Social Media Ads vs Google Ads
When do you need to use social media ads?
Social Media Ads are helpful when you need to grow your brand awareness. They help you build your community and engage with your potential customers. In other words, the main focus of social media ads is the upper funnel – awareness and consideration stages.
Advantages of social media advertising
There are multiple advantages of social media advertising. If social media ads aren’t already part of your wider marketing strategy, you could be missing out on the opportunity to reach more people, generate higher conversions, and nurture greater customer satisfaction levels.
1. Increase brand awareness
By promoting your business, products or services across social media, you are increasing brand awareness from the get-go.
Even before clicks and conversions come into play, you are putting your brand out there to millions of people by using social media ads.
Appearing in people’s social media feeds with a ‘sponsored’ label or showing up in front of a YouTube video can do wonders for increasing your brand visibility, helping your business to stay fresh in people’s minds – even if it’s on a subconscious level.
2. Boost leads for your business
By running specific lead generation ad campaigns, you can really harness the benefits of social media advertising for your business.
Facebook’s messaging adverts and lead generation ads are an ideal solution for customer-facing businesses looking to gather more leads. You can use lead generation ads on Facebook to encourage people to sign up to your online event, grow your email list ahead of a product launch, or to gather customer information for future marketing, to name just a few examples.
Meanwhile, LinkedIn advertising can be a powerful lead acquisition tool for B2B marketing businesses.
3. User-friendly interface
Advertising on social media doesn’t have to be scary. Most social media giants offer a user-friendly advertising platform.
By managing your ad campaigns through ad managers, like Facebook Ads Manager for your Facebook and Instagram ads or Campaign Manager for your LinkedIn adverts, you can make sure your ads are set up to achieve the digital results you are aiming for.
When do you need to use Google Ads?
Google Ads are used mainly by brands for flourishing their lower funnel, in other words, increasing hard conversions.
Keep in mind that the company often needs to invest in both awareness and conversion stages to ensure sustainable growth.
According to statistics, people are more likely to click on the ad of the company they have heard about. Therefore, investing solely in Google Ads might not be sufficient.
Advantages of Google Ads Advertising
Any business with an advertising budget has a lot of tactics and digital channels to choose between. Google Ads offers a few key benefits that can set it apart from some of your other options.
1. It’s easy to control your budget.
You don’t have an unlimited budget. When you invest in a paid marketing channel like Google Ads, you have to know that you can stay within the limitations of the budget you have. Luckily, Google Ads has no minimum spend, so even small businesses that can’t spend much can use it.
2. Google’s reach is vast.
Google gets over 3.5 billion searches every day. Advertising on Google gives you access to one of the largest audiences you’ll find anywhere.
But the Google Ads platform goes even further than that. In addition to buying ads on the search engine results page itself, you can also buy ads for Google’s other properties – including the extremely popular Gmail and YouTube – and for all 2 million websites and 650,000 apps that are included in Google Display network.
3. It’s a fast way to get noticed.
SEO is an important way to build your website’s visibility and get more visitors, but it’s slow. Most businesses can expect to spend months of continual work before they start to see much progress – and sometimes longer. Not all businesses can wait that long for results.
If you want to start gaining traction and getting people to your website faster, Google advertising works as a shortcut to getting the kind of visibility and results you want from SEO faster and with less work.