Times are changing rapidly and gradually the most prominent tactics of promoting your business are evolving. We'll discuss the pros and cons of using social media and Google ads and how they both could cause an impact on your business goals.
The definition of our topics today:
Google Ads: Google Ads is Google's online advertising program. Through Google Ads, you can create online ads to reach people exactly when they're interested in the products and services that you offer.
Social Media Advertising: The practice of advertising through platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Pinterest etc., using texts and or visuals to promote a certain service or product.
Advantages of Using Social Media Advertising
Social media is one of the fastest way to spread the word
If you have a big fan base and/or a growing one, you can tweet, post on Facebook or Instagram and your message can instantly go to thousands of users around the world. Many people using phones know how addicting they are and one of the reasons is because of social media. Taking advantage of this will be a great benefit for your business.
It’s good for SEO traffic
The signs are showing that social media is being used to help for ranking purposes by both Google and Bing. Making posts on your social media accounts will relay traffic from your social platforms to your website. This will tell Google and Bing that your site is a leading factor to user searches.
Most Social Media platforms are a growing trend
Social media is a trend you cannot ignore if you want to stay close to your customers and in sync with the latest developments in marketing. Social platforms are the key to building a B2C (Business to Consumer) relationship that has never been experienced in any era until now.
The ultimate Business 2 Customer relationship
With social media, your customers can show that they like a product or piece of content by expressing it such as, commenting and sharing (Like, Tweet, +1 etc.). Using this information, you can gauge on what content to keep on creating for your audience.
Related content: What is social media marketing answered.
Why Companies Are Hesitant to Start Social Media Advertising
Time and money investment
A small business can usually get by with a person assuming social media posting responsibilities with other duties. But when your business starts to grow, hiring a person to manage social media and communications becomes increasingly necessary. Using social media effectively is a full time job, creating content, targeting audiences, creating ad campaigns, increasing engagement and more, these tasks need to be monitored by a designated social media manager or team.
Reputation management
One of the reasons why you are on social media in the first place is to enhance your reputation. Using social media is a perfect way to increase your reputation because of the easy avenues your content can be shared, and at a rapid pace. This can backfire; one wrong comment or one offensive post can lead to a dent on your reputation, which can take an extended amount of time to mend. Hiring a professional social media manager will help detour a situation like that.
Harmful customer reviews
Social media is also a big platform for customers to complain about your products and services. Not everyone will directly contact you for any issues, they may land on your social media company profiles and post complaints or negative feedback/reviews about your content. The more complaints you get, the more your brand will suffer. Managing and responding to reviews and give grieving customers a solution is key to managing this platform. Using a social media manager that knows how to handle this will be your best investment.
Difficult to measure certain Social Media results
The only platforms that allow to view your engagement endeavors fully are Instagram and Facebook. Other platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter etc., have minimal means to measuring your actions. All other platforms can be measured of course, but unfortunately it takes a quite a bit of time to gather that information.
Advantages of Using Google Ads
Creating an Google ads campaign can be quick
You can be up and running on Google Ads in a very short duration of time. While there is a lot more to Google Ads as a whole than just campaigns, ad groups, keywords and ads, these are the foundations. Do a bit of keyword research, decide a budget plan, set up a campaign and a few relevant ad groups, make a couple of ads, and that is it. Your ads will appear as soon as they’ve been approved, which normally is instantaneous.
Huge chance of exposure
You have the chance to appear on the first page of the Internet’s largest search engine; that alone should be a huge factor into budgeting Google ads in your marketing plan. That is a tremendous amount of exposure! Your business is appearing to someone who’s actively searching for what you offer when they really need it. Which is a perfect opportunity to showcase a brief summary about what your business has to offer to the potential customer.
You have full control of your ads
You can turn your campaigns off or on with just a click. You can even have control of what ad groups or keywords you want to have paused. This is a huge advantage search engine advertising have over social media advertising. Even though social media advertising is still relativity in its infancy compared to Google Ads. Paid social advertising is slowly evolving into a similar approach to paid search advertising. But, if you want the most amount of eye balls in the shortest amount of time, Google ads is the way to go.
Measuring PPC results are simple
When it comes to Google Ads, Google definitely does a great job in measuring your work. Whether using applications such as Google Analytics, Google Ad-sense or Google Tag Manager, these all can help give a detailed report on what you are working with.
Disadvantages of Using Google Ads
You pay for each click to your website
That means that you pay whenever someone clicks on your ad, regardless of whether that click converted or not. So you may get clicks from visitors who have no intention of ever buying your product or service. This can be a bit costly if you do not know what you are doing and your campaign is not designed to target the right audience.
Competitive industries have higher cost per clicks
If your competitors are already using Google Ads, this might the reason why you want to start your own campaign. But the competition can be intimidating, and as a result the cost per click will be much higher than anticipated. If your keyword bid is too low then your ads could be relegated to page 2 or 3 of the search results. Unfortunately this is a pay to play field and in order to get the best results you need a high bid. Fortunately there is no bidding on social media, which a nice alternative or supplementary practice to run on top of your Google ads!
Time consuming to learn keyword targeting
You need to ensure that you have added sufficient negative keywords to your campaigns, or your ads could be shown to the wrong users. Another time consuming task is getting all the right keywords to effectively target the right people. This is an on going process as well, each week you will monitor what users are searching for and adjust your negative keywords and primary keywords accordingly.
Conclusion
No matter what platform you end up using for your business to expand, there are no right or wrong answers. Depending on your business and the market it serves, each platforms has its pro's and con's. Do not be afraid to do some trial and errors with some platforms you have never used before. You never know one of them can be a ticket to another flight your business can take off to.