Are Search Engines Or Social Sites Better At Targeting Your Market?
Posted by Linda in Internet Marketing, Target Markets, tags: search enignes, social sites, target market, target marketingHow well you can reach your target market provides an important comparison point between search engines and social sites. If one brings more target market members to your site, then it’s better for marketing your site or blog.
This is the third in a series comparing search engines and social sites. If this is the first one you’ve come to, and you prefer to start at the beginning of the series, you can link to the first post in this series below:
Are Search Engines Or Social Sites Better For Marketing Your Site?
This post compares the ability to gather target market information from search engine and social site visitors.
Social Sites Make It Easy
To Learn About Visitors
With just a little effort, you can learn about the type of people who comprise a social site, including their language, their concerns, and their hopes. They provide this information in their profiles and in forum threads. This information makes it easier to effectively speak to them and to cater effective marketing appeals for them.
It’s More Difficult To Learn
About Search Engine Visitors
But when your visitors come from the search engines, it’s less likely that they are in ;your target market. In fact, you don’t know anything about search engine visitors, and it’s much more difficult to learn about them.
If searchers aren’t in your target market, it’s likely that they may be interested in your content, but not in purchasing anything. But if you are getting enough search visitors and can learn about them, you may be able to develop a product or select an affiliate product that my interest them.
I just learned that there is a WordPress plugin to help you address searchers directly and ask for information about them. As soon as I learn the name of the plug-in and can get a technical person to install it for me, I’ll let you know how it works.
You’ll need to get as much demographic information from your search visitors as possible to discover if your content is appropriate for them. But I believe search engine visitors are hesitant to provide information about themselves because they don’t know or trust you not to abuse their information.
You definitely don’t want to ask for their names and email addresses in the same form that you ask for their demographic information. That applies to any survey. Because if people believe you can match their responses to them, they won’t respond.
Getting Visitors From
Your Target Market
Enhances Conversion
If you don’t gather information about your visitors or if they’re not in your target market, converting them to buy from you is nearly impossible. So selecting traffic sources that make it easier for you to learn about your visitors enhances your marketing and your business profit.
As you consider the advantages and disadvantages of search engines and social sites for marketing your site. I’d appreciate you leaving a comment.
I know that I need to market more through social sites. Don’t get me wrong I’m pleased to be getting about 10,000 search visitors a month, but I need to complement search visitors with direct and referral visitors.
It’s not that I plan to stop doing SEO and rely totally on social sites, or any other means, for getting traffic. I believe both are important. But I also know it’s risky to depend too much on any one source of traffic.
However, if I were starting a new blog, I’d concentrate more on social site visitors than search engine visitors. That’s because I believe it’s easier to reach your target market through the social sites than through the search engines. What do you think?
To improve your search engine marketing, I recommend The Google Spot Web Marketing System makes it possible for a fraction of the cost of hiring an SEO company to do it for you.
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Posted 6-19-09:
Are Search Engines Or Social Sites
Better At Targeting Your Market?
Entries (RSS)
Nice post. I’ve found that in the last months social sites are really key to driving traffic. I think the highest percentage of my traffic is coming from Facebook and other online forums. But I don’ t think SEO is irrelevant either. I’m definitely more well versed in social media than I am in SEO.
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Hi Scrinvas,
I agree that social sites have their advantage. I believe the major one is targeting your market.
Thanks for visiting and for your comment.
Warmly,
Linda P. Morton
Good comment. There is however some danger when entering social sites ‘uninvited’. For example, a number of contacts of mine are concerned because of the increased number of alerts they are getting through Facebook. Based on this, one could argue that a key component to successfully marketing through social sites in the virtual world is to have a good introduction and then follow up.
Hi Ventrilo,
Thank you for this clarification. I’m sure Scrinvas appreciates it.
If I understand you correctly, you’re saying that some people are spamming the social sites. I’ve also had that experience. Too bad that some people look for the easy way to promote themselves and their sites. Their irresponsibility effects us all.
Warmly,
Linda
Hi Linda! I use both and so far most of my traffic is coming from search engines. I worked really hard on the social marketing for a while but didn’t see much in the way of results but the money I’ve invested in PPC and for the Yahoo Directory listing have brought many, many visitors. Thanks, for your post. Deb
Hi Debbie,
Thanks for telling about your experience with search and social marketing.
I’m also glad to know that PPC and Yahoo are working well for you.
Warmly,
Linda
Hi Linda,
Great post! I think social sites will definately open up a range information about target markets for organisations that, as you correctly point out, are very hard to gather from search engine click-throughs alone.
The profiling of consumers via their social media sites (such as Facebook, LinkedIn etc) will prove to be an invaluable resource for segmentation and target market analysis if organisations can gain access to this, the privacy issue still rages on here though.
I believe an integrated multi-channel strategy would probably be best for organisations to drive traffic and capture the attention of their target market whilst collecting statistics on their markets.
Very insightful!
Cheers,
Sarah
Hi Sarah,
Thanks for your relevant and detailed comment. What I like best about social sites is that they are usually well targeted to a specific type of person. What I don’t like is that they take loads of time, constant work, and don’t bring much traffic.
I belong to several small business social sites, and for one I even write a weekly post, but still get almost no traffic from it. I recently read that overall less than one percent of traffic comes from social sites, while almost half comes from search engines. That’s enough to cause me to rethink my strategy.
Warmly,
Linda