Using Paid Search & Social To Win More Business

Paid search and paid social are both incredibly powerful and useful digital channels that can help attract traffic to your website and generate enquiries for your business. However, both of these channels have strengths and weaknesses. For instance, while paid search can capitalise on users who are looking to make a purchase, it is not the best tool for letting them know that they need your product or services in the first place.

In contrast, this is where paid social comes into effect because it is a great tool for creating brand awareness and targeting new audiences. In this article, we’re going to cover what paid search and paid social are and how using them together can benefit your business and increase your profits.

Understanding Paid Search

“Paid search” has many different names in the industry – search engine marketing, pay per click advertising, and so on. While they do cover other areas of online media, they are essentially a form of online advertising that allows you to show adverts on search engine results pages (SERPs) such as Google.

As you would imagine, they are a great way to target qualified users and promote your products/services which will you help you capture leads or make sales.

Understanding Paid Social

As you would expect, “paid social” refers to the online advertising model of paying to display adverts or sponsored messages across social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat. They are a very useful tool for targetting large amounts of people (including previous website visitors) to promote your products or services. You can use this to create brand awareness, pull users further into the purchasing funnel, and ultimately make sales or receive business enquiries.

“For instance, ComScore found that consumers exposed to a brand’s social media content are 2.8 times more likely to search on that brand’s terms.”

 

How Can You Use Them Together To Benefit Your Business?

You now know what paid search and paid social are but let’s quickly cover why you should be using both.

Remarket To Users Who Didn’t Buy

Have people visited your website from paid search but failed to convert for whatever reason? By using paid social, you can show your ads to your paid search audience and focus on regaining their attention. This can be very powerful and help you convert audiences or users that came very close to converting previously (e.g. visited a high-value e-commerce page for X amount of time but made no purchase).

Create Brand Awareness

As previously mentioned, paid social is a great tool to attract users to your brand and start their journey towards becoming a paying customer. In essence, this will help you create demand for your products or service (i.e. users later performing searches for terms related to your business). However, it’s vital that you have a Paid Search campaign set up ready to capitalise and convert those users into paying customers.

Upsell To Previous Customers

Are your consumers likely to make multiple purchases? By using paid social, you can get them to make a purchase they did not even know they wanted to make! As you know, paid search ads only appear when a user makes a search for a particular keyword, so it can be difficult to re-engage with these users as they may not be actively searching anymore.

However, by using paid social ads, you can appear to these users on a different platform and remind them about your services and any good deals you are currently offering. Perfect for bringing back old users and encouraging them to make a purchase.

Are you interested in running paid advertising online to grow your band and take profits further for your business? Get in touch with our team to find out how we can help.