Over the last few years, social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and Youtube has been taking the Internet by storm. More people are going with the trend and focusing on social marketing and it’s quite understandable why. But what’s surprising is that marketers are ignoring search marketing in favor of using social media as a marketing strategy.
There are many reasons why marketers are going with the social media route. First, social media really has the potential to snowball from small campaigns. Second, social media is one of the most cost effective ways to market your business online. Third, there is a huge audience in the social media sites and it would be foolish not to take advantage of the user base that is available.
But what’s shocking is that when you run the numbers, search still produces better results than social media in terms of return on investment. The marketers that are having success with search are making a bigger impact on their bottom line than marketers that are using social media as an advertising/marketing platform.
There are several factors for this. While social media is more budget friendly to start with, it requires more commitment in terms of how much time you invest. Social media is very active and you need to constantly monitor and develop campaigns to keep up.
On the other hand, search marketing requires a bigger investment up front. It does require a big commitment to start a campaign but after you’ve got it going, you pretty much have a regular revenue stream set up. It’s also easy to manage whether you are running pay per click campaigns or getting traffic through organic search. It is very affordable to ramp up a winning campaign.
Another reason why search may be producing better results is that it is easier to target your audience. You can target your audience through keywords. There are various filters you can use to really hone in on your most important prospect such as day parting, negative keywords, and more. This allows advertisers to really optimize campaigns and make it as profitable as possible.
Probably the biggest reason search performs better is because there is an intent to buy from the user. People on sites such as Facebook are not on the site with the intent to make a purchase whereas a person searching Google may be typing in the model of a product to compare prices and look at reviews.
If you were hesitant about using search before, then there’s some news that may want you to start a campaign. Studies are also showing that the click costs have decreased over the last few years. This may be because more marketers prefer social marketing over other methods.
In contrast, the costs of advertising on sites such as Facebook have gone up with the increasing demands. The rise of other marketing methods such as mobile marketing can be another contributing factor to lowering costs of search. Keep in mind that everything may vary from industry to industry and the overall changes in costs are a generalization.
As you can see, search marketing is still effective and is still one of the most profitable marketing strategies for online businesses. This doesn’t mean that businesses should solely focus on it as social marketing and other advertising/marketing channels are still profitable. It just means that you shouldn’t jump on the social bandwagon without putting in a decent effort in using search.