Choosing the Right Advertising Platform For Your Business
There is no single ‘best’ channel or platform for your business to advertise on.
As with most things in business, choosing the right advertising channel is about identifying the objective you’re trying to achieve and selecting the right tools to get the job done.
Today we’re going to help identify the basic differences between the two main PPC (pay-per-click) platforms that you may be considering to start advertising on, and to help you decide how to utilise them.
What Is A PPC platform?
PPC stands for Pay Per Click, and it refers to the main mechanism of the advertising channel. You pay per click not, per impression.
The two main PPC platforms today are Google Ads and Meta Ads. Both of these operate in a fundamentally similar way.
They are places that people spend time on when they are online, and these platforms allow you to serve ads to those people, charging you per click.
They both allow an increasingly detailed level of targeting while also requiring the advertiser to ultimately decide whether that targeting is working or needs to be refined and changed i.e. the value of their conversions.
A click is a click to a PPC platform. They get paid per click and it’s up to you to make sure that click was worth your payment.
That’s where choosing the right PPC platform for your needs becomes important.
Using Google Search Campaigns To Capture Demand
Is your roof leaking? Did you forget today was your Mother’s birthday? Do you need to book an emergency service for your car?
This is demand. You’ll need a plumber, or a florist or a mechanic, and you need them immediately.
Google Search campaigns excel at capturing demand.
Putting your company, service or products in front of high intent searchers is exactly what Google Search was built to do.
That’s why when drafting Google Ad strategy, considering high-intent keywords, monitoring search volume and various other optimisations is so important.
These leads are ready and eager to convert, to have their immediate problem or need solved, and your job is to get yourself that click and hopefully that conversion too.
But what if your product category is new, or maybe its price dictates a longer lead cycle and less high-intent? That’s when you’ll need to generate demand.
Using Meta To Generate Demand
No one will be actively searching for a product they haven’t heard of or a problem they don’t know they have, no matter how good your solution is.
This means you need to engage in Demand Generation, creating the awareness of, and driving demand for, your products and services.
In marketing terms you are focusing on middle and top of the funnel advertising, awareness and education.
For serving your business and your product to new customers, Meta Ads is a great tool.
With an army of active daily users across its platforms (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp etc) Meta gives you the opportunity to disrupt users’ experience and get attention for you and your brand.
This form of advertising is built around identifying and going to your target audience, rather than sitting back and waiting for them.
It is still a PPC, so the onus is on you as the advertiser to decide what is and isn’t your audience, where they are and what messages to reach them with as you pay for leads by the click.
