Social Media Marketing
What are the benefits of using social media for business?
Consider that there are now more than 4.2 billion active social media users across the globe. If you’re not taking advantage of social within your digital marketing strategy, you’re missing out on a fast, inexpensive, and effective way to reach almost half the world’s population.
​
Social Media Marketing is a form of digital marketing that leverages the power of popular social media networks to achieve your marketing and branding goals. But it’s not just about creating business accounts and posting when you feel like it.
Social Media Marketing requires an evolving strategy with measurable
goals and includes:
Maintaining and optimizing your profiles
Posting pictures, videos, stories, and live videos that represent your brand and attract a relevant audience
Responding to comments, shares, and likes and monitoring your reputation
Following and engaging with followers, customers, and influencers to build a community around your brand
Social Media Marketing also includes paid social media advertising, where you can pay to have your business appear in front of large volumes of highly targeted users.
Benefits of Social Media Marketing
Humanize Your Business
Social media enables you to turn your business into an active participant in your market. Your profile, posts, and interactions with users form an approachable persona that your audience can familiarize and connect with, and come to trust.
Drive Traffic
Between the link in your profile, blog post links in your posts, and your ads, social media is a top channel for increasing traffic to your website where you can convert visitors into customers. Plus, social signals are an indirect SEO factor.
Generate Leads & Customers
You can also generate leads and conversions directly on these platforms, through features like Instagram/Facebook shops, direct messaging, call-to-action buttons on profiles, and appointment booking capabilities.
Increase Brand Awareness
The visual nature of social media platforms allows you to build your visual identity across vast audiences and improve brand awareness. And better brand awareness means better results with all your other campaigns.
Build Relationships
These platforms open up both direct and indirect lines of communication with your followers through which you can network, gather feedback, hold discussions, and connect directly with individuals.
Search Engine Marketing
What Is Search Engine Marketing?
Search Engine Marketing involves utilizing the results from search engines to promote your websites. It does this primarily through the strategic usage of paid advertising on the search engine. Think about the ads that appear at the top of Google whenever you search for something — that’s search engine marketing.
In this way, SEM is different from Search Engine Optimization, or SEO.
SEO marketing tries to increase web traffic organically. However, search engine optimation is still an important part of any marketing strategy. Indeed, SEO and SEM are often used in tandem to increase web traffic for businesses.
​
​
Benefits of Search Engine Marketing
Spreads Brand Awareness
The paid ads used with search engine marketing can help your brand cut through the noise of competition. Whether it’s the headline or URL link, these types of ads can leave a lasting impression when it comes to customers’ impression of your brand.
When combined with other forms of brand awareness it can slowly or quickly put you on your target audience’s radar. If you want some other ways to increase brand awareness for your company, then check out our guide here.
Fast Visibility
Creating visibility through organic SEO takes time and energy. Search engine marketing on the other hand provides almost instantaneous results. Your ad is placed in front of your potential customer as soon as they search for you. This makes it an ideal short-term strategy for quickly creating visibility for your products, service, or organization.
Can Target Ads Based on Location
Another big plus associated with SEM is that you can set up your ads to only target people near the vicinity of your business. This helps you filter out searchers who are too far from your location.
It also helps connect you with people in your area. Local audiences are eager to find businesses in their area. Maybe that’s why search results for ‘near me’ and ‘where to buy’ queries have grown by 200% on Google over the past two years.
Simple Management
Another attractive benefit of search engine marketing is simplicity. Platforms like Google Ads make it easy to both create and manage any ads that you use through the service.
For example, you can create schedules for different ads, allowing them to run or stop for however long your budget allows. This type of scheduling makes sure that you get the most out of your ads before deciding to end them.
Easy to Target the Audience You Want
As we mentioned, search engine marketing allows you to target users that live in a certain location near your business. However, this isn’t the only way that SEM can help put you in front of your ideal audience. Different age groups, races, and socioeconomic groups use different keyword searches.
As such, utilizing the keywords in your ads can help put you in touch with the customers more likely to engage with your brand. For example, let’s say you want your ad to target a young, Gen Z audience. You can find out what keywords they’re searching for, then target them with relevant content.
Increases Traffic to Your Website
The ads for your website are often the first thing that users see when they search for relevant interests. If your ad copy is effective, then this can drive traffic to your website.
This is especially helpful if you’ve been having trouble generating traffic organically through SEO. If utilized properly, the paid advertisements will help supplement traffic until you begin to generate it more naturally on your own.
Allows You to Measure Your Performance
Measuring the effectiveness of ad campaigns in real life is often a difficult and costly experience. They require things like surveys, focus groups, and similar metrics. Luckily SEM platforms like Google Ads give you instant access to information like top-performing keywords, impressions, and click-through rates.
This is one of the best advantages of SEM over traditional advertisements. These tools allow you to measure the performance of your ads. If you notice that one ad does better than another, then you can quickly adjust your strategy and run more effective search engine ads.