SEO vs Social Media. What's Better for Crypto Marketing? | Ep. 37

Ty Smith0:12

Welcome to another episode of the Crypto Marketing Podcast. I'm Ty Smith. Today we're going to discuss the differences between SEO and social media as part of a crypto marketing plan. So we're going to go into the differences in the maintenance requirements of each strategy, the costs associated with each, the differences in the type of interaction that each strategy generates from users, and then we'll go into a little bit how to determine which of the two strategies is right for you. Hopefully by the end of this episode you'll have some more information to make a more informed decision as to where your marketing resources should be dedicated.

Ty Smith0:49

So first let's start with why SEO and social media. We've done episodes for each of these at much more length that you can definitely reference, but the basic bullet point list of why SEO and social media are great fits for crypto brands is, one, that they're owned channels, meaning there's not too much of a risk of being deplatformed. That's a little bit more true for SEO than it is for social media, but you can kind of hedge yourself on the side of social media deplatforming by making your approach omni-channel, getting involved on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Telegram, whatever it is.

Ty Smith1:25

Point two is that they're very scalable. So both of them have a little bit of a kind of just get the ball rolling phase where you don't see a whole lot of results, but once you've passed that point, it's very easy to kind of fan the flames and extract more value out of both social media and organic traffic from SEO. Point three is that they're relatively inexpensive. So rather than go out and buying a ton of paid ads on CoinMarketCap or whatever it might be, a podcast, you really just have to invest in really having capable people on your team that are able to successfully deliver on the side of SEO and social media. You can do it yourself also if you're kind of a jack of all trades, and the other expense is really just software.

Ty Smith2:05

And point four, which is the most important point, is that both of these are proven to work for crypto audiences. So crypto audiences, just like everyone else, use Google to find information they're looking for, and the crypto audience especially uses Twitter and social media a ton. So you'll definitely be reaching the right audience by implementing either one of these strategies. All right, so let's go into maintenance requirements of each. So what do I mean by maintenance requirements? Maintenance requirements in the context of this means basically how much do you have to be putting into either one of these strategies on like an ongoing basis.

Ty Smith2:42

So with SEO, for example, it's pretty, I don't want to say set and forget because you do have to do a little of like pruning of content and maintenance of content, but once you have content up, like a blog post, for example, or you have your website designed in a way that's ranking well, you really don't have to do too much. You can kind of leave it. You can make periodic updates. What we do at Coinbound is every three months we'll go back and refresh old content, as well as we're constantly obviously putting out new content. For social media, the difference there is that it requires constant input.

Ty Smith3:16

So if you are focusing on building out like a really robust, powerful Twitter strategy, you have to realize that you're not just signing up for Twitter being your strategy for a month. You're making a long-term decision that's going to require someone constantly putting out content every single day. We've done another episode on how frequently you should be tweeting. To save you a click, it's multiple times a day, every single day, over a period of years. That said, it's a big time commitment, but it works.

Ty Smith3:48

Costs. So costs with social is basically free. I'm going to reference specifically to Twitter in a lot of this conversation just because that's really where the most value is for crypto. But the cost of, obviously, it's free to start a Twitter account, it's free to post tweets. The only real expenses that you have is, again, if you're hiring someone like a copywriter or a social media manager who's going to be doing the content for you, that's a cost, as well as the softwares. So we use Sprout Social, also HubSpot is great, Buffer is great. All those have a monthly cost. They range quite a bit from like $20 to some are $1,000. TweetDeck is one that's free, but in general, that's another cost that you should be prepared for. Again, though, still relative to everything else in the marketing world, it's relatively inexpensive.

Ty Smith4:41

SEO, on the other hand, still inexpensive compared to most options, but more expensive than social media. Content production for SEO purposes is much more long-form, and if you're a business owner, it's probably not in your best interest to be writing all the content yourself. Maybe in the beginning it is, but as you get more in the CEO role and can delegate, then I definitely recommend getting qualified content writers to be creating the content for you. It's not cheap. You can expect a good writer could be $100, $200, $300, $500 per article. And then the other expense associated with SEO is link building, which can range quite a bit as well, but it's just again another expense that you don't have to deal with in the social media world that you do in the SEO world.

Ty Smith5:34

All right, so next point I want to touch on is the difference in how visitors or new users or prospects, whatever you want to call them, how whatever your target audience is is interacting with your content. So it's important to, I guess, understand that as humans we're not that complex. I suppose we are in some senses, but in many ways we're also pretty simple and predictable. And one perfect example which ties in with this conversation is the concept of social validity and social proof. You're walking in the park, you see a crowd gathered, you walk over, you have no idea what they're looking at, you have no idea if it's something that's at all interesting to you, but because there's a crowd gathered around it, you think it's probably something at least worth checking out. That same concept applies to social media and just digital presence in general.

