Social Media Marketing Is About Branding, Not Selling
There is more proof around today that search engine marketing can be a useful branding tool. What about social media marketing? There is still a lot of doubt surrounding social media marketing and sales, particularly when it comes to measuring that all important ROI. It is difficult enough to determine the value of branding in straight monetary terms – however, that is often the real problem – not the marketing.
I know there are many businesses that will argue with the value of social media marketing and sales. However, these businesses generally deal with the here and now, not the future. Selling pizza, hamburgers or the humble old fish and chips using Twitter to spread the message is easy once you build your following. Selling cars, TVs or even books can be more difficult.
Google have undertaken a couple of studies in recent months, one with Levi’s and the second in Germany with Heineken. I won’t go into all the numbers, you can read that here at WebProNews. The bottom line is that search engine marketing does boost brand awareness.
Can you draw a line through that then to social media marketing? I know they are two different forms of marketing – however, the key is the visibility of your brand. I think you can gain some comfort from these Google test results, particularly in the manner of marketing.
For example, search marketing together with a TV campaign had positive results. Going back to the old school of optimizing eye-tracking and heat maps gave positive results; and multiple impressions (three impressions in their tests) provided much better results than single impressions.
Social media marketing is a long way from being a useful tool for winning sales. When it comes to branding, it may well be one of the best options into the future. What is needed now is to transfer these tests to social media marketing to see whether or not the same results can be achieved. It would also be interesting to see what results you could achieve by combining search marketing and social media marketing campaigns. Food for thought!
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