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Social Influence is proud to announce our new branding as we move into a brand new year.

We began as a small Instagram growth service provider in 2018 offering manual growth to personal accounts and have since evolved into a full-service marketing agency with a strong roster of consumer product brands.

In June 2019, in an effort to combat software-based follower growth services, Instagram lowered action limits by 80%. With our 100% human-powered manual growth method, we grew overnight into one of the largest follower growth services in the country.

As we helped users spread their influence, our own influence expanded. We received an inundation of requests from consumer products brands looking to gain real, active followers on Instagram. 

For brands and businesses that monetize their accounts, growth remained a necessity to remain competitive on Instagram, but these businesses were faced with a scarcity of growth services.

Quickly, we realized that we could offer our skills to help brands grow their influence, sell their products online, and increase their bottom line, restructuring our company and its services to better suit the needs of nascent brands.

Today, we specialize in helping small consumer brands reach their biggest goals, combining our traditional Instagram growth method with an array of digital marketing services to elevate brands with custom-tailored omni-channel campaigns into the mid-market.

We recruited the best e-commerce managers, content creators, and retail consultants to offer brands a full-service marketing partner to simplify business management across the consumer product industry.

Our new branding reflects our new direction. We couldn’t be more excited for what the future has in store, and to continue offering brands the tools they need to succeed. New year, new us. Social Influence: we are marketing for the modern brand.

You have your brand. You have your products. Now, it’s time to start advertising.

Two of the most popular advertising platforms today are Facebook Ads and Google Ads. While most business owners view these two platforms as polar opposites in competition with one another, they actually work in much the same way, and figuring out how to use each to your brand’s advantage is imperative in today’s hyper-digital marketplace.

Facebook Ads and Google Ads aren’t really competitors, per se. Businesses want the same thing out of both platforms: increased visibility, leads, and sales. Both platforms are capable of offering a huge return on advertising spend, but work in different ways. 

Despite their differences, it’s necessary to understand both platforms and how they work together to help your brand reach new customers. So what sets Google Ads and Facebook Ads apart and how should you reconcile the two in your wider digital marketing strategy?

Facebook Ads: The Visual/Social Platform

When Facebook opened its platform to advertisers in 2013, brands leapt at the chance to showcase their products to millions of unique Facebook users. But soon, advertisers discovered that their traditional ad structures weren’t compatible with the platform’s requirements. Advertisers that had relied on text-heavy ads found that Facebook Ads mitigated the importance of copy, forcing them instead to rely on image-heavy advertisements to get conversions.

Facebook Ads work by advertising on their social network, and fall under the scope of “paid social” advertising. Facebook has the highest number of monthly active users on social media, making Facebook Ads a lucrative option for brands looking to develop their digital advertising strategy. While Facebook Ads are similar to Google Ads in their ability to promote businesses online, the similarities end there.

Paid social ads help users find businesses based on their interests, e.g. haircare or beauty, while paid search ads (Google Ads) help businesses find new customers through keyword research. Essentially, the difference between these two platforms is that one helps businesses find customers, and the other helps customers find businesses.

Compared to the monolithic entity that is Google, Facebook Ads are the relative underdog in the world of digital advertising. Today, Facebook Ads have become a necessary part of any advertising strategy, though it took years for Facebook to improve and refine its platform to create an advertiser-friendly tool.

The biggest advantage to Facebook Ads is their massive global audience. More than 1.55 billion users sign on to Facebook every month and share nearly every detail of their lives, from the breakfast they eat in the morning to the bar they go to at night. This presented Facebook with a unique opportunity for advertisers to target users based on their individual interests, directing content to users based on their recent activity and overall online behavior. Previously, this type of advertising was thought to be impossible. You simply wrote advertisements for a general populace, hoping that the right eyes would see it and be compelled to purchase.

Now, Facebook Ads offers granularity in its target advertising, meaning advertisers can pick and choose who sees their ads using “lookalike audiences.” Advertisers can now simply upload customer information from their own databases, allowing Facebook to filter ads to the most motivated buyers, e.g. sending toothpaste ads to people who have recently searched for toothpaste or followed a business page that sells toothpaste.

Facebook then applies filters based on its own internal data, virtually doubling the number of people who see your advertisements by targeting new customers within the same interest and consumer behavior brackets as your existing customers. 

Facebook isn’t like a digital catalogue or a highway billboard. Instead, it allows advertisers to relate directly to their core audience and suss out fence-sitters and window shoppers to find customers ready to make a purchase.

