Maximizing Marketing Impact: The Key to Successful Search & Social Integration

Search and Social are crucial elements of a strong digital marketing foundation. However, a common mistake made by marketers and agencies is implementing separate strategies for these channels, which can lead to a weak foundation.  

It’s no surprise that this happens. Most internal marketing teams and agencies alike operate in department siloes: Paid vs. Organic, PPC vs. Paid Social, PR vs. Media, Brand vs. Performance. While it’s necessary to have specialists executing in each of these channels, growth is stunted in the absence of strategic cross-channel collaboration. And with the rise in social search, it has never been more important for marketers to unify their Search and Social strategy to meet consumers at the intersections of inspiration, interest, and intent.  

So, what does optimal integration look like? It takes equal parts art and science, agile teams, and creative thinking to construct pathways between these two channels.  

Cross-Channel Data Utilization

Social search offers a real-time glimpse into emerging trends whereas traditional search queries tend to be more comprehensive in nature, delving deeper into topics. 

Sharing keyword insights between search and social can strengthen content production and refine audience targeting. 

Including social trending keywords into an SEO strategy will improve a brand’s relevancy and authority on rising topics. This will generate improved organic search rankings, ultimately driving more organic traffic to site. Social search trends can also inform the build-out of keyword expansions within PPC to carve-out new white space with limited competition, yielding lower CPCs. 

Adding strong-performing keywords to social campaigns can improve audience targeting and drive quality reach. Social also offers a forum to test emerging keywords, scaling quickly while preserving search quality scores and avoiding CPC premiums.  

Cross-channel data analysis enables faster, more informed decision-making to drive quality growth. 

Unified Content Strategy

Despite marketers’ best efforts, when Organic and Paid operate in siloes there’s inevitably a breakdown. Keywords and content may be complimentary to one another, but only by unifying strategy do they become symbiotic. With Google integrating more social content into its search results, ensuring that paid social content aligns with SEO strategy is now imperative. 

Creating high-quality, keyword-rich content that resonates with target audiences will simultaneously drive organic traffic and improve the performance of paid campaigns.  

Expert-Led Coordination

At Dig & Dig, our Digital teams are staffed with paid and organic search and social specialists to orchestrate optimal integration.  

Using data-driven insights to coordinate the timing, targeting, and content for our clients’ campaigns has powered effective strategies leading to growth and impact.