Following our attendance at the first webinar of the Hootsuite Summer Social Series, we joined the next live webinar to explore the ‘Best practices for using search and social advertising together’. This is the second webinar we’ve attended in the series presented by Hootsuite to learn new strategies on search and social advertising. If you missed our blog on the first Hootsuite webinar click here. The second webinar of the series covered how to use Google and Facebook simultaneously to get best results. So, what did we learn?
Advertising on Facebook is proven to increase your Google results
If you’re an active user on Facebook, you may have noticed some ad’s which are of interest to you. This is because you’ve been targeted by a company using the Facebook audiences feature. This allows companies to reach out to new people who may or may not have realised they needed your product or service based on information Facebook holds about you; whether that be your age, location or interests. Naturally, if you saw a Facebook advertisement you were interested in, you may out of curiosity switch to Google for further research. From Hootsuite’s findings, it is suggested that by advertising on Facebook, your search results on Google will increase on average by 34%.
Keeping consistent across search and social channels
There’s a lot of noise out there in relation to marketing across both search and social. Therefore, to ensure your brand can stand out and for maximum chance of conversion, your messaging must be consistent. As you may know, it takes multiple touchpoints for a prospect to consider purchasing from your brand so you must stick to one consistent message or offer.
It’s not just brand names people are searching for- they’re also looking for offerings and results. Additionally, catchy headlines, phrases, or propositions are those that are more memorable than a just a brand name, so think about what resonates with your audience and what will stick in their minds. Ensure you are consistently optimised for those keywords across search and social so you can easily be found.
Using Facebook to retarget uses from search ads
Retargeting is an ever-growing subject in the world of marketing at the moment. What people are unaware of, is that there is more to retargeting than just purely displaying ads to website visitors. In order to maximise your efforts in retargeting, you can cross over with search and social. Often when clicking on a Google ad, visitors will come away from the page, perhaps do some additional research and explore other alternative options or solutions. However, by retargeting with Facebook, ads appear when the user visits the social media platform at a later date, reminding them about your offer and keeping your company at the top of their minds.
In summary, you shouldn’t be thinking about whether search or social is better for your brand- you should instead think how it is best to use search AND social together. Stay tuned for the final blog on the third webinar of the Hootsuite summer series.
