Today we'll go over the pros and cons of search engine marketing vs social media marketing and how to use either of them or both of them to grow your business online.
As the Internet continues to grow, so do the number of options that consumers have when it comes to websites they can use to search for products or services. With the rise of websites like YouTube or the various social media apps that are prevalent today, users have more options than they've ever had before regarding ways that they can seek things out on the Internet.
Sites like Google and Yahoo have always been used to search for things because that was their original intended purpose. Social media websites were designed to give people a place to gather and connect online, but as these sites have grown, they've begun to offer more possibilities for the way that they can be used.
These days people search for things on sites like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and others in the same manner that they used to search on Google and Yahoo. This is one of the many reasons why advertising on social media websites has grown so much over the course of the past few years.
As a business, you have a multitude of options in regard to ways that you can promote your business on the Internet. But these various online advertising platforms each have their own pros and cons, and today we'll go over some basic tips and tricks on how to most effectively leverage search engine marketing as well as social media marketing.
Every business regardless of its vertical should be doing some means of search engine marketing as well as social media marketing.
On the search engine side of things this can be broken down into two core segments, even though there are dozens of different, more specific types of search engine marketing, but for the sake of this post we'll just focus on them at the most baseline level. Pay per click marketing and search engine optimization.
We'll do the same for social, reviewing some key talking points about organic social media marketing and social media advertising.
At the very least, every business should make sure that when a potential customer Googles the name of their business, the information that is being displayed on the search engine results page is factual and accurate. Many businesses fail to even take this most basic step of making sure that their information on Google or Bing is accurate and up to date. Additionally, if you want your website to receive more traffic than it currently does, and I'm sure that most businesses agree that they do, you should be running some sort of paid advertising effort via Google search or Google display.
It doesn't necessarily have to be with a huge budget. Even a few dollars a day can go a long way in bolstering your website's traffic. The more traffic your website receives, the more work your website can do for you as far as growing your business is concerned. Duh.
One of the most cost-effective ways that a business can achieve this is by running a display campaign on Google's display network. For these ads, you leverage images to help drive traffic to your website, and you're charged per thousand impressions, so it's a quick, easy, and cost-effective way to get thousands of people browsing websites or their cell phones to see your business information.
Pairing this with a website that's pleasant to look at and user-friendly helps increase the number of calls, leads, and sales your website can generate.
Of course, search engine marketing can get very layered and complex, but these essential components in and of themselves, if done well, are a great start.
In short, optimizing organic efforts on search engines helps decrease customer frustration while increasing traffic to your website. Paid search engine advertising efforts bring interested parties to your site to help increase your likelihood of generating a lead or making a sale.
As far as social media marketing is concerned, a lot of the same principles discussed above are also applicable. You can do a lot of these things on social media these days. One of the greatest differences, however, is cost. And since every business is different and there are so many different types of businesses, it's up to you to either do some serious research or through trial and error, discover which marketing goals of yours can be executed in the most cost-effective manner and on what type of marketing channel, whether that be a search engine, social media site, or elsewhere.
Because social media sites aren't the first place people go when they want to buy something, generally speaking, they tend to be a better place to foster awareness about your product or service or to grow an audience while simultaneously working on branding. You can absolutely generate leads, calls, and sales from social media apps, but this is something social media has evolved to offer, as opposed to search engines which were created since their inception to help people search for things online.
Just like with search engines, every business should have at the very least a basic presence on core social media websites, so that when users look for them, they find an active, polished page which helps reaffirm to them that your business is active and engaging with consumers.
Once this is squared away, you can delve into leveraging social media websites for other things like generating call traffic, online inquiries, and sales.
Again, it's up to each business to attempt all of these things on a plethora of sites to see how well a particular marketing platform works for them and at what cost.
Having a polished presence across all major search engines and social media websites, however, is a good way to cover all your bases. From there, you can start running paid ad campaigns on these various platforms a little bit at a time to start to develop a gauge for which platforms generate traction and more importantly, at what price point.
And pairing the above with an optimized website that is fast, efficient, visually pleasing, and user friendly, in conjunction with conversion rate optimization, is a good fundamental Holy Trinity of online marketing.
This is an extremely shallow overview of how search engines and social media websites work and as I'm sure you can imagine, once you start to get into the granularity of it all, it can be quite complex and time consuming, which is why there are hundreds of thousands of people across the world whose full-time jobs is to develop and manage search engine or social media marketing efforts, both organically as well as on the paid advertising end of things.
If you feel it’s probably best to contract outside assistance with some or all of these online advertising endeavors, we urge you to please feel free to reach out to us. These types of online marketing efforts as well as others are at the core of what we do, and we love to help businesses of all sizes evaluate their search engine and social media marketing efforts to look for new or better ways to shine online.
If you’d like more information about how Array Marketing Solutions can help your business do a better job of promoting itself on search engines or social media apps, contact us today to learn more.
Cheers,
-AS