If your business needs leads or customers right now, running ads is the only reliable method. Don't worry, this isn't an ad. This is just something I find myself telling business owners quite often.
I primarily do organic marketing. So search engine optimization, answer engine optimization, organic video marketing. And I really do believe that long term organic forms of marketing give you the best return on investment when done the right way.
The problem is that it takes a long time and the results are unpredictable. Whenever I talk to someone who's like, I need customers right now, we're in trouble. We need more business this month.
I'll tell him, then you need to run ads. It's the only reliable method of taking money and turning it into more business in a short period of time. So the next logical question is, where should I run ads?
I just wanna go through your options and how to think about the best place to be running ads. For the last 10 or 15 years, there's really been two types of places that you can run your ads. You're either showing up in someone's feed on a social media site or you're showing up in a search engine, which is pretty much just Google or like 90% Google.
There's also Bing. So the advantage of running ads on Google is that you're showing up as someone is searching for the thing that you're offering. This means it's way more likely they're Gonna click your ad and buy what you're selling.
The main disadvantage is that you pay way more money to run these ads on social media. You can get a lot more exposure for every dollar you spend, but you're just showing up in their feed uninvited. They're not searching for the product or service that you sell.
Social media ads typically make sense when there's a very specific demographic or shared interest among people who are interested in your product or service and that's because the social media algorithms are very good at targeting specific demographics and interests.
On the other hand, if you're like a personal injury attorney or a plumber, something that anyone might need but only in a very specific situation and where they're likely to be searching for you as soon as they need you, social media ads tend not to work very well and search works much better. If you find yourself needing to explain what your product or service is, it's not something that people are already familiar with, you're gonna have a hard time on search but a video ad on social media could do really well.
On the other hand, if you sell a commodity or at least something that people think of as a commodity like window tinting, you're gonna have an easier time on search. And this whole time I've just been talking about social media as if it's one platform, but of course there are many platforms. The biggest ones are gonna be meta and TikTok.
And I say meta because it's one ad platform to show ads on both Facebook and Instagram. When most people are deciding which platform to show their ads on, they think where is my audience? I often hear things like, well, I don't wanna show ads on TikTok cause that's just for younger people and my demographic is older.
Then they're always surprised to hear that the vast majority of my viewers are over 45 years old. These platforms have billions of users. Plenty of your ideal customers are there.
My advice is that before running ads, post some content organically to each of these platforms. And I always recommend video content if it's possible. Try posting 10 videos to each of the social media platforms and see how they perform.
Not only will this show you which platforms algorithm likes your content the most, it'll also show you which of those 10 videos it likes the most. Take the video that got the most views, cut a 15 second version of it, put a strong offer at the end with a call to action to take the next step. Now as I said, for the last 10 or 15 years, those have been the two types of places you can run ads.
But we're starting to see a third category which is AI results. Google has just started experimenting showing ads in their AI responses, ChatGPT Is hinted that it's coming. So we still have no idea what this will look like, but it does seem like it would be a good fit for pretty much any business.
And typically right after a platform starts running ads is when you get the best rates. So I'm guessing there's gonna be some big opportunities for those that act quickly.
