Massively Improve Your PPC with Social Media
If you have solid PPC results, then you already have a solid foundation to use social media to your advantage. Social media marketing carries on where PPC leaves off, and using them together creates an effective way to increase your conversion rate and your return on investment.
Retargeting
The first and best way to use social media is through retargeting. PPC drives people to your website. A great PPC conversion rate is 2% - and retargeting allows you to go after the other 98%.
It’s very effective too - by sending out a message to someone who has already visited your site, they are 10 x more likely to click through than through a display ad - and they are also 70% more likely to convert. Over time, retargeting can lead to a 147% higher conversion rate.
Retargeting works by putting a piece of html code in the landing page of your website so that people who click through can be tracked. Most advertisers have ways of using this ‘pixel’ to retarget your audience - Facebook, Twitter and Google certainly do - as well as third party plug in providers like AdRoll, ReTargeter and Chango.
Beyond just retargeting people who have already visited your landing page - you can set different pixels on different landing pages to track people who have been at different stages for customer journey.
Why is that important?
If a customer has put things in their basket but hasn’t checked out, the you can target them with an ad designed to get them to go back. Due to automation, it can even be a reminder of the exact good that they put in their basket - or a specific special offer (if you’re an eCommerce store).
Many people retarget through Facebook, because it has more than 2 billion active users, and it’s audience network covers Facebook and Instagram, and also covers websites, banner ads, display ads and in-app advertisements, as well as optimising for mobile.
It means that if you are already doing PPC, there’s likely to be a way to retarget already within your marketing process. If you’re unsure, go with Facebook.
Another reason to use Facebook is their lookalike audience feature. If you import a custom audience - say people who actually did reach the checkout page of your website - then you can create a lookalike audience which finds people with similar demographic markers to people who already became your customers.
It’s a way to get your message in front of people already predisposed to like your product or service.
The better your PPC, the more information you can put into your social media retargeting campaign, and the more successful it will be ultimately, because it speaks to your audience directly at their level of experience with your business, where their attention already is.
Social proof
There are many benefits of social media marketing. By having links to your social media on your homepages, or even having plug ins that show your interaction with your audience, you can show to potential customers that you are active on social media.
Why does that matter?
Not only does this show that you are a business who connects with their customers, it can also create social proof that people genuinely like your products.
People believe real people on social media over advertisements.
Depending on the nature of your business, and the amount of buy in - people will search for your company and see what people say about you on social media and review sites.
Placing this evidence and qualified testimonials up front will make it more likely that people will move on to the next step in their customer journey - or point them towards positive reviews and customer experiences on third party sites that they can check out and make them more likely to return again.
Social media skills
If you are using social media properly then you know how to write a succinct message that gets your point across.
You know that you have to educate and entertain. You know that you need a sales funnel which will either attract, interest, push people into a decision or take an action. You also know what your loyal audience wants and how to appeal to them directly.
After a little experience with your social media where those things become second nature. Look at the copy you have with your PPC links, as well as the copy that you have in your normal rankings. Then make sure the links will be effective at getting people to click through to your website, and the content on your website will be more appealing to them in terms of tone and written content.
But why bother?
The skills gained in retargeting and keeping up a social media presence can have a positive benefit on all other parts of your digital marketing efforts.
Change Up Your PPC Today
As social media is something that can be added to your PPC rather than having to replace it, you can boost your PPC with social media right now.
Even if you haven’t had a great social media presence up until now, retargeting is a way that uses social media to get your message in front of customers. You don’t already have to have a strong social media following to use it.
As a bonus, if you do put up retargeting content - you can start to build a social media presence, which will later help you demonstrate your worth with social proof.
The more social media you do, the better your social media skills will be - and that has a positive impact with everything you do.
Social media is the future of marketing, so you might as well start today. What are you doing to get the most out of both your PPC and social media?