If your business relies on the Internet to function, there are two primary ways you can drive organic traffic to your web platform: creating social media pages for your business and try to gain followers and market through the page and trying to rank higher for certain key phrases on Google and Bing and trying to make sure people can find you quickly when they search for products/services you provide.
While ideally, you’ll try to focus both on social media and search engines, oftentimes, you have limited resources and need to choose only one. So, which one should you focus on? This article will help you answer this question
Demographics
The most important data point that can help you make that decision is the demographics of your clients. If you have a largely tech-savvy middle-aged client base, it is hardly likely they’ll be using social media to keep up with products and services they care about, and they’ll much rather have to deal with a professional website that’s search engine optimized.
On the other hand, if you are targetting a largely old and retired demographic that spends the better part of the day on social media sharing conspiracy theories, you’ll have an easier time getting to them by creating social media accounts and trying to grab their attention.
This is why you need to do your research and collect as much data on your clients as possible, including age, income levels, and if possible, even hobbies and habits. This data will help you make the right decision.
Type of Products/Services You Provide
The types of products and services you provide is another dimension that you need to consider before choosing a route before the other. There are things that make social media more suitable than search engines:
- Sharability: if you are in the business of creating unique and stylish products that people would want to post pictures of and share on Facebook and Twitter, you need to have a social media account. You can leverage these qualities to go viral and become really successful.
- The qualities of your product and services: it is really hard to make a piece of code appear desirable. If you’re running a web development agency, you’ll probably not gain a lot of clients by creating a social media account. On the other hand, if you’re a tourist service, you’ll be able to post a lot of attractive photos that encourage your followers to ask for your services.
Budget
The last thing you need to consider before making your decision is the amount of money you’re willing to spend. SEO doesn’t have an immediate effect on your sales and requires long term commitment. On the other hand, you can create social media accounts for free and running ads for them isn’t that expensive. You need to consider the short-term and long-term impacts of both strategies on your budget and come up with an effective compromise.
If balancing the budget is too hard for you, you can always hire an agency to do all the hard work and manage your marketing campaigns. If you want to do it yourself, regardless, but don’t have the necessary technical expertise, you can always undergo a social media training program online in Brussels in one of the most widely acclaimed SEO agencies to hone your skills.
