Social Media Marketing vs. Search Engine Marketing: Which Strategy Is #1?
When it comes to marketing, businesses have more options than ever before thanks to the reach of the Internet. Instead of being confined to your local town, region or even country, you can sell goods and services to millions of people around the world. Small and medium sized businesses genuinely have the chance to become big operators if everything goes well for them. As far as marketing goes, search engine marketing and social media marketing are two of the most popular strategies. Below, we will look at the advantages of each method over the other as well as discussing how to use both effectively.
Why Social Media Marketing Is Better
With social media, you have the ability to directly communicate with consumers and tend to their needs personally, something which isn’t possible with search engine marketing. Thanks to social media, you can appear to be a benevolent company with the best interests of the consumer at heart. It provides you with a greater level of credibility too as customers can see you interacting with people every single day and they know you have nowhere to hide if your products/services are not up to scratch.
Reputation management is one of the most important phrases in any company’s vocabulary when dealing with online consumers. Social media marketing allows you to quickly respond to criticism, setting things straight and keeping your reputation intact. Keeping a clean slate is essential to the future health of your company. With search engine marketing, there is little you can do to prevent negative comments appearing. Your best bet is to contact a specialist company that can write a host of positive material thus pushing the negative comments down the rankings. The trouble is, this takes time and every minute a bad review is visible on the top few pages of Google, your company potentially loses a lot of customers.
Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter have created tools to further improve customer experience. For example, Facebook allows you to create a community page where your company is discussed extensively. This gives you the opportunity to know more about your audience and vice versa.
Why Search Engine Marketing Is Better
If you don’t already have social media accounts, you are making a big mistake and have a lot of catching up to do. In contrast, you can begin search engine marketing as soon as you establish some sort of presence online. Although social media sites have hundreds of millions of users, this still pales into comparison with the number of people who actively use search engines. An estimated 90% of Internet activity begins with a search. A majority of consumers still use a major search engine like Google to find out more information on a company including product reviews.
If you are clever enough, you can create a website or webpage with targeted phrases to capture your ideal audience. The Keyword Tool that’s free from Google AdWords is a great help because it allows you to find out exactly how many people search for a particular keyword or phrase each month. You receive worldwide and local figures and can also find out how competitive the keyword is. You can then use this information to create web copy that’s search engine friendly.
Even if you can’t get into the organic search results, there’s always plan B which is to spend until you become visible! Paid search listings are not actually that expensive and they allow you to customise your appearance. Admittedly, organic searches are better but a paid search listing still gives you a considerable web presence and is far superior to the majority of paid marketing strategies.
Why Not Have Both?
It’s probably a matter of what your company actually needs at a certain point in time but you’re better off striving to utilise both marketing strategies. There is always the chance that one will not work as well as you would hope so having a back-up plan is always a good idea. Savvy entrepreneurs will look to combine the two and seek to have an equal level of traffic from each in case one falters. Besides, search engine marketing helps your social media campaign via keyword research. If you want to get your social network profile seen, you will still need to include certain keywords.
In a hypothetical scenario, if you only have enough time/money to commit to one strategy, search engine marketing is probably the better option simply because more people use search engines than social media websites and there may well be a higher conversion rate also (though this is debatable). However, if you have even a small amount of money left from your budget each month, it would be a good idea to put it towards a Facebook ad marketing campaign. A little goes a long way in the Internet marketing business when you know what you’re doing.
An article is written by Kate Willer. I like social networks, Google android, mac data recovery and psychology. I’m interested in IT services, computer upgrades, computer repair, different computer apps. Love travelling and skiing.
