A New Generation Marketer

Combining social and paid searches can create a compelling SEO plan for your company. Both are very important marketing channels, and combined, as with any marketing effort, leads to better results. Each search strategy is very different, but together they can be extremely effective.

Paid search involves keyword bids, conversions, click-through rates, measurements and analytics, and ROI, whereas social search is engagement-based, brand building and hard to measure.

It is important to realize that these both provide different results so you must focus on their strengths individually.

Many companies rush into their paid and search strategies and try to combine them. However, it is best to treat each as its own entity to optimize their benefits. For paid you need to focus on conversion rates and cost vs. ROI. For social you must build a brand community and create positive engagements within your market.

Don’t expect the strategy of paid search to work for social, and vice versa.

For example, if you set a goal of 100 conversions a week for your paid campaign, you can’t expect the same for social since social is based on building your brand on the Internet and increasing awareness. However, together they can produce great inbound marketing results. By creating a compelling social campaign where you drive consumers to your site via social media and engage with them, they will be more willing to look into what you offer.

Consider this: a friend walks up to you and asks you to help them achieve a goal. Five minutes later a complete stranger asks the same favor. Who will you be more willing to help out? Your friend, of course! The same goes for social conversions. If you engage with your community online and create meaninful relationships, they will be more willing to talk to you and look into your product. This can then drive up your conversion rates, assisting your paid campaign.

Many think that social campaigns cannot create ROI, but if done right with a paid campaign, it certainly can.

So how can you best leverage these two strategies to work together?

Make social campaigns search friendly. Optimize your social messages using tags and keywords. For example, if you tweet about a new blog article, include the keywords you are trying to rank for. Search engines are now much more social friendly and even pick up on tweets. This can then drive leads to your site.

Try new keyword tests on social media. Since social media is free (well, almost) it is much easier to do A-B keyword testing than on a paid search campaign. Test different messaging throughout a specific time period and see which message either created the most buzz or drove the most traffic to your site.

Study the social media-sphere for trending topics around which to revolve your paid campaigns. There are several tools that can help you find the buzz around your industry, including Radian 6. If you can track what people are saying about your industry, product/service category, or brand itself, you will make search keywords much easier to find.

By leveraging the benefits of both search and social campaigns together, you can create an extremely compelling inbound marketing strategy. Each can assist the other, but the strategies must be focused on individually to bring out each tactic’s strengths.

Does your company use both social and paid search campaigns? If so, have you noticed an increased response? Leave your comments below.