Through­out the path-to-pur­chase, con­sumers seam­less­ly move across chan­nels and devices until they reach the moment, that zero moment of truth, to make a pur­chase or con­vert. As inte­grat­ed and flu­id as the expe­ri­ence is for the con­sumer, behind the scenes, cross-chan­nel coor­di­na­tion can be a chal­lenge for mar­keters.

Cross-chan­nel mar­ket­ing by nature is cus­tomer-cen­tric and focus­es on how the right media mix can impact and influ­ence con­sumers to take action. Mar­keters must strike a bal­ance of the clas­sic push and pull rela­tion­ship of mar­ket­ing tac­tics to reach and engage indi­vid­u­als, and do so at scale.

It’s rel­a­tive­ly easy to under­stand that var­i­ous adver­tis­ing chan­nels push and pull to influ­ence con­sumers and dri­ve action. The hard part is putting togeth­er the right mix of strate­gies and tac­tics to achieve the mar­ket­ing math of 1+1=3.

Search and social rep­re­sent two chan­nels ripe with oppor­tu­ni­ty to begin build­ing this cross-chan­nel syn­er­gy.

Why Search + Social: The Opportunities

Consumers Are Receptive To Search & Social

Search engines and social net­works have done a great job of build­ing equi­ty and trust with con­sumers – search because of its trans­paren­cy and con­trol and social for its pow­er­ful per­son­al net­works.

A Nielsen study from last year revealed that near­ly half (48 per­cent) of glob­al online con­sumers sur­veyed trust ads deliv­ered via search and social.

Even more pow­er­ful, 57 per­cent of respon­dents cit­ed that they some­times or always take action from search ads and 55 per­cent indi­cat­ed as such for social ads, con­firm­ing the grow­ing influ­ence of these two adver­tis­ing media.

In terms of time spent, “social net­work­ing” and “search­ing” rank as two of the top con­sumer activ­i­ties online. Fur­ther­more, 91 per­cent of online adults say they use search engines and 74 per­cent engage in social media.

For mar­keters try­ing to reach their tar­get audi­ences, these two chan­nels elic­it both strong intent and inter­ac­tion sig­nals with con­sumers.

Search & Social Account For More Than Half Of Digital Marketing Budgets

This year, eMar­keter projects that U.S. mar­keters will spend more than $16 bil­lion and $6 bil­lion on search and social respec­tive­ly, account­ing for more than 54 per­cent of the total pro­ject­ed online spend. In fact, more than 40 per­cent of busi­ness lead­ers planned to increase bud­gets across social and search in 2014, with only email as the only chan­nel edg­ing out the two.

Giv­en the increased invest­ment, if mar­keters can tru­ly mas­ter the com­bined pow­er of these two chan­nels, they will have a huge impact on the entire­ty of their dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing pro­grams and result­ing out­comes.

Search & Social Work Better Together

In 2009, GroupM released one of the first stud­ies that helped demon­strate the inter­play of search and social. Among its find­ings, the study cit­ed a “50 per­cent click-through-rate (CTR) increase in paid search when con­sumers were exposed to influ­enced social media and paid search.”

Since then, mar­keters have come to learn more about the added val­ue these two chan­nels bring to one anoth­er as addi­tion­al research has aid­ed in quan­ti­fy­ing the impact an inte­grat­ed approach has on sales and cost per acqui­si­tion. An analy­sis of a U.S. retail­er’s search and social cam­paigns found that audi­ence seg­ments exposed to both search and Face­book gen­er­at­ed a return on ad spend 30 per­cent high­er than the search-only group.

When run in con­junc­tion, search and social can help each oth­er work hard­er and per­form bet­ter. Results from a sim­i­lar study for lead­ing glob­al infor­ma­tion ser­vices provider, Exper­ian, revealed a 19 per­cent aver­age increase in total con­ver­sions among indi­vid­u­als who saw both Face­book adver­tis­ing and paid search adver­tis­ing com­pared to those who saw paid search adver­tis­ing alone.

From a con­sumer per­spec­tive, con­ver­sion deci­sions typ­i­cal­ly aren’t made in an instant, so cross-chan­nel rein­force­ment helps move peo­ple down the path. As tech­nol­o­gy inno­vates to unlock ways to lever­age search intent data to bet­ter inform social tar­get­ing, not only do adver­tis­ers ben­e­fit from more data-dri­ven tar­get­ing and opti­miza­tion across chan­nels, but con­sumers also receive a more tai­lored and rel­e­vant ad expe­ri­ence that can pos­i­tive­ly influ­ence con­ver­sion deci­sions.

Cross-Channel Challenges: The Obstacles

A recent Econ­sul­tan­cy report not­ed that while 67 per­cent of client-side mar­keters find cross-chan­nel mar­ket­ing to be a top pri­or­i­ty, 62 per­cent of respon­dents agreed that their mes­sag­ing, exe­cu­tion, and deliv­ery strate­gies weren’t actu­al­ly aligned across touch points.

Mar­ket­ing orga­ni­za­tions that are siloed can be held back by their infra­struc­ture and typ­i­cal­ly aren’t nim­ble enough to make coor­di­nat­ed changes across chan­nels when need­ed to best take advan­tage of mar­kets that are con­stant­ly in fluc­tu­a­tion. In fact, orga­ni­za­tion­al struc­ture was one of the top bar­ri­ers to cross-chan­nel mar­ket­ing that glob­al mar­keters iden­ti­fied, along with tech­nol­o­gy and bud­get lim­i­ta­tions.

The fact still remains that mar­keters are lever­ag­ing an increas­ing num­ber of vehi­cles to reach their audi­ences, cit­ing on aver­age 13 dif­fer­ent chan­nels in their mar­ket­ing mix.

Cross-chan­nel coor­di­na­tion is becom­ing more of a neces­si­ty, rather than a lux­u­ry, giv­en the mobil­i­ty of your cus­tomers across the web. Search and social are two chan­nels where you can begin to take the steps toward true cross-chan­nel coor­di­na­tion.

Make the case inter­nal­ly to bet­ter align teams and strate­gies; devel­op a plan with short-term goals to test out your hypoth­e­sis; and, prove that 1+1 can equal 3.

Have you seen great exam­ples of com­pa­nies mak­ing the most of search and social to influ­ence con­sumers? What obsta­cles has your brand over­come?