3 Lessons Social Advertisers Can Learn From Search Marketing
I strongly believe that marketers can always learn something from one another whether it be a new insight, trend, or tip. Your peers can be great resources to help you better hone your craft.
There are many disciplines within marketing, and as teams begin to collaborate more to drive cross-channel synergy, there are lessons to be learned from our channel counterparts.
Social advertising, for instance, is still a relatively new practice and affected by rapid industry growth and change. In Q3 2014, key performance indicators (KPIs) for social advertisingsaw fluctuation both year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter as marketers continue to scale investments and improve their targeting and optimization practices. During that same time, Facebook, the worlds largest social network, proceeded to introduce structural changes and new functionality into the mix.
By comparison, paid search has seen more stability given its maturity and the long-standing best practices search marketers have developed. As the newer kids on the block, social marketers should embrace the opportunity to take a cue from more seasoned residents of the digital world and adopt some tricks of the trade from SEM.
Search marketers are used to combing competitor activity and performing keyword researchto ensure coverage on key topics and opportunities to expand or adjust strategies. With the festive shopping season getting into full swing, search marketers have been busy concatenating keywords, developing negatives, and keeping a watchful eye on the competition.
Social marketers should perform this type of research for their own programs. Competitive research may seem obvious, but it tends to be overlooked, as it can be a time-consuming process. Thankfully, there are many tools available in the market to make social monitoring easier. Free tools like Google Alerts, Hootsuite, Social Mention, and Topsy are accessible ways to begin this process.
Pick a handful of your top competitors so as to not overwhelm the process. Then, more broadly, set up tracking of key topics and hashtags in your industry. Use this information to guide your strategy on message or audience development. The key is not just to hop on the hot topic bandwagon, but adapt these themes and insights to fit your program and execute against them better than your competitors.
Over the years, search marketers have gotten very proficient at testing elements of their campaigns to drive optimal performance and find best-fit combinations. From experimenting with calls to action and messaging variations to comparing landing page performance, multi-variant testing has become a hallmark paid search practice.
Testing needs to become an integrated part of the paid social strategy, particularly as more marketers begin to take an always-on approach social advertising, rather than sporadic bursts of campaign activity.
There are several things marketers can do to improve their social testing:
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3 Lessons Social Advertisers Can Learn From Search Marketing