The one thing to understand about a successful social advertising campaign is the importance of having an advertising plan that reflects the customer journey and online decision making process. Social Advertising relies on creating intent and persuading your audience that they have a problem and that you’re ready and able to solve it for them.
We want to give users that “Aha!” moment!
Social Ads at the end of the day are really just a form of sales and are pretty similar to what a great offline sales person does with a prospect. Great sales people tailor their messaging depending on how established their relationship is with the prospect throughout the sales cycle. The same holds true to a great social advertising campaign.
A sales person will have a much easier time closing a “warm lead” that has a great deal of understanding of their product or service and the problem that it solves for them specifically as opposed to a “cold” lead that is being cold called for the first time.
The way a great salesperson talks to a cold lead at the beginning of the sales cycle vs. a warm lead they have already been talking with vs. a hot lead that is ready to be closed is very different. Social Ads have to work in the same way or you will have very little success and not make money.
The goal of this post is for you as a social advertiser to seek opportunities to work with the other digital channels to either introduce or nurture leads with social media depending on what phase they are at in the sales cycle, aligning your social advertising campaigns with the customer journey.
Search Marketing is a great 1 / 2 punch with Social Ads as typically a prospect is already warmed up when visiting your website through a SEO or PPC keyword they made the decision to search for and seek out.
Incorporating Paid Social With SEO
If your website is currently driving a strong amount of traffic organically, integrating a solid social advertising plan to support that traffic is extremely important and often times can be a big winner in generating more leads or sales online.
Why is that? Well because people that are discovering your website are doing so for free & they have intent for what they are searching for and that is why they took the initiative and invested their own time to seek out this content or information.
We don’t need to convince them they have a problem or opportunity to solve because they already realize that, hence why they are searching for answers or solutions.
So how do you find what your ranking for organically? The long short is you can use Google Analytics and SEM Rush.
This blog post will show you how to check what your ranking for organically, and how to create social audiences to take them to the next step in the online sales cycle, just like a great offline sales person would do with a prospect.
I suggest retargeting organic traffic to a RELEVANT transactional page. Meaning if someone is searching “Why SEO is Important” and lands on a Power Digital blog post, we want to retarget them to a “transactional” page like a contact form that outlines our SEO process and a free assessment we can provide them with.
Incorporating Paid Social With Paid Search
Integrating AdWords with social ads is very similar to integrating SEO with Social ads.
Why? Because it’s the same principle: people discover your website through intent for what they are searching for. We don’t need to convince them they have a problem or opportunity to solve. They know it and are seeking help.
The difference between SEO and Paid Search? Instead of waiting months to rank organically for free, we can spend money on advertising behind intent driven keywords on Paid Search to introduce users to the brand instantly.
…..so how do we strategically do this?
Related: Creating Cross-Channel Strategies Between AdWords & Facebook Ads
There are multiple ways:
- Retargeting off of landing pages that have ONLY had paid search traffic driven to it
- Creating UTM codes denoting Paid Search Parameters in your AdWords campaigns and plug those UTM parameters into your Facebook audiences for retargeting purposes.
- Specialized Plugins are popping out of the woodworks to retarget cross-channel.
From there, take them to the next step.
For example: we rank very well for the keyword “Facebook Audience Network Bot Traffic”, and have also bidded on the same keyword to drive traffic to our content and reach people that are seeking out information around this subject.
These people likely have a serious problem that we have a solution for that will help them.
…In that particular blog post, we post the solution to fix a HUGE problem that many Facebook advertisers have faced and do not yet know how to solve. They are wasting their money and we can show them how to avoid that. Nobody likes wasting money…
We then retarget the qualified prospects that hit that blog post to a transactional opportunity to get in touch with our team and learn more about other Social Media Advertising mistakes they might be making. We solved one problem for them through the initial blog post and now have credibility and trust and very likely can help them in other ways to solve other problems they might not even know they have yet. That is what great consultants and consultative sales people do offline and the same thing we do with facebook advertising.
Here is a quick recap of what that path looks like:
- User has a problem and searches for solutions
- User lands on blog post and finds solution and gets great value for FREE from us
- User goes on Facebook the next day and sees our ad taking them to the next step and showing them other ways we can help them
Ideally, these users found a great deal of value around the original problem they searched about, we retarget these users on social with a solution to work with us.
Incorporating Paid Social With Social Community Management And Content Strategy
Integrating a solid social advertising plan aligned with your Facebook page content has become more important than ever as of recently and a major winning formula for Facebook marketers.
Facebook now allows advertisers to retarget our “Facebook Page Visitors and Engaged Facebook Page Visitors”.
What’s more interesting is using Facebook’s Audience Overlap tool for key insights of how your page/engaged page visitors interact with your profile page and your website.
Below is a screenshot of trends we see pretty much across the board with all of our clients:
Facebook Page Visitors (Excluding Facebook Page Engagers) typically have LOWER overlap rates with website traffic whereas there’s always higher overlap rates between Engaged Page Visitors and Website Traffic. This is an opportunity for a Big Marketing Win, that many brands are missing.
One solution we’ve found is trying to engage our current Page visitors that haven’t engaged with some sort of relatable quote or piece of content to build trust.
If we stay top of mind with these individuals, they will eventually either directly search our website or get stepped into other campaigns that intend to drive leads.
Incorporating Paid Social With Traditional Marketing
Still not ready to leave the realm of traditional marketing?
Well that’s okay because digital can really help you measure your traditional advertising efforts.
Let’s use the TV, Magazines, and Billboards as examples of traditional media tactics we can incorporate within a social advertising funnel and maximize value of these offline campaigns.
The key I’ve found with incorporating traditional media is using some sort of URL for people to directly search that is easily memorable and cannot be found OTHER than being seen in your traditional media placement.
Related: Facebook Traffic and the Buyer’s Cycle: Best Practices
…This allows us to truly have a decent measure of whether the traditional ad is working.
So for example: Let’s say Power Digital Marketing is advertising in magazines and the goal is to find leads that need help with SEO.
In the magazine ad, I would look to provide some valuable content to educate prospects on SEO and make the URL for them to visit something along the lines of: Seoisnotdead.com or SEOisnotvoodoo.com…. The key is to make this memorable and concise so users don’t feel overwhelmed or forget what to directly search.
If those pages can only be found in our traditional media, we can measure and pixel those pages’ traffic to retarget off of to see how well that introduced users to the brand.
Bonus Plugins
There are plenty of plugins that are coming out these days (mostly only for WordPress so far) that allows us to retarget users based off the traffic source. So as time goes on, some of these workarounds will not be needed and retargeting cross channel will be easier and easier.
Check out a couple of our favorite plugins for this case:
Key Action Items To Implement
Next time you’re creating a Facebook Ad, make sure to think about the customer journey and the other marketing channels users have hit prior to serving them that ad. What was their mindset and how can you best speak to them to complete their journey? Think like a consultative sales person and how you would want to be spoken too if you were the prospect being targeted.
There is no better opportunity to do so than social advertising. It is built for this type of marketing and is the same as offline sales just online.
What’s your thoughts on incorporating paid social with other channels? Have you seen success doing so? Tell us about it below!
