Paid search vs social ads

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...

ing 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...

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...