Tuesday 12 November 2013

Search Engine Marketing or Social Media?

Everyone likes the new shining objects. So does the marketers, who started switching from, search engine marketing to social media, and such trend followed by other marketers. Of lately, there has been a shift or thinking to shift their Digital Marketing focus from Search Engine Marketing to Social Media. Switching search to social was a smart move? Can marketers rely completely on Social Media instead of Search Engine?

Few years back, the companies that shifted their Digital marketing focus from search engine to social media are now bringing back the search engine marketing as the strategy that is the part of Digital Marketing. The major question is, why did the search engine was chosen again? It is because; the marketers didn't receive the kind of performance that they were hoping to get out of the social media campaigns.

A research showed that, only 1 per cent of online transaction could be generated through social media. At the same time, there was a great contribution of Search Engine Marketing for e-commerce sites for lead generation, sales and representing 31.43 percent of sales traffic. E-mail marketing had 2.82 percent and social media just had 1.55 percent of all e-commerce traffic.

It doesn't mean that social media failed those businesses, but the marketers failed to understand how to use and optimize social media in their respective businesses. If a business makes use of social media, it should generate genuine people who’d get engaged in the activities and trends put by the business. Social media is not about adopting give-away campaigns like “Win iPad” and converting people who want to win, follow the brand using social media such as Twitter and Facebook. This will not bring in genuine fans or leads. The business will face a decline in the engagement due to not implementing a perfect strategy that suits social media which will lead to generating the leads and actually the genuine ones.

Another trend flowed in Asia is to put Paid Ads (PPC) to be focused of the search engine marketing and not concentrating on the SEO. It might be because of the assumption made by the people of SEO getting too harder. But if a website is healthy and well optimized, more than half of website traffic can be fetched through organic search results. One can easily get traffic to a website if SEO strategies shall be implemented properly and following rules and regulations of search engines and rather focusing on paid ads.

Social media, Paid ads and SEO have their own different roles in the digital marketing field and despite of adopting these techniques one over another, try bringing all together and implementing it in the business which results in bringing business goals closer.

To collaborate the above 3 techniques, a business shall make use of the following 6 steps:

·         Behavior of Audience in Search and Social Media
It is really necessary to understand how people behave on search engines and social media, such as what people search for, in search engine and social media. For that, a marketer has to look and analyze own website so that relevant audiences can b targeted according to their needs and purposes.

·         Setting up goals for search engines and social media
Set up the search and social media goals, once a marketer have well understood the audience and adjusting it according to the digital marketing projects.

·         Using maximum advantage of social media on SEO
The social activities that is being performed by social media has a greater impact on search engine and a marketer should take maximum advantage of social media on search engine optimization, so that improvement can be brought in the organic search performance.

·         Combine search and social media
A marketer goes wrong as far as they consider search and social media to be different. A marketer shall create a cross-functional process between the search and social so that you can integrate the search learning into social media, and the social media learning into search.

·         Implement the best practice and influence people to follow it
Give a shape to the findings, research, goals and process and implement it and enforce the people across the world to follow it.

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