In addition to guest posting on the UpCity blog, The Xcite Group is featured as one of the Top PPC Agencies in the United States. Check out their profile!
Building a Marketing Strategy
There are different techniques that businesses use to promote their messages online; however, everyone agrees that building a comprehensive digital marketing strategy for your business is becoming increasingly crucial for the health and visibility of your business.
Over the past ten years, online marketing has taken the business world by storm. Thanks to search engines and social media sites, it is easier than ever for end-users to find what they are looking for online. It has also made it necessary for businesses to create a visible online presence to remain relevant to that end-users search.
Two ways to get your brand in front of people are through paid search and paid social advertising. These strategies make it easier for online users to find your business online and contact you. Before investing in any marketing strategy, it is crucial to understand why it is important, how it helps you grow your business, and how the different elements of your campaign work together to give you the whole picture of your incoming data.
Let’s discuss why paid search and social are both important for your business.
Paid Search, What is it?
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) refers to several techniques and strategies a company can use to generate more visitor traffic from search engine results pages to their website. The goal of SEM is to promote a company’s visibility through both Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and paid search.
Paid search allows you to bid on selected keywords in an auction. This auction will determine where your ads are served based on the query the end-user is searching for on their search engine. This strategy will get your content in front of the people looking directly for you or the service you provide.
While SEO also aligns with the idea of increasing the visibility and ranking of a website, it requires you to establish yourself as an authority in your industry by creating frequent and consistent content with high-quality links.
This reputation takes time to build, which is why paid search is perfect for businesses looking to see fast results with a visible ROI for growing their website traffic quickly.
What are the benefits of paid search?
There are many benefits of using paid search for your business including brand awareness and visibility. By creating these touchpoints, your company will see more online leads and overall conversions. Along with improved visibility, paid search ads allow you to control how your marketing campaign presents online.
Small to medium-sized businesses that use advanced SEM tools and ads strategies experienced revenue growth nearly 4X higher than their previous year’s earnings. The most valuable benefit of search is the opportunity to show the end-user exactly what they are looking for, in the least amount of clicks. It allows you to control what you are paying for with strategies that can both target the top and bottom of your sales funnel based on the end-users query alone.
Paid search is a faster way to drive traffic to your website if you are just starting with an SEO strategy and enables lots of control and flexibility.
Another advantage to using paid search advertising is that it is easily customized and 100% trackable data. This feature allows you to target specific keywords intended for your company’s target audience. You can also customize your ads to appear based on day of the week, time of day, language, geography, device, and audiences based on prior visits to your website.
Erick Rudolph, Senior Director of Optimization at The Xcite Group says, “The flexibility in keywords and their match types allows you to see more or less in a search query report. A search query report is a report in AdWords that allows you to see what the user searched when they clicked on your ad. Whether it was a misspelling, longer tail query, or maybe a specific color, size, etc. It allows you to let your market manipulate your potential product updates, your strategy, and to see overall interest in your market.”
Paid Social, What is it?
It is important to understand the difference between organic social and paid social.
Organic social is when a company or brand invests the time to interact and engage their community on social media. Posting to your page, responding to comments or photos shared, running contests–these are all ways you can interact with your community organically to build that relationship.
Paid social advertising is similar to paid search, meaning businesses pay to place their ads on various social media platforms. When you use paid social in your marketing strategy, your ads will appear alongside and between organic content on peoples’ social media feeds, a lot like television ads between segments of your favorite show. This strategy helps build brand awareness in a place where the end-user is engaged and curious.
What are the benefits of paid social?
April Klabon, Social Optimizer at The Xcite Group points out, “There are currently about 2.8 billion monthly active users on Facebook. 1.84 billion of those users say they check in at least once a day, and two-thirds of that number also visit a local business page weekly. That’s a lot of potential customers expressing publicly what they like, what they’re interested in, and telling you who they are and what matters to them. Paid social gives businesses access to information they can leverage in ways they haven’t been able to before.”
This is because paid social uses targeting tools that businesses don’t typically have access to like; potential clients’ demographics, interests, and location to determine who your ad is served to.
Another advantage is that almost all social media platforms offer ad space in a variety of layouts, media options, and placements.
While conversion rates tend to be higher for paid search ads, paid social can be used alongside your traditional paid search efforts. Investing in paid social ads will help you move more people into your sales funnel. For example, you advertise a 10-day challenge PDF in return for the potential customer to give you their email address. Once your campaign has run and collected said emails, you can then use them in many other remarketing campaigns.
Hear From Industry Experts
Read the latest tips, research, best practices, and insights from our community of expert B2B service providers.
How are Paid Search and Paid Social Different?
Paid Search
- Paid search is responsive or reactive to a customer’s wants allowing you to show ads to the very people raising their hands right now
- Paid search is mostly keyword-focused, matching keywords with ads to the user’s search query
- Paid search ads are mainly text ads that appear on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) in Google or another search engine
Paid Social
- Paid social uses objectives like reach and brand awareness to cast a wide net and target a broader audience based on interest layers and basic demographics
- Paid social uses objectives like traffic, lead gen, and conversions to funnel your growing audience into a space where users are more likely to take action
- Potential customers are being targeted more intuitively
- Paid social can use customer lists, lookalike audiences, and custom audiences (website traffic, etc) to target users through remarketing objectives
- Paid social can vary greatly, including display ads in different formats, video ads, and text ads
How do Paid Search and social Work Together?
April, “We know the two channels behave very differently and target audiences in rather unique ways from each other, but when searching and social strategies are shared, we’re essentially doubling down on a client’s advertising efforts.
Paid search and social work together in the following ways:
- On average, clients running social ads next to their search campaigns will see a 2% higher conversion rate in search alone. This is because you are creating brand touchpoints and giving your audience different ways to engage as well as an opportunity for you to engage with your potential customers in different ways both based on the audience targeting as well as the objective and ad type options.
- Example: Facebook users will see your content on their feed, this creates brand awareness so when they see your company name pop up in Google, they will recognize you.
- Example: Facebook users see your content on their feed, they start doing branded Google searches and more research on a service/product they are looking for.
- Your company will have double the data to look at and evaluate. Knowledge is power, and data is the tool business owners have to help them make the next best decision for their company. If you are missing data points, there is no way to see the whole picture of your company’s marketing capabilities.
To sum it up, both paid search and paid social is crucial for growing a healthy and robust business. Both of these strategies are about getting the word out on your brand and creating touchpoints with potential customers.