Too many organisations are siloing their digital teams, says Paul Korber. A holistic approach to social and search is now a necessity.

If you ever find yourself trying to fill a digital marketing role, you’ll come across a plethora of experts and niche specialists. More and more, we’re finding that digital marketers are being pigeonholed by their roles to focus on a single area of the digital landscape.

Notably, many organisations are thinking it’s sensible to silo their digital marketing teams, with one team allocated to paid social and another focusing on paid search. However, keeping the two functions separate can result in funnel blindness, mixed messages, inflated conversions on a last-click attribution model, and poorly allocated dollars that should be working together.

While search and social both serve a large and engaged user base, they tend to serve very different purposes along a consumer’s path to conversion, which is why many businesses opt to disconnect these two areas. However, it’s through combining search and social campaigns that marketers gain visibility into how these channels work most effectively together. Search has the power to successfully ‘pull’ consumers through queries of intent, while social is able to effectively ‘push’ messages out to highly targeted audiences.

Consequently, the effect is far greater when getting these two areas to work in tandem. In fact, our recent study involving more than 200 enterprise advertisers managing Google, Bing, and Facebook campaigns revealed that programs that adopt a dual approach unearth significantly more consumers who are more likely to convert, and also spend more per transaction.

Some of the key benefits of unifying search and social include the ability to target consumers at specific stages of the purchase funnel, time saving in management, being able to use all the data available to see a clear picture of consumers across all channels, and most importantly an increase in ROI.

As digital marketing becomes more advanced, taking a holistic approach to search and social is no longer innovative – it’s fast becoming a necessity.

A holistic approach allows you to meet a range of objectives, including:

• Increase traffic and conversions of brand terms on Google by prospecting new customers with video ads on Facebook,
• retarget non-converters from AdWords campaigns with Lead Ads or Dynamic Ads on Facebook,
• cross-sell recent AdWords converters on Facebook (we recommend targeting people within a week of conversion), and
• apply search intent profiles to Facebook audiences to retarget or cross-sell to potential customers.

These days, businesses really should be always thinking cross-channel in order to successfully maximise their ad spend. In being able to identify where a customer is located in the funnel (and what got them there), there are numerous ways marketers can maximise returns.

Paul Korber is RVP of customer success, APAC, at Marin Software.

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Further reading

• A look at where advertisers will be spending social over the next 12 months »
• I’m not who you think I am: the pitfalls of social media listening »

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