001. Paid Search Vs. Paid Social

And yeah, there we are. So welcome everybody. My name is Emilio Garcia and this is our first session of boundify Live. This is a very interesting format that I'm exploring since today. I like it because it's not as formal as a webinar where I have to have a presentation, maybe a speaker and a very fixed kind of like topics that need to be covered in this order format. I intend the audience to participate. And while I probably will have everyone on mute while I'm sharing what I'm going to present on the screen, please feel free to ask questions. Either you unmute the microphone or you just type something on the chat. I will just make a quick chat here. Hi everyone. And you can ask any question if you want to. Today I want to focus on a topic that I really like, which is the difference between paid advertising on search engines and paid advertising on social media, specifically for B2B companies. So I will focus heavily on LinkedIn. I love this topic because probably like Donald and Tim will probably say that they agree it's a source of confusion because you can pay both, you can pay Google, you can pay LinkedIn or Facebook or any other social media platform. But usually what you can accomplish on each of those platforms is completely different. So I will explore that today. Let us dive in right away. I like these kind of explanations to share my screen. I like to do that. So I will start here and I think one of the very first thing that we want to cover is how those ads look like because sometimes it's not easy to recognize them. So I'm going to pick in this scenario, I'm going to choose a theme or a topic here. Imagine that you are or you own a company that develop apps that develop, you know, Android Apps or iOS apps. And you're exploring advertising for your company and you want to understand how the landscape work. So when you are thinking about search, this is usually what a user might type. Something like app development company maybe. And you can see here that Google would suggest some examples. So if I click on this, I get this sort of results. And one thing that I want to add our that scenario is the company is trying to look for people that want to develop an app. But I already have on mine a kind of buyer. And in this example, imagine that our usual buyer is, is someone that is starting a company or thinking about developing an app. And they have very little resources available. They don't have big team and they're looking for an agency or a firm that can help them do that. So that will be the buyer in this scenario that I'm imagining, that person will be the owner usually or a partner of the company. And we need that because that was going to be important for social. So if you were going to do this search on Google, you will be presented with this kind of results. And nowadays it's incredible how Google have reduced the difference between ads and organic or unpaid results. But the difference, and I will zoom in here, is that these 1, 2, 3, 4 first results are ads. The way that you know they're ads is because you can see the word ad here. That's pretty much the only clue that you get about it after this. So this will be the first organic result. These results here, nobody's paying for or nobody's paying Google for for showing up here. They probably expended money and time developing content that will rank this high for these very competitive keyword because we will see that this can be very competitive. But they didn't pay Google. So this will be organic results. But the first four, these are search engine ads, right? So this is how paid advertising looks like for the user, for that person that we have in our minds from the searcher perspective. What about LinkedIn? Well, in LinkedIn, the ads they try to use the same idea is something that doesn't look like a promotion. Some of them are pretty obvious and some of them are difficult to see. And I will show you here, I'm looking at my profile here and you can see here that this area, for example, this is promoted. These are ads. And you know that because you know they are not part of the feed and they say the word promoted. LinkedIn from the many, many years when they started before being acquired by Microsoft had these other ads that are more text based. And you can see the word ad here too. So these are two very easy to spot areas where you can see ads. But the one that is the most popular one, and this is not coincidence, this is a client of ours, is these posts. So if you look at this post, it looks like any other post on social media, right? Like the people that you follow, the companies that you interact with. But the difference is that it says promoted. That's how you know this is an ad. And as you can see the biggest difference, and that will be the difference when you are willing, you are deciding where to spend your money is that on search your ads will only show up when people is looking for what you are offering, when you are willing to bid for that keyword or that phrase. And on social the ads just show to the right People or the people that you intend to show them, there's no search on it, right. And they pretty much look like the rest of the feed. So this is an ad and let me, let me continue to scroll and see if I can. This is, for example, obviously an ad from LinkedIn itself, right? And one thing that you will distinguish for ads is that you don't have to follow the company to show ads to someone. Like, for example, I don't follow United Healthcare. Actually, this is the first time that I have heard from them. But I'm seeing a post right now, right? And the reason I know it's a paid post is first, because I don't follow the company and second, because it says promoted. Beyond that, it looks like just any other regular post. You can like it, you can comment on it, you can like the page, you can do pretty much whatever, anything else that you can do on a post of your own, but that will be the biggest difference. So, and I wanted to start with that because to answer that first question, that's pretty much the answer, when do you advertise on search and when do you advertise on social? Well, pretty much goes down or boils down to if you want to go, if you want to go after intent or if you want to go after context, right? And what I mean by intent is that the most powerful feature for search is that you can just show ads to people that is already looking for the solutions or looking for, you know, solving a problem that they are aware of. So that's the beauty of it. For example, for markets where there's already a lot of demand, that is that the potential, the market already knows about the problem. Like, I want to develop an app, I cannot do it on my own. I need help. In those kind of services and industries, search works wonderfully because you go only to, I call it harvest what you already have there. Harvest existing demand. However, there's one big issue with search and is that you don't have that much of control on who is the person that is doing the search. Right? And that's the reason that in this example that I'm showing that I started with, I want to go back