Cross-Channel Coordination: Search & Social Integration Opportunities, Obstacles

Search and social elic­it strong intent and inter­ac­tion sig­nals with con­sumers.

Kelly Wrather By Kelly Wrather from Kenshoo. Join the discussion » 0 comments

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?

Kelly Wrather

Written by Kelly Wrather

Sr. Manager, Content Marketing, Kenshoo

Kelly Wrather is the Senior Manager of Content Marketing at Kenshoo, the global leader in predictive marketing software. Prior to joining Kenshoo, she helped launch the Accuen brand, the trading desk of Omnicom Media Group. A graduate of Boston University's College of Communication, Wrather's previous experience also spans social media and online community management.

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