ost organizations engage in both natural and paid listings to some degree, however many don’t have a huge understanding of the interaction between the two. Search should be seen as one medium and they should be managed as one to maximize return. Consultancy found that managing the medium as one can increase your budget efficiency on average by 30%. Why spend so much of your budget for paid listings if your natural listings are ranking well on Google’s first page? Integrating these 2 channels can provide benefits in different areas: • Unified reporting enables you to manage your search budget more effectively. • It allows you to identify problems and performance between paid and organic listings, and then make changes accordingly. • Risk management – as search engines change so quickly due to competition and other factors, your budget is open to fluctuation.
Managing these search channels enables you to move and alter your budget as and when you need to. • Keyword cannibalisation – In some cases your paid and organic listings will cannibalise the clicks from one another. Noticing when this is happening and where is important and can help you to achieve. • Forecasting – For a forecast to be accurate it should reflect the effects of both paid & organic searches over the other. • Method to goal – How does each medium achieve different goals? What are you using each search method to achieve?
 
Organic is usually clicked on before a paid listing, so their goals should be planned in relation to one another. • It’s important to understand how and when your paid and organic listings overlap on search pages. This will help you when creating paid adverts and allocating budgets. Paid and organic listings are separate disciplines, but both have benefits and drawbacks, it’s important to understand these and how they affect each other when planning an SEM campaign. It’s a difficult process, but shouldn’t be ignored. Another aspect, which has been added to the mix, is Social Media. “The evolving use of social media may provide advertisers with a way to improve long-term click through rate (CTR) by focusing on potential customers within their social zone of trust.” (blueglass.com) Advertisers have worked on the notion that people do business with people they know and therefore trust.
 
We associate with like-minded places online just as we do in real life. Content is crucial but marketing is still predominantly about search, content has little relevance if no one can find the website. So finding the correct place to display your message to your consumers is a vital part of your SEM campaign. Social Media Since social media networks reached an overwhelming number, advertisers had to take notice. Facebook has over 350 million users, sharing 3.5 billion pieces of media such as links, articles and videos each week, (stats compiled by Jake Hurd, econsultancy).
Having a marketing break through on a social networking site can be hugely beneficial. Consumers then engage with and encounter these adverts natively, advertising isn’t forced upon them. For example, a friend of yours ’Likes’ a particular product or brand, are you more likely to choose it for yourself? As mentioned previously, consumers like brands they trust, so are you more likely to choose the recommendation by a friend or a banner advert. It is very difficult to measure the weight of outbound links and click through rates from sites such as Facebook, so comparing this against natural and paid listings will be challenging.
However, an interesting find by Chris Copeland, CEO of GroupM Search, showed a 50% click-through-rate increase in paid search when consumers were exposed to influenced social media and paid search. GroupM’s report notes that the top reason consumers use social media in their purchase process (31% of them) is to get other people’s opinion. Search engines have picked up on this, bringing up flags such as Google’s +1 feature. Google said “Sometimes it’s easier to find exactly what you’re looking for when someone you know already found it.
” People’s tribal instinct remains strong and companies who want to increase brand awareness should be integrating the social networks. The key points to integrate social media include infrastructure – giving the consumers the ability to ’Like’ or ’+1’ something and soft-sell messaging. You should also produce content that can be added to social spaces such as blogs and also using images is important. Users interact with specific content rather than general landing pages. Integrating social media is more about engaging with consumers and brand awareness than advertising; building a brand consumers trust and are willing to ’share’ is key.