputation management, SEO, and social media. Lastly, if the search engines and active consumers are migrating to social media, it only makes sense for businesses to do the same.
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