Most digital marketers have at one point or another undertaken the task of attributing a value to social media and likely dealt with this question: “Social Media is great for interacting with customers and sharing information, but is it worth investing in to make money?”
The simple answer is YES, YES, YES!!!! In this blog post we’ll demonstrate significant ways social media can not only make you money, but also impact the rest of your marketing strategy.
Is Your Marketing Keeping Up With The Times?
Savvy companies using paid social advertising with pinpointed psychographic targeting are seeing positive effects to their bottom line through direct response and retargeting ads. This isn’t news. However, social media’s influence being felt through other channels of advertising is.
Forward-thinking companies that chose to invest in social media are seeing social’s impact on SEO, paid search, PR and in-store business. The beautiful thing about social media is it connects just about everyone. There are 90-year-old grandparents with Facebook pages, next-generation teenagers who are sharing experiences and communicating through Instagram and Snapchat, while millennials now turn to Twitter to get most of their news. Social media has grown in reach and influence to the point where it now penetrates most aspects of our life.
Why would marketers feel that this would be any different in our world of digital marketing? Here are just a few ways social media has affected other marketing channels.
Driving The RIGHT Traffic To Your Search Campaigns
When done correctly, paid social advertising is a proven commodity at driving users to landing pages where traffic can be converted. At AIMCLEAR, we believe that social media has more power than just “getting them there.”
Instead, we take advantage of Facebook’s psychographic targeting options to ensure we are capturing the “right” traffic. We utilize pinpoint targeting to make sure viewers visiting our clients’ sites are the same customers who are going to actually purchase a service or product. Since we know these are the right types of customers, we cookie them with a retargeting pixel upon entry to our sites.
Now you’re probably thinking to yourself, “Yeah, yeah we know about retargeting. This is something the industry has been doing for years,” and you’re right, BUT AIMCLEAR isn’t satisfied with just remarketing. Instead, remarketing lists are utilized in search campaigns to ensure the users finding our sites through search are interested in the product or service.
How do we know they’re interested? Because they’ve already told us they’re interested through the act of visiting our site through social media.
Giving Your Website A Jumpstart
To some marketers, utilizing social media for SEO might seem like a bit of a stretch. Most marketers would agree they can boost site traffic by sharing links to webpages over social media, but with the decline of organic reach in social channels, this is a less effective solution when relying solely on organic. Well, what if we were to tell you that utilizing paid search can be the best way to build effective links for your site and increase your page’s results in search engines?
It’s been widely discussed for years that getting links to your site from authoritative Internet users is a key way to build your domain’s authority and rank. The problem with building those links has always been how to get in front of the right people without paying for links or spending hours (you probably don’t have) trying to reach out to users over email or the phone.
Paid social advertising changes all of that. Want to get your content in front of the right people? Target them with social advertising. With the plethora of targeting options available in social advertising, business looking for an SEO boost can target the influencers in their industry based on a combination of interest, industry, location and countless other combinations of targeting options.
Getting In Front Of Influential Writers
Most public relation experts will agree that with the emergence of social media and digital marketing, public relations tactics have had to adapt. While PR practitioners used to have to spend time cultivating relationships with authors and trade magazines, now through social media they can get their businesses and content in front of industry leading authors with well-cultivated social media targeting.
Let’s say a business creates a white paper that is going to revolutionize the way companies in their industry approach business. Instead of spending hours on the phone trying to set up interviews or contacting journalists to write about the new content, forward-thinking PR trailblazers can spend their time more wisely targeting those same authors and publications through job title or company targeting via social media. Custom audiences can be created from writers’ Twitter handles, LinkedIn connections (you know you can export those, right?), or email addresses on business cards… and can then be targeted specifically with ads about the content, driving influential people not only to the desired content, but the entire site.
The beautiful thing about this approach is that you can also cookie the people who visit the site — and since you’ve already qualified the users through the social media targeting, you have now built a retargeting list of authors and industry influencers to be used for the future.
Getting Buyers in The Door
Have an in-store promotion or event that you want to drive people to? We already established social media is a great way to target the right people and drive awareness. However, this question from stakeholders remains: “How will we know that we are making money from this effort since they are visiting the store?”
The solution can be as simple as offering a special promo code that is only shown to those users who have been targeted through social media, or take the customers to a landing page where they have to print off a coupon that is only available on that page. This gives companies the opportunity to tie revenue back to specific advertising efforts and allow marketers to show the value of social media campaigns.
Targeting specific types of people on social media also can help with advertising costs for in-store promotions. Instead of spending the money to get a direct mail or print piece produced, companies can instead use a fraction of that budget and create very targeted segments of customers on social media. Plus, you can be assured that the people seeing your ad are people that would actually be interested in the product or service the store is providing.
The days of companies being weary when it comes to advertising on social media because of concerns over tracking and revenue generation are coming to an end for most businesses. With the advancements in social media targeting and tracking, businesses can now see the value of social media advertising in direct response (driving a purchase), but also positively affect other efforts of a holistic marketing strategy.