to that example to give you a reference of what I mean by that. You can say, well, I want to show up for app development company and I know that the person will have the right intent. Yeah, but how do you know that that person is not a person that is looking at job at your company, someone that wants to work for you, not to purchase from you? There's no way to know unless that person put something like app development company jobs or work at an app development company. Or it can be a student that is looking for information about app development companies. It can be a person that is looking for help on how to start one app development company. Right? So there are many intentions on that word. And if you pick the word, the word app development company, you might show up for people that are looking for jobs, for people that are looking for starting a company for app development, or even just people that is looking for help on learning. Let me show you an example. If you go from app development company or mobile app development company to just mobile app development, that would be like a reasonable place to show an ad. Like saying, well, I want to show up for that. Because if someone is looking for development, probably they're looking for help on creating an app. And you can see some here, there are some companies that develop apps that are showing up ads when someone is looking for mobile app development. But I, for example, I wouldn't go for those because if you look at the organic results here, you will see that most of the results organically show results about how to become a developer, not how to hire one. It's a very subtle difference. If you go from mobile app development to mobile app development company, the kind of results that you get organically are completely different. And that's one of the challenge of search again is great for selecting intent, but it lacks heavily on context. There's very little that you can do on the kind of person that is doing the search. And I will go a little bit on the back end here to show you some examples. For example, let me go to our account and just show you something. We of course that we are a B2B marketing agency. You can imagine that we go for keywords like B2B marketing agency and stuff like that. And we have some control over demographics. Not that much. There are a few things that you can narrow down or select like the age of the searcher and just the bracket. Right. Not a specific ages, but you know, if they're between 18 and 24 or something like that. The gender, that's another option that is available. Lately Google have added the ability to select based on household income. They do that based on the zip code of the searcher. Right. It's not that they know exactly the net worth or the income of the person is that they know the average household income of the zip code where the person is doing the search. And so you have those parameters, obviously you have the location you can select big cities and small cities and probably if you are going after a decision making, for example the B2B, you will have a better luck if you go after big cities on high end zip codes because usually you will find companies there and not just individuals. But that's it, that's how much that you can know from search. You don't know anything else about a person. So that will be the strong or the strength of search. What about social media? And I want to show you an example using again LinkedIn in this case to show you the big, big difference between the two platforms. So here I am on the management portion of LinkedIn ads where you can select the audience for those ads, right? And you can see, you can select location, of course, and after that you can start selecting the kind of person that you want to show up the ads and what I mean by that. And let me clear all this so we can start with a brand new audience. Let me clear all, let's remove all. So imagine that I'm talking about the U.S. united States. And as we discussed in this example that I'm using, we are after companies that have an owner. So it's a small company, it's not a big one. The one that in my mind I'm thinking about this potential person that will look for help for app development, right? For developing an app of their own. And so we know that we want people in the US that will be the first idea. But then we would like to know a little bit about the company itself. Like for example, maybe we are developing apps on a specific industry, maybe it's about education, for example. So I want to go for companies that are in the education space, like higher education, that will be an example, that will be the first criteria. And then I can narrow down into, well, what about, what about the company size, right? I want small companies, not one person companies, but maybe 2 to 10 employees, maybe 11 to 15 employees at most. So that will be my second criteria. And finally I can say something. Well, because there are going to be a few people within that company. I want the partner, the owner and maybe the cxo, right? That's the CEO or the CFO or something like that. And those will be just as a matter of example, those will be my criteria. And as you can see here, I have a target audience. So here the big benefit of social is that you can select the right people. If you say I am an app development company, I want to sell only to the US And I'm just exemplifying Here, the whole US because you might say, well, I don't want to go after the whole country. I'm just going to sell this on New York and maybe San Francisco because I know there's a lot of efforts on app development on those two cities. And so you have very narrow space. So you have only 18,000 people that matches that criteria. Right? So the big strength of social pay or social ads will be that you can select the right people, the place, the kind of company, the kind of function I'm not talking about here. If that person is in marketing or is in the purchase department. And obviously there are many, many criteria you can select in social, you have that strength. You will be in front of the right people. What will be the only disadvantage is that you don't have control over timing. Right? This is the right people. But we don't know if they want to purchase right now. We don't know if they are aware of the solution because we have never seen them searching for it. We don't know, for example, if they are aware of the problem. Right. Maybe they are trying to solve the problem on their own, trying to look for apps to help them development, but they haven't. Think about, I need to hire someone. And that sounds obvious, but it can be a problem for your specific industry. So that will be the biggest disadvantage of social when you use it isolated, is that you will have this great control over the person or the individual that you show the ad, but you will have little control over the intent. Right. And kind of like that covers what I wanted to discuss today. I don't know, I will start sharing and stop for a little while and ask you, do you have any questions? Do something pop up on your mind right now. You can either talk or put on the chat.

