Search vs Social Algorithms in Marketing: What’s the Difference? And Why Does It Matter?
Have you ever had a nightmare about algorithms?
The online space is a wild west of constructing marketing strategies that rely on other people’s decisions: Create a 3-month Instagram plan, only for Instagram to make a core change. Plan out your SEO tasks only for Google to make an algorithm update.
How do you score goals when the posts are always moving?
In this post, we’re going to take a step back and look at the core purpose behind these platforms so that we can feel confident about how we use them in our own businesses.
1. Search Marketing: Meeting Intent
Search marketing is all about meeting your potential customers at the point of their expressed need or desire - and the core principles of search engines are to connect people with the solution to their problem.
If someone goes to Google and types in “how to make bread”, then it's in Google's best interest to present them with the best bread-making tutorial, or the best blog post, or the best recipe.
The search engine is doing its job most effectively when they present the exact thing that the user was looking for.
Why focus on search marketing?
When we optimise our websites and content for search visibility, we are making sure that search engine algorithms understand exactly how we help our customers.
By investing time in SEO, you're creating a long-term traffic asset for your business. Once your keyword-optimised, high quality content is out there, it will attract visitors to your website for months and years to come.
2. Social Media Marketing: Building Connections
Social media marketing is not really about selling.
It's about storytelling, sharing, and building relationships.
The purpose of social media is to connect people and be social and sociable. When we show up on a social media channel and we’re selling, we’re interrupting the purpose that the channel was originally created for.
As business owners, if we’re relying too heavily on social media channels for traffic and customers, we are choosing the hardest path, because we’re actively working against the designed purpose of the algorithm and trying to take people away from the social space and into our own commercial space.
Using social media to show off our business’s personality, and connect with our audiences in conversation and content works with the social algorithm, because it focuses on community and engagement.
You can answer questions, share behind-the-scenes content, and create a loyal community around your brand. You can humanise your business and make meaningful connections, you can interact with your customers and get insights and feedback in real time from the real humans who are interested in your brand.
3. The Key Differences Between Search and Social: Intent vs. Interruption
Intent marketing meets potential customers at the exact moment they express a need or desire.
They are actively searching for information or products, and your content appears as a helpful solution, so it feels a lot less intrusive and much more like you’re adding value.
Because of this, you usually see higher sales conversion rates from organic search.
Interruption marketing, on the other hand, is about catching people's attention while they're doing something else.
Think TV ads during your favourite show or sponsored posts and ads in your social media feed. It's about making people stop and look at your content, even if they weren't actively searching for it.
While it can be very effective, it relies on capturing attention in an impactful enough way that you can distract the person away from what they were doing and over to your business.
If you think about TV and streaming adverts, it can also feel intrusive or annoying.
4. The Pros & Cons of Intent & Interruption Marketing
Intent Marketing:
Pros: Highly targeted to your ideal customer, higher conversion rates, long-term results, cost-effective over time.
Cons: Takes time to create content, takes time to see results.
Interruption Marketing:
Pros: Immediate visibility, quicker to create content, more creativity for your message and format, can reach a broad audience quickly.
Cons: Short lifespan for your content, can be seen as intrusive, can be expensive, often requires ongoing investment of time or money.
5. Combining Both: Creating a Healthy Marketing Strategy
The magic happens when you combine search and social media marketing - because you’re creating long-term, customer-focused content that attracts visitors over time with your search marketing, and short-term, relationship-building content with your social media channels that engages your audience.
When we approach social media channels knowing that we can connect with our audience there and focus on building relationships, it really takes the pressure out of feeling like a sales person every time you need to create a social media post.
Here’s the approach I recommend taking:
1. Understand Your Audience: You need to know who your customers are, and who your content is for - what do they want or need? Understanding your ideal audience will help you create content that resonates.
2. Create Your Search Strategy: Focus on creating high-quality, optimised content that addresses your audience's needs. This will serve as the foundation of your marketing strategy.
3. Repurpose for Your Social Content: Take that valuable content and adapt it for social media formats, whether it’s captions, carousels, or videos - you already know it’s relevant to your customers, because you created it for your long-term strategy. So now, you can create short term conversations with it.
Avada kedavra, algorithms!
When we use the marketing channels and their underlying algorithms in line with their designed purpose, we will find it much easier to get visibility for our businesses on them.
Search marketing is about meeting your customers at the point of their expressed need. Social marketing is about building connections and relationships. Sure, we can do those things using other channels too, but that’s almost always when we end up on the struggle bus.