Facebook Ads versus Google PPC: Which Is Better For Your Photography Business?

Let’s say you have a little extra money this month and you want to take it and use it for advertising your photography business.

Should you invest in a Google PPC (pay per click) campaign? Or should you use it for Facebook Advertising?

On the surface, both have incredible backing and a lot of statistics to support them.

Facebook has 845 million active users, who as a whole post over 1 billion posts per day.

Google is said to have around 1 billion searches per day.

Which puts the two fairly equal when it comes to people you can potential market to. Yet that’s where the similarities end.

When you head to Google, you are actively looking for information. You head to Google with a question or thought in mind, ready to find the answer. You add in keywords looking for results. Which means you’re just as likely to click on an ad as you are natural results – if it provides you with the answer you are looking for.

With Facebook, they rely on “push” marketing when it comes to getting their ads in front of visitors. People on Facebook aren’t raising their hands asking for information; they are there to keep up with their friends. They want to hang out. Clicking on an ad means removing themselves from the conversation. And in many cases its not something they are willing to do.

So the two right off the bat are completely different. If you’re going to jump in an advertising campaign on either one, you have to approach them differently.

Google

With Google, you have to think like your customers. What are they searching for? What could you advertise to make them want to click on your ad?

Dig Deeper: How To Run A Successful Pay Per Click Campaign

Let’s look at an example to see how you should approach a Google campaign. We’ll assume we are a photographer trying to boost up our clientele for model portfolios.

Our average client will head into Google and use keywords like “model portfolio photographer” to find someone to help them. We want to be there. And if we know they are using the key phrase “model portfolio photographer”, chances are that’s exactly what they want. They need someone with the experience and expertise to help create a dynamic portfolio that will help get them modeling jobs.

So we know our ad should use keywords that showcase our talents as a model portfolio photographer. When I typed that into Google, this is what I found:

Google makes it easy to create as many ads as you desire, and focus each ad to select keywords and phrases. Yet we can see a wide variety of the results here simply don’t match up with this keyword. Would someone looking for a model portfolio really trust a dog photographer? So these are wasted ads. They aren’t targeted enough to attract attention. And more than likely won’t be clicked on. [Read more…]

How To Run A Successful Pay Per Click Campaign

Want access to instant potential clients? Nothing can be easier than working with Google Adwords, or Pay Per Click (PPC).

Google has offered its PPC service for many years. And because its been around for a long time, small time business owners think it may not be the place to start, or its too expensive for them to accomplish anything with it. That’s simply not true. PPC is still the best way to test out your offer, the easiest place to get instant results, and one of the least expensive way to advertise.

Dig Deeper: Is Google AdWords Your Solution To More Clients Dropping By Your Photography Business?

With PPC, you place money down for your ad at the time you create it. But the money you put into your account isn’t for the ad creation like it is with magazines. Instead its held in an account and will be deducted as people see your ad in Google and click on it. You have complete control over your funding – start with something low like $10 per day. When the $10 fee is reached, your ad won’t appear again until the next day.

You also have total control over what keywords you will be listed under. Appearing under a generic term such as “wedding photography” would be a big hit to your budget. But if you really niche it down, you can do pretty well. You will only be advertising to people that have thought hard about what they are looking for, and type in what they want.

So – if you know your customer and have been wanting to try PPC, lets walk through the steps necessary to create a dynamic campaign.

Identify the keywords you are selling to

Let’s say you are trying to increase your boudoir photography business, and decide to use PPC to find new customers. Start by finding out who your competition is. Head over to Google and type in your keywords and look at the ads. Head over to their sites to see what they offer, what the sites look like, and how they are approaching their customers. You can learn a lot with just a small amount of research. For example, below you can see the difference just by switching from the keyword “boudoir photography” to “boudoir photographer”.

Keyword research

When you’re writing up content for your site and SEOing your site, you are mainly concerned with keywords people would type in to find you. With PPC, you have more flexibility and have different match types – broad, phrase and exact. Broad matches are a great place to start, as this will help you figure out what people are searching for and how they are finding you. Once you are sure of what they are typing in and what is helping you find paying customers, switch to an exact match. You can also use them in combination to help eliminate phrases that provide no results at all. For example, boudoir can have a lot of connotations. By doing a broad match with “boudoir photography” you may also pull the keywords “boudoir pictures” and discover that line of thinking isn’t right for your business. So you simply add that as a negative keyword, and your ad will no longer show with that phrase. [Read more…]