Difference Between Paid Search And Paid Social
If you are looking for online marketing tools, you might be wonder what to choose. There are many options are available. Before choosing one, you need to think about your marketing goals, what you are trying to market and who are the customers. Then you can choose one, that suits to you.
pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is one of the most powerful tools. You can use PPC in Facebook Ads, Google Ads and many more platforms. It is easy to reach your target market through these platforms. But you need to choose the right platforms and right way for marketing.
When we talk about GoogleAds, there are many options in this single platform like manual ads, automated text ads, click-to-call ads, banner ads, video ads and many more. You need to choose the one that matches you best.
If there are many options are available, almost all of them can be categorized into two categories. They are paid search and paid social. Identifying their strengths and weaknesses will help you to choose one that fit into your marketing strategy. In this tutorial we’re going to discuss about the difference between paid search and paid social. Keep reading and you will be able to get some idea to make better marketing decisions for your business at the end. First of all let’s take a look at how both of them work.
Paid search
Paid search advertising show ads in response to search queries that people use. Google Ads is one of popular paid search platform. There are many paid search platforms in other search engines like Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo.
The best thing of paid search advertisements is they will be seen by people who actively looking for something related to your business. These audience is really looking for make a purchase. It’s good to both you and your business.
For example If someone searches “flowers for wedding”, there is a chance that they have a wedding come up and the are looking flowers to buy them. If you are running a wedding flower business, you can make them to find your page through paid search. If you have made your paid search campaign with that term, you would be in the top of their search results list.
If you wanna getting in front of people who have high purchase intent, paid search is the best option you have.
Paid social
Paid social ads show in social media platform like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Reddit. It’s different from paid search. Paid social audience isn’t actively looking for a solution for their problem or anything related to your business. It’s like billboards radio ads or TV commercials.
What happens in paid social is advertisers highlight a need and offer their business as the solution and make you to buy them. In paid social, there is no need to wait until customers come. We mentioned before paid social is like tv commercials or radio ads. But there is a kind a different between them. That is, in paid social track the performance of your ads. This makes it easier to determine how people are responding your ads.
You can adjust your messaging or targeting also. You can reach many people through paid social and you can make them to buy something. Even people who haven’t buy anything from you before can make a purchase this time. For example, imagine you are looking paid social ad about fresh eucalyptus. You didn’t have a Intent to buy them. But just after you seeing this ad you wanna make a purchase.
With this method, you can reach as much as people you want. That’s how paid social grab customers. Paid social is the best way to build awareness for new products, services or your business.
What’s right for your business?
You can use any platforms and show ads all the time. But it’s not practically. If there are many opportunities available, with financial and time limitations you wouldn’t do that. When you have to choose one, what would it be? Paid search or paid social? The answer totally depends on your marketing goals, what you have to market and who are going to buy. Let’s discuss suitable option according to the three different scenarios.
1.When you need results fast
If you are looking for doing businesses quickly, the best option is paid search. You will be able to target people that are ready to buy. The audience may be small, but most of people very close to make a purchase. If someone leaves your site without making purchase, you can use retargeting and catch that lost target again. Normally paid search isn’t a long-term play. After seeing your ads customers either click on it or don’t.
For example, imagine a situation that your toilet clogs and it starts flooding. Are you going to wait until you find a best solution or would you go for a quick solution? You need solution immediately. Therefore you would get help from the plumber you see first.
Paid search is user-initiated. But paid social is different from paid search and it is advertiser-initiated. It takes so long to see results. It doesn’t mean paid social don’t give much results. It just take some time and it won’t fast as much as paid social.
2.When you need to keep costs down
If we wanna earn money, we have to spend some too. But it is different the amount that we can spent from business to business. If your budget is low, you will have to choose a cheaper option. We can look at this problem from different directions.
If you look at things in terms of cost-per-click (CPC), paid social is the best option. Paid social clicks don’t get much lower-funnel when it consider with paid search. There this will be the right option. For example, a law firm have to pay an average of $6.75 per click on Google. But the average CPC for an advertiser on Facebook is only $1.32. If that law firm care about CPC, they would choose paid social for sure.
But if the situation is different, what would they choose? Imagine you are paying $30 per one click one Google Ads. But someone make a purchase after 10 clicks. Which means you have to pay $300 for get one purchase. Let’s look at paid social. It cost only $1 for a click. But 1 person out of 300 is making a purchase. To get that purchase, you have to pay $300 because there are already 300 clicks. You have to pay the same amount in both two options. Then what would you choose between them? Paid search or paid social? You might get that cheaper CPC doesn’t make paid social the cheaper marketing channel. Choose marketing channel that suits your campaign goals instead choosing the cheaper one.
3.When you’re trying to build awareness
Making brand awareness is important as much as making sales and profitability. Therefore you need to consider about making awareness doing online marketing. In here paid social comes first. People might do not realize whether they need what you sell or not.
As we mentioned before you can use paid social to make awareness. If build a loyal following with them, they will come again to you when they got a problem instead of searching on Google. You can use imagery, reviews or video content to tell people about your product or brand story and make people excited about your business, products or service.
Look at above image. What would you do after seeing such a ad. You may haven’t thought about losing weight using broths and soups. But after you see this ad, you might start to think about new weight loss method. If you’re trying to sell something that people haven’t heard of before and wanna make brand awareness, the beat way is using paid social.
Final thoughts
If you are looking for online marketing, paid search and paid social both will work for you. You can try either of them. But there would be one that perfectly suits your business and your goals. Not only that, you need to consider about what you have to sell and who are the your targeting audience.
It’s important to knowing how each marketing channel works and their strengths and weaknesses and what they can do for your business. Then you can select the best marketing channel for your business, product or service. If you choose the right one you have done first step to the successful advertising campaign.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do paid ads work?
Paid advertising is a great way to increase traffic to your site and in turn conversions quickly. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) takes long period to work. You’ll wait to see results few months after you’ve made changes in your site. But in paid ads, you will be able to see results quickly.
What are the types of advertising?
There are seven types of advertising. They are paid search advertising, social media marketing, native advertising, display advertising, print advertising, broadcast advertising and outdoor advertising.
How can I advertise online for free?
There are some ways to advertise online for free. You can write guest posts for other blogs and answer Quora questions. Publish content on LinkedIn and offer to do interviews on other business’ podcasts also helps to advertise your business. Sending email newsletters and do a free product giveaway or contest are helpful. You can create YouTube videos too.
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What Is Paid Search (Beginner’s Guide)
What Is The Best, Paid Search or Organic Search?
Advantages And Disadvantages Of Paid Search
