5 Core Ways to Integrate Paid Search and Social

This guest post by Sana Ansari, GM at our friends 3Q Accelerate, outlines five strategies that are considered key best practices for smart search and social campaigns. These integrations bring your digital marketing to the big leagues. Be sure you’re hitting all these bases with your paid search and social campaigns, or check with your ad team to make sure they are. (And yes, both 3Q and BCI offer SEM and paid social services!) Don’t miss these opportunities for engaging customers throughout the funnel and driving them back to your site. Take it away, Sana!

SEM and paid social are both performance channels with particular strengths and weaknesses; SEM captures intent where Facebook doesn’t, but Facebook can open awareness to a huge new audience that AdWords can’t reach. Used intelligently together, however, these two channels combine for a powerhouse marketing campaign.

Here are five ways to integrate your paid search and paid social campaigns for immediate results.

1. Generate Demand and Brand Awareness

To attract users at the top of the funnel, use Facebook to increase share of voice, brand engagement, and awareness. This will help generate demand. As users begin to learn about your product and services, they’ll end up going back to Google later and performing a search. You can capture and convert those with SEM.

2. Leverage Facebook for Remarketing

Let’s say we’ve been successful in getting our ad to high-intent audiences via SEM and we’ve been able to bring them to our site. However, for one reason or another, we were unable to get them to convert. We can leverage Facebook for additional scale on high-intent customers by using remarketing and getting our brand back in the eye of those visitors. We can leverage Facebook’s creative options to take another stab at convincing them (with value props, product imagery, etc.) to convert as well as sending the user to a highly relevant page to finish the job.

3. Use Facebook for Re-engagement

If you are a business where users can come and convert multiple times (think ecomm – toy stores, apparel, etc. – or services – spas, food delivery, etc.), you’ll want to use SEM to capture those high-intent users initially. Once they have made a purchase or signup and you have gotten that first-party data (email really), Facebook is a perfect avenue to remind these customers later on about great deals, new products/offerings, etc., to lure them back in for new purchases. Facebook allows you to upload first-party data to narrow out your customer base within their members and allow you to show your ads directly to that audience.

4. Leverage Lookalike Audiences

In the same vein as above, there are a bunch of good options in Facebook to really leverage our first-party data to help us capture incremental unique users. Let’s say we have been able to build up a great customer base via SEM. However, often there’s a limited number of people searching for our product/service, and we want to venture out to get our offering to more audiences.

A great way to do this in an efficient manner is to take our customer list (ideally segmenting them out into smaller lists of audiences with a similarity – for example, high lifetime value/LTV, medium LTV, and low LTV) and upload that into Facebook, essentially creating website custom audiences. From those website custom audiences, we can then use Facebook’s lookalike technology to find additional audiences that show characteristics/traits very similar to our customer base.

5. Go after Your Competitors

Double up on your competition by going after audiences who like competitors in Facebook – target them specifically on Facebook and bid on competitor terms in SEM. If we continue to get our brand in front of these audiences, they’ll become familiar with our name, and with the right ads we should be able to capture enough interest to bring them onto our site via either Facebook or SEM.

Have you developed any other ways to use Facebook and SEM campaigns together, replicating successful messaging, for example? Leave a comment!

If you enjoyed reading this post, then be sure to check out our How to Improve Your Social Media Strategy article too!

Sana Ansari, General Manager of 3Q Accelerate, has worked in digital marketing since 2009. Sana's expertise in SEM, the Google Display Network, landing page optimization, copy and creative optimization, remarketing, and driving lead quality has been fueled by a data-centric methodology reinforced in all of her team members. In her time at 3Q, she has been responsible for driving some of the agency's greatest success stories, taking companies with limited budgets and big ideas and turning them into names familiar across the country. Sana graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering from UC Davis and has two daughters.

See Sana's author page for links to connect on social media.