Social Media Advertising and Marketing
Social media networks can be leveraged into powerful SEO and lead generation tools by providing your website with free, highly reputable, and trafficked site links and backlinks. When properly leveraged, they help firms to create awareness and interest with prospective clients and foster engagement with existing ones.
By regularly sharing links to your website on your firm’s social media pages, you are helping your website’s search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.
Google and other search engines review quality links to help determine how reputable your website is and therefore how high it should rank in organic search rankings for important keywords. They also place value on the regular ongoing addition of new links which demonstrates that your website is still relevant and generating new content. The more links that you can get from high ranking sources including major social media platforms, the better your website will rank online in search results.
When combined with ongoing content creation, your social media channels can play a big role in your larger content marketing strategy. Depending on your specific market and the types of clients you are pursuing, your firm will want to consider establishing a meaningful presence on many of the following social channels:
- YouTube
- Google My Business
- TikTok
Social media marketing can be broadly divided between organic social media in the form of unpaid posts and paid social media in the form of advertisements.
Organic Social Media: Inbound Marketing
With the need to focus on growing quality website traffic and converting leads into clients, our social media philosophy is built on the tenets of inbound marketing. Inbound marketing is the use of content marketing, social media marketing, and search engine optimization to draw prospects to your firm, its people, and its services. By creating and sharing content that appeals to potential clients, inbound marketing attracts qualified prospects and can help your firm to build trust and credibility in your market and beyond.
We recommend creating a social media plan designed to promote consistent activity across all of your firm’s social media channels. This can be conservative at first and grow over time as interest and content allow. We can work with you to create an editorial calendar for promoting your firm’s valuable blog posts and news content to social media on a regular ongoing basis, as well as share timely and newsworthy content suggestions for your firm’s professionals to write new blog posts and news stories.
With regard to social media, you ideally want to engage your audiences so that they share and favourite your content with their networks, thereby referring or marketing your firm organically on your behalf. In that process, your firm should be actively cultivating a following, starting with all professionals at the firm helping to connect with others they know, related to their profession or not.
When you engage with clients and prospective clients on social media, you want to ensure your posts aren’t lost in their feeds. We design social media templates that you can manage internally while ensuring you stay on-brand and look professional with each post. These templates can be created for all of your social media platforms and be customized to promote your firm’s awards, news, blogs, events, and hiring announcements.
Paid Social Media: Social Media Advertising
Social media advertising offers an entirely different way of reaching audiences online. Where the reach of a social media post can often be limited to existing followers and people searching for specific #hashtags, social media ad campaigns can help you to reach a larger audience of users based on a wide range of targeting options. Social media ads are optimized to focus on specific goals including increasing conversions (lead generation), clicks (traffic generation), impressions (awareness generation), or social media followers (audience generation).
Advertising on social media offers many benefits over more traditional advertising methods. There are no minimum ad costs and no contracts, meaning small budgets can still generate results and campaigns can be edited or cancelled anytime. They are also measurable; these channels provide marketers with metrics that can help to determine which ads and strategies have worked best, which ones need improvement, and what changes will likely lead to that improvement.
Each social media channel caters to a different online audience, making it essential that advertisers select the correct one(s) for their ads. Cubicle Fugitive is experienced at advertising on the following social media channels:
- LinkedIn: LinkedIn ads and sponsored content can be targeted to professionals by industry and job title (among other audience criteria), which makes this a valuable channel for promoting business-to-business (B2B) professional services directly to key decision-makers.
- Facebook & Instagram: For consumer-targeted awareness campaigns, Facebook ads are a great option. This ad platform allows advertisers to reach Facebook’s large audience of 190 million Americans and 21 million Canadians as well as Instagram’s growing audience of 120 million Americans and 13 million Canadians together in one place. [1],[2]Ads display in many visually attractive formats that can be targeted to audience segments based on demographics, interests, location, and more.
- Twitter: Twitter offers objective-based campaigns that help to ensure that ads get served consistently and strategically to consumers. What it may lack in targeting capabilities is offset by generally cheaper costs, making it a go-to advertising option for broadly targeted campaigns.
- YouTube: See Google Ads Display Network Ads.
Beyond what we’ve listed above, Cubicle Fugitive is also happy to discuss social media marketing options across any other social media platform. We work with you to determine which social media channels are right for you to generate the best results against your goals with the most efficient return on investment (ROI). We also provide ongoing maintenance, optimization, and reporting to ensure you stay competitive in the evolving digital marketplace.
[1] Statista. “Leading countries based on number of Facebook users as of January 2020.” https://www.statista.com/statistics/268136/top-15-countries-based-on-number-of-facebook-users/ Retrieved May2020.
[2] Statista. “Leading countries based on number of Instagram users as of January 2020.” https://www.statista.com/statistics/578364/countries-with-most-instagram-users/ Retrieved May 2020.