I'm not capable of asking a question yet. Just continue.

Don't worry, Donald.

I've got a lot of learning to do here.

Yes, that's great. Don't worry. I'm happy, happy to share. So.

More than question a comment that. It's one of the things we were talking this morning, Emilio. This is like you have to test the market, right? You have to test it and see what works for you, right? Because I mean, you're not gonna know for the very beginning. You're not gonna know if that works for you. This classification that you are making is working for you. But if you really test it and prove it and everything, you're gonna be able to get the right market for you. And the advantage I think is that this has the right tools of analysis to help you make that decision afterwards right after you test it. Right?

That's right. That's a great comment, Leonardo. Thank you for coming about that. It's true there's usually best practices. One easy indication is when you have a product or service where you have both existing demand and the possibility of creating additional one and your budget is restricted. It can vary obviously depending on the situation. But my usual recommendation is go for the demand that you can already harvest, right? So capture the demand that you already have on Google, on the search engines if it already exists. Unless your effort is really more about brand awareness and more about kind of like maybe remarketing, for example, is a good example. If you want to be in front and top of mind to your current clients and current prospects and opportunities, then social is a better medium. But, but if you want to capture existing demand, you go to social first and then if you have already captured as most demand or as many people that you can there, then you can expand into social. Obviously my recommendation will be try both because then you can test and compare. Because social can be used for demand generation too. It's not just for brand awareness, but it's just harder because you don't have control over the timing. However, there are situations where you really have to use social and there's not much to be done on search. I remember an example that I will be happy to share. We work with a client some months ago and she developed a very interesting app for people that wanted to preserve the their heritage, the things that they had at home that they wanted to give to their children or to their family when they pass away. And so she developed an app where you can take pictures and record a little bit about the history of whatever you were going to give away or give inheritance. And obviously it was a product that nobody was searching for much, right? Is nobody's, you know, thinking one morning, oh, you know, it will be awesome to record what I have around my house and just give a glimpse of the history behind something that I'm going to left when I'm not here. So obviously for that specific case we chose social media because we knew that we knew the target, we knew the kind of person that will be interested. It's just that probably they were not aware of the, of the, you know, a solution like that one. And she had a great success because obviously it resonated very well in this case was Facebook with the crowd or with the audience that she was after. So there are cases where when you have a very Innovative product or very innovative service, where the category itself have not been defined where. And it's not about. It's not that your product doesn't have unique things, it's just that the solution itself is very rare. Where you need to start on social because you need to start building awareness on that. Right. Very well. I have a question here about if you can make ads on LinkedIn using animated GIFs. Good question. To be honest, I have not used GIFs so far. Probably you can't. However, what you can do is use video. That's one thing that you can use. So you can make a short video without audio that will be animated and can be quite short and you can use that as one of the formats of the campaign. The other thing that LinkedIn offers that is very interesting is that it has very interesting formats. It has the usual image. Let me see if I can show some examples here, here. So you have the usual image, just like the one I showed on the feed. And you have the text ad, which is the one that shows in the upper part of the, of the, of the page. But you have the carousel. You can, you can promote videos and, and there's.

