Integrating Search and Social – The Perfect Combination for Your Ad Campaign

Digital advertising pros have a great opportunity in 2019 to integrate social media into their Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaigns to help boost conversions and revenue.

Social media strategies have grown to be a key part of marketers’ advertising campaigns. Marketers are seeing higher results when they create great content for adaptable use across multiple channels. For instance, juice drinks company Bai reached 15 million people and increased its ad recall by 17 points by running a video campaign on Instagram and Facebook. And using Twitter for ads around its Mayochup campaign in 2018 helped Heinz increased its brand awareness by 28%, with over 1 billion impressions in just 48 hours.

Adding social dollars on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other networks have many benefits to marketers, including higher brand awareness, more personalization opportunities to consumers, stronger data capabilities and better audience targeting. Some marketers have reported seeing a faster ROI from social media ad activity, compared to traditional organic search and content marketing techniques, which build online momentum over time.

For your agency to do this right, it makes sense to get your social and SEM teams on the same page. For instance, task the social media team with learning about how consumer search behavior affects social media results. Use your client social media insights and search analytics to create a more targeted ad campaign. Digging through the data will open up areas for collaboration for social campaign effectiveness.

Benefits of SEM/Social Integration

Here are some of the clear benefits to integrating search and social into your digital advertising campaigns:

• Raising brand awareness

• Increased personalization opportunities

• Stronger data capability

• Better audience targeting

Raising Brand Awareness

Integrating search and social brings a great deal of brand awareness to your target audience. These consumers can learn about your brand through social media, and then utilize search once they are ready for additional details or in need of your product.  The trick to raising brand awareness is to find, nurture, and reward your avid followers. By consistently offering engaging content on social media channels, brands can boost their follower count using tactics such as exclusive offers, contests, and giveaways.  

Increase Areas for Personalization

Social media can be used to build trust, and brands can build this trust with personalization efforts. One example might be to nurture top-of-the-funnel consumers on social media for your brand’s products and services. In capturing these consumers’ attention with your content, you can drive them to your site(s) for data capture and the high possibility of conversions.

Stronger Data

Integrating social into your search strategies can produce better data for your marketing teams. Social media success can help to fill any gaps in search data. You can also create opportunities to mine social data and evaluate audience habits. This new wealth of data can be useful in your existing analytics, and you will be able to use these gained insights in your upcoming SEM campaigns.

Targeting Audiences

You can also find new ways to target audiences by combining the strengths of both SEM and social media. There are various ways to integrate these strategies, such as by creating lookalike audiences, utilizing search landing pages (with social URLs as the bait), and targeting different demographics with a variety of messages in search.

If your SEM strategy isn’t incorporating elements of social media, you should rethink your overall marketing strategy. Today, social is much more than just having accounts on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Use these channels to build your brand image, personalize your interactions, engage with your local consumer base, and gain followers.