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The old model of communication (sender -> receiver) doesn’t really cut it anymore, especially with the ubiquity of social media in our digital world. Your search marketing efforts shouldn’t be any different. Allowing your search ads to be more interactive for consumers is a great way to increase engagement with your paid search campaigns, and at the same time, shows your potential customers that you “get it.” By adding game-like elements or social tie-ins to your search ads, your prospects will feel the need to click through and see what you have to offer.
Interacting with customers on their own turf is incredibly important for successful campaigns and one of the ways you can do that is by making your search ads more shareable or connected to your brand’s social media presence whether it’s an AdWords extension for Google+ or having your ad direct consumers to an e-commerce focused Facebook page.
Outgoing traffic for Yahoo! Search, as seen below, paints an interesting picture of the search engine’s users. Looking at site destinations can help to identify trends in consumer behavior in regards to where search engine users are going more frequently—whether through paid or organic search. Not shown below, #12 on the top growing list is the massively popular, up-and-coming social website Pinterest.com.
No matter which search engine your campaign is running on, incorporating social elements into your advertising remains critical. You may even consider focusing on Pinterest while the network is still young – it could be invaluable to your bottom line. Creating more social search ads will help support the strength of your campaigns across channels and organically increase the number of social search results from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+.
In a perfect world, all your marketing efforts should intertwine and support each other. Make it happen! Check out the first edition of Compete’s State of Search report to find out more about how you can optimize your search marketing campaigns to work well with all your online marketing assets.
