Should you spend your marketing budget with Google Adwords or Facebook Marketing, or both? It’s not a question that clients ask us in the first instance. Paid media only sums up the fact that you’re paying for the eyeballs on your content. With literally thousands of options in how to spend your marketing dollars, where you spend is almost as important as how much you spend. But before you get out your debit or credit card for your new ad account, please consider these two crucial factors when deciding. Search and Social are the words that the cool kids use to describe both options. Search means Google Adwords and similar, whilst social is short for social media sites like Facebook.
Google Adwords vs Facebook Marketing
When we’re onboarding a new client, they want to be everywhere and rightfully so, Just like you, They just want to put their business in the best possible position to succeed, but if you have limited ad budget of say $1,000 a month to spend, spreading the limited budget too thin across multiple channels can actually hurt your results instead of picking the one ad type that will give you the best chance succeeding, smashing that out and using the additional revenue generated from those ads to scale into other marketing channels. So, Google, Facebook or both? Let’s dive in and find out which method is right for you.
Search Engine Marketing
Search describes all things Google, Bing, Yahoo or whatever SEARCH console your target audience are using to find you. They are searching for your product or service because they are in a time of need. This means that your ads can be targeted to people based on what they want, not what they look like. Basically, in search, your ads can be pretty direct with your messaging and your calls to action can be very detailed. It’s the closest thing you can get to with a traditional flyer, mail shot or any traditional method of advertising. The key aspect of search to constantly remind yourself is that people are in a time of NEED. That’s why they are searching for your product or service. With a clever Google Adwords Expert (that’s us), you can make sure that your ads only appear in front of the right people, at the right time for the right product or service. Got a niche product and need a niche target audience? We can help with that.
Social Media Marketing
When you’ve finished getting your head around search, you can get back to thinking about interrupting someone’s timeline with what you think they might want to see using SOCIAL media channels. You’ll be creating ads based on someone’s interests, location, demographic make-up or perhaps just the connections or relationships with others. It’s a much more nuanced approach and in most cases the big ask or objective is not sales, it’s awareness. What? You’re not selling on social? Of course you can and there are many examples of companies selling lots on Facebook. But they didn’t start out with lots of customers on Facebook, they had to grow that community with lots of other posts, comments and shares (organic content). Take your new friends, followers and fans and turn them into costumers with great content.
Search & Social Media Marketing
So if search is based on times of need and social is just to interrupt someone based on what you think they might like, how do you combine them together for maximum effectiveness? That’s easy, you use social media to drive awareness and traffic to your Page and website and then use search to create highly sophisticated keywords and phrases in search engines that will trigger your ads to show. Lots of businesses will have a token Facebook presence and spend much more of their marketing budget on Google Adwords. Why? Cause no one wants to see port-a-potties on Facebook but when they need one for an event etc they’ll have remembered you from Facebook and can use that awareness when your ads show up in search results on Google or Bing or whatever browser you are using.
Simples, right? Make cool ads for people that are looking for products and services like yours on Google Adwords and then create some other content that you can drive awareness to your Facebook Business Page and then onwards to your website. It’s actually not that simple. It’s actually pretty complicated when you get someone’s attention on Facebook and then you chase them around Google with search ads. Have you ever visited a site and then you got chased around by that website’s ads? That’s what we do here at Leftlane. We take two simple things that work independently from each other and combine them to become a very successful marketing funnel for your business.
If you think your business is ready for paid marketing on Google Ads or Facebook Ads, get in touch with us. We’ll be able to help you decide which option is best for your business and of course which one will get you the most bang for your buck! Don’t forget, we won’t firehose you with data, just top-line (actually bottom line) figures to keep you on top of the successes of your campaigns.