Social media is fast becoming an integral part of any internet marketing strategy. Working alongside natural and paid search, social media can help to create truly integrated marketing that helps to boost your website’s position within search results and builds your customer base and brand strength.
The diverse approaches of search marketing and social media marketing may at first be difficult to align, but there are various methods of combining the two in order to maximise the benefit of each technique and improve areas of your marketing campaign that previously might have fallen short.
PPC and social media can work hand in hand by driving traffic back and forth and picking up customers who may need an additional nudge to complete a transaction or become a repeat customer. Decide where you want to drive you customers, and look at your analytics to find out where you need extra work to make your marketing efforts efficient and worthwhile.
You can direct users to your Facebook page or other social media profile using your PPC ads and a strong call to action. This type of ad is useful when you are looking to increase your social media presence or call attention to a promotion. Give search users an incentive to visit your social profile, such as a special offer or competition. You can also use PPC ads to direct users to multimedia on social platforms such as promos, adverts or instructive videos on your YouTube channel, infographics or images.
You can also use a combination of social marketing and PPC to help turn browsing customers into conversions, or entice customers who have previously visited your site to return to complete a transaction. This technique is called ‘remarketing’, and is a long term strategy that follows the path of users who have already shown an interest in a particular product or landing page.
You might start with social media or PPC by running a campaign or series of ads driving traffic to a specific landing page on your website. Social media can be useful to target a very specific audience and bring large numbers of new traffic to your site using promotions or promoted posts. Usually only a small percentage of this traffic actually convert into customers, but in the process you will have gained exposure to your website and your brand. This familiarity is what you use to your advantage with the next step of your remarketing strategy.
Using Google AdWords, you can analyse your traffic data to identify visitors who viewed certain pages and products, find out where they left the site and even find those who got to the checkout stage before abandoning a purchase. It is these customers you will be targeting with your next PPC drive in order to entice them back, playing off the familiarity and trust they will have gained during their original visit to your site. Ways to do this include:
– Echoing (but not replication) text, wording and imagery used on original adverts, promotions and product pages to remind customers of the great deal they will be getting.
– Offering an extra incentive to those who dropped out at the checkout stage, such as free shipping or additional discount.
– Promoting a similar product to the one users will have viewed on the original landing page.
– Offering newsletter or email subscription with additional promotions, savings and product updates
Using PPC and social media together in this way means every part of your marketing plan is useful and you manage to convert as much traffic to your site as possible. Utilise the immediacy of PPC with the wide audience appeal of social media to bring the best of both worlds together.
Courtesy of www.ikroh.com
