F is for Facebook in Google’s Alphabet (I bet!)

Yep…I am talking about this very specific relationship one that has been riddled with miscues and online battles of digital lines in the sand. It was last year our health care digital team launched a Google Hangout embedded inside Facebook, since that successful campaign..it has been a lot harder to pull off technologically speaking.

But I am not really thinking through the lens of how to make these digital properties talk to each other when deploying campaigns, but more of the relationship between these two audience giants when it comes to digital content marketing.

We have found a few things through evidence based testing:
1) Facebook is an awareness tool
2) Google is conversion tool

*Now…their is a caveat to this premise, we have successfully launched and deployed specific health risk assessment tools inside Facebook. This is where the user can take a risk assessment survey inside the Facebook platform allowing us to capture the user’s contact information into the healthcare organization’s CRM. Then we can attribute the user data to downstream revenue, calculating ROI for this patient acquisition initiative.

What I get really excited about…is real content marketing inside Facebook/Instagram to influence the user’s Google search, thus capturing them into the CRM. Yes…Facebook and Google work well together.

Facebook provides the audience reach and Google provides the search and pull capturing that very keyword search influenced by a campaigns keyword branding inside Facebook’s content engine. So let’s get specific.

Let’s take a video you may deploy inside Facebook for your audience to enjoy. Many people put a link in the status update hoping the person will either click the link in the copy or at the end of the video. This link many times is used to capture someone to make a purchase or sign-up for a service.

We are finding something different, the keywords used in the text of the video and the copy below will influence the Google search, so we are deploying Google Adwords to capture that search. People search to take action, so we use Facebook as the awareness tool to influence that search, branding keywords over and over again so the audience thinks of those keywords when search for that product or service.

Bottomline…we are finding Facebook has been a great way to not only make the community aware of a new product or service, but also educate and influence the audience which keywords to use when searching to make a purchasing decision.

I see this performing really well with customer testimonials where a third party shares their experience with a brand. As a part of the video and text, make the search terms available via Google Adwords very apparent in the content, creating top-of-mind awareness for those terms.

I can see the video playing with a customer sharing their experience and as they are talking, the text of those relatable terms appear in the video next to the person talking. This not only forces people to stop scrolling to engage visually, but reinforces the search terms purchased to drive the audience to specific digital property.

Bottomline, it is all about content! Yes…content is once again a key component. We can scale digital advertising buys up and down, but you have to create rich content that is engaging for the audience. Content is the equitable position here, and without any equity…you are borrowing from other tactics to influence an audience that is becoming more and more skeptical of digital advertising.