It surprises me everyday just how often social media and paid search are left to roll along their own unique parallel tracks. Rarely interacting and rarely sharing the same message.
There’s such a huge opportunity to create a strategy to the benefit of both channels and it works both ways. Here are just a few of my favourites, sharing paid search with social media and sharing social media with paid search.
Paid Search Promotions
Everyone loves saving money and everyone loves to share. The obvious route is to promote, say, your latest special offer on Facebook or Twitter. That’s great to an extent but you’ll soon lose friends if you simply bombard them with ‘salesy’ messages.
You need to think carefully about the balance of commercial and non-commercial posts – after all, your audience is there socially and wants to have fun!
So let’s turn things on their head – let’s promote your social media via paid search. Yes that’s right, try driving people from paid channels through to your social media platforms. Let’s not forget, though, that you are spending money here so we still need to see a return on this spend.
Search Intent
We want to reach an audience in the right state of mind. Someone browsing on Facebook doesn’t always want to be hit with commercial messages, whereas someone searching in Google with commercial intent, will expect to be exposed to commercial results.
One idea might be to display a paid search advert and either directly or indirectly promote your Facebook Page. You can then encourage visitors to ‘Like’ your Facebook Page and say a great big thank you to them with a discount code. Make them feel special.
If you plan and approach your strategy from this angle, you’ll build your following instead of damaging it. Quite how you build this strategy is up to you.
Paid Search Ads
The simplest way to achieve this is to use your paid search ad text to convey the message. We’re limited on space here so there’s only a brief opportunity. Make the most of the character limits and be sure to emphasise your offer. ‘Follow us’, ‘Like us’, ‘Tweet us’, ‘Share’…these are all well recognised social terms and hence strong calls to action.
“Like us & save an extra 10% today!”
Landing Page Content
Another option would be via landing page content. Create a welcoming banner to endorse your social channel, together with the extra benefit and promotion. That way, your social channel still benefits but remains more ‘social’ and less cluttered with commercial messages.
This method helps to give your visitors a choice, its optional. Nothing forced, just a friendly heads up that you’d love them to jump on-board as a friend and even more as a customer.