Running a business in today’s world requires a robust online presence, regardless of the industry. Simply having a business website is no longer enough to drive sales and traffic to your site. The internet is saturated with websites all competing for consumer attention.
You can employ methods for increasing the visibility of your website and thus get more conversions overall. Many companies invest in various digital marketing techniques, such as paid search or paid social media, to achieve this. Explore the advantages of paid search vs. paid social to determine which one is for your business.
Paid Search
Paid search refers to pay-per-click advertisements on search engines such as Google. Paid search or pay-per-click (PPC) advertising provides tons of benefits to your company. Learn more about how paid search works and what it can do for you.
How It Works
Paid search starts with the investigation of key terms people are searching. Discovering what keywords your website already ranks for is a great start. The next step is investigating search results for similar terms, terms competitors are ranking for, and terms potential customers are searching for.
Once you’ve identified the keywords that’ll drive traffic to your site, you can set up PPC with Google. This is often best left to professionals trained in keyword research, who can accurately identify and adjust key terms based on performance over time and other metrics.
What it Does
PPC drives traffic to your website by putting your website’s advertisement at the top of search results on key terms chosen for your PPC campaign. This creates visibility with potential customers who want to find you offer.
The people seeing your advertisements are actively searching for something you provide. This ad helps them to see your site regardless of your organic search rankings.
Paid search captures demand that already exists.
Benefits of Paid Search
There are many benefits businesses enjoy from investing in paid search advertising or PPC. It’s one of the most popular forms of digital marketing and yields significant results when seamlessly implementing a campaign. Explore more benefits PPC could offer your business, which includes:
- Increases website visibility instantly.
- Works quickly (compared to other digital marketing methods.)
- Captures existing demand.
- Creates conversions out of people who know what they want but aren’t aware your brand provides it.
- Makes your site easier to find.
- Gathers tons of helpful data on keywords and the way consumers shop.
Paid Social
Paid social media advertising is another prevalent form of digital marketing. It’s unique in because it yields trackable results in a delayed attribution system. Social media is vital for businesses to build brand awareness and credibility with consumers. Discover more about paid social media and what it can do for your brand.
How It Works
Paid social media advertising works by first establishing a presence on social media for your company. It can strike users as suspicious if a business invests in paid advertising on social media without an up-to-date and active social media account.
Once you’ve created profiles and a plan to update your accounts with quality content regularly, the process is quite similar to paid search. At the start, the methods look very similar, except instead of choosing keywords, you’re selecting a segmented audience and the platforms you’ll invest in.
There are countless platforms for social media; choosing which to spend your campaign funds on is tough. Identify your target market. Who buys your product? Facebook and Instagram are the platforms with the largest demographics of users to choose from, so chances are your target market is on there.
After choosing your target market and locating them on social media platforms, you need to create a solid, creative ad copy that captures your audience’s attention.
Remember: In paid social media advertising, your customer is not looking for you—you are disrupting their curated feed. You need a strong, creative, attention-grabbing ad copy to gain their attention and avoid getting lost in the noise.
What It Does
Paid social media advertising creates demand. It increases your company’s brand awareness in the target market. Social media provides an opportunity to gain an audience with people you otherwise wouldn’t get to target.
It’s vital to understand one of the crucial differences between paid social compared to paid search. Your audience in paid social is not looking for your products or services. They intend to scroll through a feed of friends, family, and influencers they personally chose. Your advertisement disrupts their experience—but if the ad is interesting and put in front of the right person, it can eventually lead to a conversion.
Paid social media is a delayed attribution method of reporting. Facebook uses a 28-day attribution window with cross-device tracking to show you exactly when a sale’s first impression happened. Social media raising brand awareness is longer because of the lack of intent on the user’s side.
Benefits of Paid Social
Paid social media advertising creates brand awareness and drives demand for your products and services. When done with strong creative and careful considerations, paid social can lead to significant increases in conversions for your company. Discover some additional benefits of paid search.
- Increases brand awareness.
- Drives traffic to your site.
- Widens your audience.
- Provides a unique opportunity for your brand to get creative.
- Provides understanding and information about your product or service to consumers.
- Gets you in front of a diverse and statistically likely-to-purchase audience.
How to Decide
Ideally, companies should invest in both paid search and paid social. Both of these forms of digital marketing work seamlessly together to increase overall brand awareness and conversions.
If possible, always do your best to invest in both.
Sometimes there are budgetary constraints forcing companies to choose just one. In this case, research your options and consider talking to a professional digital marketing agency about which can best benefit your company. If your business is lacking demand, social media is the right investment. If it’s struggling to capture existing demand, paid search is the way to go.
Remember: Investing in just one paid search or paid social is missing an opportunity for each to support the other for outstanding results.
Paid social media and paid search work well together to create and capture demand.
Paid social creates demand, and paid search captures that demand.
An example of these digital marketing methods working together is: suppose a man is scrolling through his Facebook feed. The feed consists of his friends and family. He scrolls past an advertisement for a T-shirt with a fun and relatable saying on it. He stops and reads the ad, looks at the picture of the shirt, and keeps scrolling.
A few days pass, and he’s entirely forgotten about the T-shirt. The following week he has a friend with a birthday coming up which he forgot about. He remembers the T-shirt ad and thinks what a great gift it would be for this person. He then opens Google and types in the name of the brand, including the phrase “fun T-shirts.” There are countless organic search results for other brands—but right at the top of the page there’s a paid search ad for the exact T-shirt he saw two weeks prior on Facebook. He clicks on it, peruses the website a bit, and ultimately purchases the T-shirt.
This conversion is technically one created by paid search—but it all started because of the brand exposure this man experienced through a paid social media advertisement.
Paid search and paid social work hand in hand to inform each other and drive conversions.
For all of your paid search and paid social media campaign needs, contact Logical Position. We are a Facebook Premier Partner and Google Partner, which gives us unique insights to ensure your campaigns are successful. We employ specialists in multiple digital marketing areas so your campaigns can inform each other and work together to produce results.
When you work with us, you’ll get a dedicated team of experts working non-stop to ensure your campaigns are progressing toward your goals. Your account manager will regularly check in with you to update you on progress and maintain total transparency regarding campaigns. Contact us today for a free consultation.
