Which is most effective, social media marketing or Pay Per Click? This is probably one of the most hotly debated issues in the marketing world at the moment, but it doesn’t need to be. Both methods have their place, they are just very different places.
Pay Per Click Marketing
PPC campaigns have you competing to get your message in front of an audience by agreeing to pay X amount of money for every person who actually clicks on a link presented as or alongside their search results. Presumably, at least a few of those people read or interact with your marketing effort. This can be quite powerful, especially if the clicker is searching for information to make a buying decision or is actually shopping at the time.
However, the technique is in many ways self-limiting – all you get is a search result. This is usually a clickable link and a bit of text – no visuals, not engaging interactions, no real marketing at all unless and until they click the link.
Social Media Marketing
There are lots of social media marketing techniques, but we’ll look at ‘paid social’ because it is a better parallel to PPC. In a paid social marketing scenario, Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn or whatever decides what posts to put in front of you based on your apparent interests and what you interact with most.
It is easy to use that machinery to target a very narrow band of people and pay to put a message designed just for their segment in front of them. It is similar to PPC, but they get more than a sterile link and 50 characters of text on most platforms. They get a hint of the interactions that await if they read deeply and start clicking.
An example in practice – this very debate
Not to get too ‘meta’ on you, but you are participating in both a social media marketing campaign and a pay per click marketing campaign right now. By reading this.
The fact that you clicked a link to arrive here (on a search engine, on a web page, or even off an email, depending on your provider) makes putting links like this in front of you more desirable and this more expensive in terms of PPC campaigns.
If you are viewing it on social media, or if social media formed a part of your journey here today (it probably did), then your interaction with it has been noted as well, and you will be shown more similar things in the future – some paid and some free.
These algorithms and engines want to give you the content you prefer, and want to make a buck at the same time. The end result of both processes is that you actually do get to see the type of information you were looking for, and make the kind of interactions you wanted. Everyone involved gets what they want, and is happy. If your company had been a part of the process, you could be making money making people happy too.
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