Welcome to a two-part series of what to expect in Social Pay Per Click (PPC) and Targeting in 2016 and how you can use it to attract more customers and revenue to you business in 2016.
If you are an ardent reader of the Nativedge blog, you will recall that we were fortunate to have an interview with Larry Kim, Founder of Wordstream and one of the leading experts in the digital marketing space, back in October of this year. You can read the full interview here.
In this two-part series, I will be telling you more about a very wonderful insight that Larry Kim shared with us on Nativedge’s Techsuccess Interview series. Below is the excerpt from the interview:
What are the two big things that are working in Social Media Marketing today?
“Hands down, it’s social PPC ads and super precise targeting. On their own, social ads have exploded and proven incredibly effective at promoting and amplifying content, but it’s the targeting capabilities that give them real commercial value.
I’m a huge advocate of using new social ad formats to your advantage basically, you want to beat your competitors to the punch by doing new and different things that will help you stand out and increase engagement.
Another of my favorite social ads hacks is to test your content out on Twitter organically first, then only promote your most engaging stuff. This helps maximize your Quality Scores and increase engagement while keeping your costs low.
Both Facebook and Twitter are now partnering with third-party, offline data providers that have a ton of real-world data purchasing behaviour, net worth, credit card habits and more. The social ad networks match their user profiles with the offline behavioural data, allowing you to get crazy specific with your targeting.
The real power is in layering these insights over demographics information and your Custom Audiences (on Facebook) or Tailored Audiences (on Twitter).”
There you have it, pay-per-click (PPC) ads and precise targeting are at the forefront of shaping social media marketing for businesses in the foreseeable future. Yeh! I know you’d be thinking and saying ‘Come on Khalid why and how are they going to shape digital marketing.’
So let me tell you why first:
Paid search, or pay-per-click (PPC), is an important element for many digital marketers, and though effective, it is significantly more powerful when used with other marketing strategies, particularly those that are less focused on direct-response objectives.
That’s because audiences are more likely to respond to marketing messages if they see the same message across multiple channels.
Although many marketing strategies can work well together, this article will focus on how paid search can work in conjunction with targeting to drive conversions. Using both as part of a coordinated strategy will boost marketing performance overall while amplifying the effectiveness of each tactic.
Larry Kim goes into more specifics about social PPC and targeting in his post “3 Incredible Social PPC Hacks for Crazy Engagement & ROI”
The first of which is :
- Pick Your Winners & Promote Them Like Crazy
This involves carefully selecting the right content you want to promote. When you notice that the content you promote isn’t getting enough engagement, perhaps you need try another approach.
Larry Kim recommends holistically testing out an idea on your social channels to see how it resonates with your audience before you commit yourself to it.
A good way to achieve this is to use the analytic tools of Facebook and Twitter. You can then monitor the engagement levels of an update you have posted. If the engagement levels are good, then that’s an opportunity to for you to promote the post.
Using the organic performance of the post as an indicator will give you insight into how the post will perform if it is promoted.
The higher the engagement levels of the post, the lower your cost per engagement. That is to say, the more engaging the post is, the more it spreads across social media beyond the clicks you’ve paid for.
So you can monitor the organic performance of an update you’ve posted. The moment you notice drops in engagement, you can extend its organic life by promoting it thus continuing a cycle.
- Smarter targeting
Larry Kim outlines two ways to generate interest in your social content
- Content with vivid imagery or thought provoking headlines.
- Putting your content in front of the right people.
When creating an ad, it is important that the right people see it otherwise, you would have wasted your money.
Facebook and Twitter have become even more precise with their targeting by partnering with third party data companies. These companies have vast amounts of data on consumer behaviour preferences.
Social ad platforms leverage the information from both the data companies and social networks to help you target very specific customers. What this means is that you will be creating ads specifically targeted to the consumers that matter the most.
In my opinion, nothing beats paid search as a pure direct response tool. It is one of the best ways to get in-market consumers to your website; and when paired with a strong search engine optimization (SEO) strategy, it can be a powerful tool for generating brand awareness and initial demand.
Together, they can effectively drive new, highly relevant traffic to your site.
However, paid search should not be the end-all be-all of a digital marketing strategy. Driving traffic is crucial, but it isn’t the end of the story. Unless your conversion rate is 100%, you have room for improvement: On average, only around 5% of website visitors convert on their first visit.
And that’s where retargeting comes in.
Paid Search Plus Retargeting
Retargeting involves serving display ads to people who have already interacted with your business online. At its core, retargeting allows you to serve ads to people who have visited your website.
Using retargeting, you can stay in touch with people who have left your site without converting, which, as already noted, constitutes the lion share of a typical site’s traffic.
Bounced traffic consists of people who have raised a hand to express interest in what you do. They probably will not convert right away, but they may eventually, and so they should definitely not be ignored.
Consistency Across Channels
Savvy search marketers will send different search campaigns to dedicated landing pages that correspond well to those campaigns.
For example, let’s say you’re a retailer who sells both golf and tennis equipment. You have two separate PPC campaigns, one for golf-related keywords and one for tennis-related keywords. Those campaigns lead to two different landing pages, one focused on golf and the other on tennis.
You can place two retargeting ads on your respective landing pages and launch two display campaigns, Users who reach the golf landing page will see golf-related retargeted ads and users who land on the tennis page will see tennis-focused retargeted ads.
This relatively simple example demonstrates how search campaigns and retargeting can work together to keep the most relevant message in front of the most appropriate audience, but product differentiation is certainly not the only use case for PPC and retargeting hybrid strategies.
For B2B companies that need to stay in front of potential customers during a long purchase cycle, retargeting ads can feature the same product features or benefits reflected in landing pages, and campaigns can be structured to serve different marketing messages as users progress down the conversion funnel.
Retargeted campaigns can bring users directly back to your site via clicks on ads, direct input into their browser, or via a search engine. The more likely case is direct return or branded search.
According to one study from Stanford University, untargeted display campaigns increased organic searches for relevant keywords 5% -25%. A targeted ad campaign can be expected to increase search behavior even more dramatically. In this instance, your SEO and paid search proficiency become crucial yet again for bringing users back to your site.
Conclusion
Working in tandem, paid search and retargeting can be an incredibly valuable toolset that can help you get the right people to their site, and bring them back after they’ve left.
If you really want to give your self a head start in 2016, social PPC?and targeting is clearly the way to go. i would love to hear your thoughts in the comments box below.
Image credits
Feature Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net
In Post Images: searchengineland.com
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