Ty Smith6:30

When you have focus of your resources on social media, the content that you're creating is driving interactions with your brand or your name in a public manner. So when someone likes or comments on or retweets, every one of those interactions is done in public and builds a little bit of more authority behind your name, which is great, especially if you're trying to build thought leadership in the space or any space. On the other side of that, SEO, you can have a blog or a site that generates thousands, hundreds of thousands of clicks per day, but those people that are on your site that are interacting with your content online aren't doing it in the eyes of others. So they have no idea if what they're looking at is reputable. It doesn't really do much as far as building thought leadership. It definitely serves its purpose, which we can go into soon, but in the context of public versus isolated engagement, SEO is isolated engagement.

Ty Smith7:29

We touched on some differences between SEO and social media and obviously some of the benefits of each. There are some similarities, the main ones being that both of them are very data-driven, maybe even maybe SEO a little bit more than social media, but both of them are very easy to understand sort of what the return on your money is being spent on either one, especially if you can set up things like Bitly to track link clicks and use Google Analytics to see how many organic traffic users are converting. So if you're a data person like I am and like most of the Coinbound team is, then you'll love both because you can justify basically everything that you do and kind of measure your success and slowly get better and better based on that data.

Ty Smith8:12

Another similarity is kind of a negative, but still just something that really applies to almost everything in marketing that's worthwhile, which is that it takes a little while to get started to the point where it's successful. And successful can mean something different to everyone, but in general, when you first start out a Twitter account or social media account or you just get started with doing SEO on your site, you're not going to see a whole lot usually for a period of months at least, sometimes longer. SEO, I'd put that timeline probably at least a year. So that's another similarity is just it's very long to get started to a point that it's successful, but once once you have the ball rolling, it's fantastic.

Ty Smith8:53

So to let's discuss sort of what is the ways to determine whether SEO or social media are a better use of your time or a better pick for you. And the answer to that is really going to depend on like everything else in marketing, where you are as a company. Are you just starting out? Are you really established? What is the product that you're selling or service that you're selling? What is a successful engagement from a visitor or client or prospect? And all those things go into determining whether SEO or social media or even something else would be the best pick. So the first step in all of that is determining what your goal is.

Ty Smith9:31

For example, if your goal might be to app downloads or registrations to something or signing up for a newsletter, maybe it's purchasing a product online on like an e-commerce store, maybe your goal is just building thought leadership in the space. If your goal is downloads of an app, like you own, I don't know, like CoinStats, for example, is a company that we work quite a bit with and their main KPI is always we want people to download the app. It's similar to Blockfolio and Delta and CoinMarketCap's app. The more users they have, the more successful they are. If your goal is downloads to an app, or and this also applies to just software as a service companies in general, SEO is definitely going to be the way to go because your process for making money is so digitized that if you can get people organically just coming to your site constantly, you really don't have to do much and people can just very easily sign up. It's just it's massively scalable.

Ty Smith10:30

If your goal is views to content, let's say you're like a media site, for example, it could be either one, SEO or social media. What it's going to come down to is the type of content that you're hoping to get eyeballs on. If it's evergreen content, then the route to go is definitely going to be SEO, whereas if it's time-sensitive content like let's say you're a news site, social media is going to be the way to go. News content historically doesn't rank that well organically on Google and works really well on social media, and vice versa for evergreen content. Where evergreen content, if you're doing like review guides or something like that, it won't necessarily work that well on social media. Social media is just way too fleeting and you'll be constantly spamming the same links, which are they're probably there's the thing with evergreen content is it's always relevant, so it's always going to be relevant when you tweet it, but it's just not going to it's just not going to drive the engagements that you would get otherwise.

Ty Smith11:28

If your goal is purchases to a product, SEO is a great way to go, again, for companies that have like a fully digital onboarding process, conversion process to make the company money, SEO is great. The other side of that is if you were doing social media for a company that's selling a product, you're constantly doing sales promotions and new product updates. It's not necessarily a bad strategy, it's just probably not the best return on your time and money as compared to if you were focusing those resources on SEO. And then we touched on this before, thought leadership. If that's your goal, which is a lot for a lot of people, social media is just unrivaled. You're just not going to get that thought leadership built by creating content that ranks well on Google. Again, everyone interacts with SEO content individually and in an isolated manner, so they have no idea if you're authoritative or not. They're just reading your article. But social media, on the other hand, when you see a tweet with 500 likes, you know the person is worthy of following and probably a thought leader.

Ty Smith12:31

Okay, so that is going to wrap up this episode. If you have any questions regarding SEO or social media or how to properly implement those for your company or your own personal brand, feel free to DM me on Twitter. It's @TyDanielSmith. Also give me a follow. We're doing a pretty heavy investment in social media in the next six months for Coinbound, with a lot of focus being on my own personal brand. So stay tuned on that. You can study the strategies that we're going to be implementing and you can throw them in your own repertoire. That said, if you found this podcast valuable, please rate us on Spotify, Apple, Google, whatever it is that you're listening on, recommend us to a friend, and that will be it. Catch you guys on the next one. Bye.