FSB Networking Event: Google Advertising vs Social Media Advertising

Our founder, Vicky White had an amazing experience speaking all about ‘Social Media and Google Advertising’ at the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB)‘s ‘Wycombe Wednesday’s’ online business networking event on the 9th March 2022.

This fantastic networking event hosted by Lynne Kennedy and Martin Knowles gives business owners the opportunity to retain and build new connections in the Buckinghamshire area.

Social Media vs Google – Advertising for Businesses

Missed out on our presentation? Don’t worry, keep reading to find out more about our insights into the best practices of running Google Ads and Social Media Ads for your business.

Benefits of Advertising for Businesses

Why should businesses be implementing Ads into their marketing and growth strategy? Here’s our take on their top benefits…

Ads give you more control over your audience – you set the targeting and say who you want to reach and what messages you want to say
Ads provide opportunities to reach a new audience and are great for re-marketing to website visitors, social media followers and customers
Paid social helps you find businesses based on the things they’re interested in vs Google Ads which helps businesses find new customers via keywords
Organic is often slower to reach business goals. I would suggest running Ads while your SEO performance builds and your social media following grows
Use your insights to review performance and refine your Ad campaigns– use Hootsuite, Google Analytics and on channel insights

Google Ads

Find out more about running a Google Ad campaign. How exactly do they work and how can they be used to give your business that competitive edge.

The importance of Google Advertising

Google Ads are helpful in enabling businesses to reach audiences who are actively looking for the services provided or products being sold.

Businesses can also use this form of advertising to outrank competitors in the Google search rankings as it provides immediate visibility and traffic (but it comes at a cost).

If you are a new business or a business who has strong competition you may find investing in advertising is the best approach to take to start driving leads and generating sales. Building visibility on Google takes time and you should be investing in an SEO expert to help you increase your rankings as most businesses find once they start to appear at the top of page one, their Ad spend reduces.

Implementing Google Advertising

Google Ads can be just what your business needs, but there’s no point diving in without setting up a strategy to support your chosen campaigns!

Strategy

Choose the right Google Ads campaign to suit your business and audience (see below)
Know your audience personas and demographics as this will help to set up your campaign correctly and produce content that reaches and engages with your audience
Have a separate website landing page that focuses on your service/products – this will improve your Ad quality score = more traffic, more sales and a higher ROI

There are a variety of different Google Ad campaigns to choose from –

Search (text ads on Google search results)
Display (image ads on websites)
Video (video ads on YouTube)
Shopping (product listings on Google)
App (your app promotion on many channels).

The type of campaign you should be using will depend on what you are offering/services you are delivering.

Google Advertising Best Practices

Always have a strategy in place before running any Ad campaigns
Know your audience personas – personality, location etc…
Pick the right type of campaign (see above)
Do your keyword research to see how people are searching for your services and/or products
Test, test, test different keywords, Ad groups, landing pages and styles of content
Do not neglect your Ad campaigns otherwise you maybe in trouble
Get the right tracking and goals in place so you know your conversion metrics to be able to refine based on performance

Social Media Advertising

If you are a start up business, have a small following or struggle to find the time to post multiple times a week, social media advertising can really help you to reach your target audience, quickly and with little effort.

Find out how your business can use Social Media Advertising to your advantage and things to consider to get you great results…

The Importance of Social Media Advertising

Social media advertising helps to:

Reach an unknown audience who have an interest in your products or services
Build brand awareness and increase reach
Supports in building follower growth
Send traffic to your website, increase engagement, encourage app installs or video views, generate leads, or encourage people to communicate with you on Facebook Messenger
Increase purchases or leads via your site or app and drive foot traffic to offline stores
You can also advertise to lookalike audiences, customer lists, those who have already engaged and to your website visitors

Implementing Social Media Advertising

As we mentioned above in the Google Ads section, it is really important you have a solid strategy in place to ensure you are reaching your target audience and not wasting Ad spend. Where is your target group most engaged, most concentrated and most accessible? Targeting teens? TikTok is where to find them. Mums meanwhile, love Facebook. Try looking at which social networks perform well organically for your brand and use this is a foundation for choosing which channels you should be advertising on.

Social Media Advertising Best Practices

It’s important to choose the best social media advertising platform for your business
When it comes to content, look at which organic posts have performed well – achieved the most engagement and use this as a potential post for your Ads.
There are two different ways of advertising on Facebook and Instagram – Facebook Ads Manager vs Boosting Posts we strongly recommend you use Facebook Ads Manager to have more control over your Ads and the performance
Take advantage of A/B split testing. Test different content styles or static graphics vs video Ads – it’s a great way to see which performs best!
Use your performance insights to make decisions moving forward. This is so important so you can refine and improve the performance moving forward

Want to know more about Ads?

Keen to learn more about how Ads can work magic for your business?

We offer Google Advertising Services and Social Media Advertising Services as well as 1-1 training.

If you are a small business you might also be interested in exploring our small business marketing packages.

Get in touch with us today to find out more!