Combine Advertising And Social Media To Optimise Customer Engagement
When it comes to creating a great marketing campaign, there seems to be an ever-growing list of components to think about. From content marketing to the right links, AdWords to pay per click strategies.
More recently, social media has become an increasingly important part of online marketing’s ability to tell a wide audience about your product or service, and there are PPC services available that are specific to social media platforms.
As if that was not complicated enough, the lines are rapidly becoming blurred as to where “content sharing” ends and advertising begins on social media. American advertising legend Howard Luck Gossage famously said: “The real fact of the matter is that nobody reads ads. People read what interests them, and sometimes it’s an ad.” This rings truer than ever in this age of content and videos going viral via social media because people find them moving or funny.
The Double-Edged Sword Of Social Media
A great many commentators have spoken about how social media has changed the face of online marketing forever. They will tell you that today it is all about putting the right content out onto the Facebook and Twitter feeds and getting people to share it.
This viewpoint is fine as far as it goes, but the challenge lies in the fact that there is a mind-boggling amount of content being shared across these social networks. The challenge goes full circle, back to how to engage viewers, achieve click through rates and actually derive some real benefits for your business.
Facebook PPC
Facebook is the second most visited website on the planet, having recently pushed YouTube down into third place. This is of course down to the fact that 1.86 billion people have Facebook accounts all over the world, drawn to the connectivity it offers and the fact that, as Mark Zuckerberg has always reassured us, “It’s free and it always will be.”
This has led to the vast majority of those 1.86 billion people pondering the following question at least once or twice over the years: If Facebook provides this amazing platform to so many people and doesn’t charge a penny for it, just how has Mark Zuckerberg managed to make over $50 billion?
The answer is, of course, through advertising. Facebook offers a PPC platform, and for many, this is an ideal way of blending both social media and more traditional advertising into an optimal campaign.
With such a wide audience, Facebook PPC is enormously popular. It is also relatively cheap and simple to set up. This spells good news for both advertisers and for Mr Zuckerberg.
Of course, if Facebook PPC is such a good idea that everyone is doing it, it’s more important than ever to use the right SEO expertise to craft a PPC campaign that will attract and engage viewers, and keep you a step ahead of the competition.
Google AdWords
Facebook might be the second most visited website on the planet, but it is not difficult to guess the site that comes first. In the minds of many consumers, Google is the internet, and no discussion of PPC can be complete without mentioning Google AdWords.
In essence, AdWords delivers targeted advertising to participating websites, allowing you to promote your content, and consequently your products or services, using Google’s own algorithms to seek out the best target audience.
A Blended Approach
The best SEO campaign will take a blended approach, making smart use of social media and PPC, in combination with unique, relevant and interesting content. If that sounds familiar, it is because these are the concepts that have always underpinned SEO.
All of this is proof, perhaps, that while the technology and tools have become broader and more complex, the essence of a good SEO campaign has not changed quite so much after all.
How are you adapting your SEO strategy? And what does social offer your brand in terms of engagement and reach? Continue the conversation at @Figaro_Digital.