One aspect of Facebook Ads some consider to be a hindrance is the platform’s reliance on visual advertising. For Facebook ads, copy is relatively unimportant. The company even recommends that advertisers de-prioritize copy when making their ads. 

This is because Facebook ads, unlike their text-based pay-per-click (PPC) counterparts, are visually-driven. These ads appear alongside videos, images, and other visual content in the News Feeds of Facebook users, compelling advertisers to create visually striking ads to compete and persuade.

Previously, Facebook wanted ads on its platform to feature text occupying no more than 20% of the total advertising area. While that has since changed, Facebook Ads remain a visually-dominated platform, a quality some advertisers love and others lament.

The major draw of Facebook Ads is the platform’s ROI. With a relatively limited ad budget, advertisers can see huge performance on the platform, stretching their dollar to its fullest extent. That’s because Facebook Ads are more affordable than their PPC counterparts at just $0.27 per click.

Compare that to the high barrier of entry for Google Ads at an average of $1 per click, and you have yourself a platform that appeals not just to big brands with infinite budgets, but small, burgeoning brands looking to make a name for themselves online. The overall advantage to Facebook ads? In a word, value.

Google Ads: The Paid Search Option

Most medium-and-large scale brands rely on Google Ads for their advertising. As a PPC-based platform, Google Ad is the be-all-end-all in the realm of paid search advertisements. While Google Ads work similarly to Facebook Ads, there are a few key differences.

Paid search advertisements rely on focus keywords and text more rather than images. Advertisers bid on high-performing keywords to use in their ads that act as the answers to related search queries from customers, e.g. if you search for “organic shampoo,” advertisers will compete to have their ads driven to the top of the search results by paying more for those specific keywords.

When a user clicks on an ad, the advertiser is charged money. The amount of that charge varies depending on the cost of the keyword. Keywords that are searched more often cost more, while less popular keywords cost less.

This process is known as “bid optimization,” an esoteric term that encompasses a topic more complex than we can delve into here. Essentially, users pay for new customers to find their ads based on keywords and search terms they enter into Google, and compete for the best keywords and search terms to find those customers.

This style of advertising appeals more to bigger brands with bigger budgets. Nascent brands usually don’t have the bandwidth to compete with major players that can pay $2-3 per click. More than $3.5 billion search queries run through Google every day, and millions of those are directed to ads based on bid optimized keywords, meaning costs can quickly become prohibitive for small brands looking to outcompete big companies.

There are two primary networks Google Ads relies on to reach users: the Search Network and the Display Network. The Search Network refers to the entirety of Google’s search engine, where big advertisers can bid millions on specific keywords to target customers.

The Display Network, conversely, offers advertisers a more visually-based platform similar to Facebook Ads. The Display Network encompasses 98% of the web, allowing advertisers to reach their marketing goals without the conversion-based limitations of PPC ads. Ads on the display network include things like banner ads, which allow advertisers to raise brand awareness more than directly sell their products.

Every second, 40,000 search queries are entered into Google totaling more than 1.2 trillion searches per year, and as the use of machine learning technology grows at Google, those numbers are likely to expand, allowing brands to reach more customers than ever before.

Google Ads remains the most popular PPC advertising platform today, eclipsing far-off competitors like Bing or Bidvertiser. While nothing can compete with the scope of Google Ads, the platform can be less useful for advertisers without the cash to blow.

What Your Brand Needs

The question is: how much is your brand’s ad budget and how much of it are you willing to allocate on either platform? Rather than choosing one platform and going all-in, it’s wiser to split your efforts between the two platforms and utilize each for its distinct advantages.

Depending on what kind of business you run, each platform presents unique opportunities and limitations. Rather than view these platforms as competitors, you should instead view them as ad-buddies that are able to work in tandem to elevate your brand online. The bottom line? Use both! Instead of investing in one or the other, you should instead utilize both platforms and diversify your advertising efforts with a mix of paid search and visual/social ads.

While there are similarities between Facebook Ads and the Google Display Network, the two platforms have evolved differently and each requires a different approach. While you should maintain consistent messaging and branding across platforms, it’s imperative to also mix up your advertising efforts to see what works best to maximize your ROI whether your brand is already big or just about to blow up.

For more information on how to utilize these platforms to your advantage, check out our blog on the best keywords to use based on your industry. See you in the searches!