Do you allocate more time to social media marketing or to SEO? While you want to do both, your time and budget are limited so you may need to decide where to concentrate most of your effort. When it comes to strategic marketing, there is no denying the importance of SEO but with the extent to which consumers socialize online, social media marketing can be the key to your success.
The underlying purpose
The right SEO strategies increase your visibility in search engines and bring traffic to your website so you can provide people with the information they’re searching for. Social media marketing allows you to effectively create more brand awareness, develop relationships with consumers and win their trust. Your established social presence will drive consumers to your website.
Many of your employees probably already use social media platforms and so it makes sense to empower them to share your content. This is called employee advocacy and your employees can become your most reliable brand advocates. Using Clear View Social’s employee advocacy software automates the process and makes sharing easy.
Identifying a target audience
You need to know your target audience to inform your SEO and social media marketing strategies. How do you go about identifying your target audience?
When planning your SEO strategies, you will research and identify buyer personas based on the data you collect. You will keep their search queries in mind when formulating your SEO strategies.
Social media marketing starts with identifying the demographics using each platform. You will focus your attention on the platforms your target audience uses the most.
The type of content
SEO focuses on giving your target audience the best possible information to answer their questions based on research. Comprehensive, long-form posts are most likely to rank at the top of the search results. If you want the content to outperform the competition, it can take time to compose it.
Social media marketing makes use of the type of content that engages consumers and elicits emotion. Visuals and short-form content works best for social media marketing. You need to constantly be aware of what’s happening on social media platforms to know what type of short-form content performs best.
Strategies and plans
SEO is basically focusing on optimizing your website for search engines. If you manage to reach top rankings, this can drive a significant amount of traffic to your website over time. However, it can be difficult to reach those top rankings. If you manage to reach those top ranks, you will continue to get a steady flow of traffic as long as you stay there.
Social media provides a powerful way to reach your audience in new ways. You need to plan how to use it if you want to focus on important goals like building brand awareness, improving engaging and driving conversions.
You can create opportunities to interact with your target audiences and receive instant feedback. You can boost your brand image by posting shareable content and identifying ways to generate engagement. It also allows you to work with influencers and others who will promote your content for you.
Measuring results
To achieve success using SEO strategies requires patience. It takes time to index content on search engines. You will only gain credibility after some time and it can be difficult to reach high rankings in the search engines due to all the competition. You need to constantly measure your results, such as your traffic and click-through rate.
With social media marketing, you can quickly see what is working and where you need to make adjustments. It is easy to track levels of engagement, such as likes, comments and shares.