I'm Sorry, this is LinkedIn.

This is LinkedIn. That's right, yes. Another thing that you can promote or you can do is you can start conversations. So let me show you an example here. Like this one. This, this, the email. It's a promotion. It's something that is sponsored. So you can send emails that look like messages to the inbox of a person. And obviously if you have a call to action, all that, you click on that and you are sent to page usually. So LinkedIn have very interesting formats beyond, beyond images. And Facebook do too, social in general have very interesting formats. Nowadays on Facebook, for example, you can have an ad that sends you to the messenger, Facebook Messenger. Nowadays, I think there are ads for WhatsApp and there are formats where you just fill the information within the same. You don't have to go to a landing page to fill anything. So they're very, very. And that's part of the, that's part of the experimentation that you have to write out. You can create different campaigns for different ad formats and test what works first best for your brand. All right. And so I think those are the two topics, to be honest, for this first event, I just have that topic in mind. The only one thing that I want to cover was the question that you were doing Leonardo, about website builders. Yes. As you know, this is here I'm going to Do a little bit of promotion. The only platform that we develop or create websites for is HubSpot. That's the company that we are partners for and so our website is built on that. But that's a very robust and complete cms. Usually when you want to start at the beginning with a builder that is easier to manage and to work with, the standard, the open format is WordPress as a lot of you have heard. But there are website builders and probably the three that I consider the most popular and the ones that people use the most are wix. Let me show them here. So you have wix. The other one will be Squarespace and the last one and there are many, many more. This is a very crowded space, to be honest. And you have Weebly. So these are the three that I remember have the largest market share for website builders and they are called website builders because usually they are drag and drop. They are just like a PowerPoint presentation versus WordPress or any other CMS where you actually have to code. And do you have templates? Yes, but you still have to know your way around a little bit. On the management side, website builders like wix, Squarespace and Weebly are easier to manage. They used to be very different. Sorry in the past. Nowadays I think they kind of like come together. I think the largest one is Wix is the most popular and is the one that has the largest amount of websites and therefore is the one that has broader templates, allows you to go from personal websites to business ones and it has some robust E commerce offering. The second largest I think is Squarespace. I consider Squarespace more design oriented. It's a platform where a lot of artists and designers and photographers and that kind of professional services gravitate towards. So it's a website builder that caters more to that kind of creative individual. And Weebly was acquired recently by Square, which is a payment processor company. So they are now more focused on E commerce. I will consider nowadays Weebly a closer competition to something like, like Shopify, which is 100% E commerce or it was born as a E commerce platform. And so any of the three will be a good fit. Honestly, probably the best thing to do is to try them out. The three of them, I think all of them have a free version that you can test and explore one of the free templates and see which one works best for you and you go from there. All right, very well. I think that for today's session I don't have any other comments or questions and I really appreciate guys you coming to this first event I will as I share on the email, I will do these events every week for no more than an hour and I will always come with a maybe two or three topics to discuss. If you feel like you want to be part of them, just chime in and we will have a conversation. And if on top of that you have any other questions that you want to discuss for the next session, feel free to either email me or just put it on the chat and I will try my best to answer.

Okay, I just. Yes, Emilio, I just want to make a comment. I think your topic you discussed today is excellent. I just can't fit it into our product which what makes sense but we'll get into that Monday maybe or whenever.

Yes, yes, no, definitely. I'm quite excited about exploring this with you. Of course for that exploration that we are going to do, I will dive deeply into your use case and we will go into recommended budget and that kind of stuff. Right. We really. And I have obviously an opinion of where you should start because in your case I think the market already have some demand in the form searches. So I will recommend start with Google for sure and just Maybe try out LinkedIn to just get an idea of what you can accomplish there. But yeah, we will discuss that next week for sure. Donald and I'll happy to see if we can move forward.

Great, thank you.

Awesome. Very well, thank you everybody. Have a great afternoon.

Thank you very much.

Thank you Leo. And talk to you next week.

Okay, sure.

Bye. Bye everyone.

Goodbye.