Marketers are obsessed with Facebook and Google. They spend more on Google than they do any other vertical and will continue doing so until 2023. Insider Intelligence report Found from November 2021.
Overreliance on these two advertising giants is a common problem in companies who come to me to help them grow. There are many reasons: scale, targeting, reporting capabilities, maturity, scale, targeting, reporting capabilities, expansive ecosystems that provide ways to reach customers, from brand awareness to retention and retargeting.
Marketers, in other words. can You can choose to only invest in Google or Facebook advertising to reach, engage, nurture and convert a large base of customers.
But Should they?
The Benefits of Staying with Google and Facebook
There are many reasons to continue investing in Google and Facebook. These include the Google and Facebook ecosystems (which include YouTube, Google Display Network, Instagram, and others). It is quite powerful.
1. Resources
Agencies and brands with limited budgets or staffing may find it difficult to divert resources from channels that generate the highest revenue. Although testing is essential, it’s much easier to test functionality on well-known platforms rather than in new ones.
2. Support for Accounts
For companies that spend a lot on Facebook and Google, they are generally able to get support from their reps. Except for a few exceptions, many emerging channels do not offer the same level of account support. This can make it difficult to navigate new user interfaces and learn their intricacies.
3. Channel Maturity
Google’s and Facebooks’ ad platforms have a much longer history than those of their competitors, like Reddit and Quora and Amazon and LinkedIn. Mature platforms offer tangible benefits, such as a wider range of targeting options, better auto-tuning algorithms, more advanced ad formats and reporting that allows advertisers to optimize their performance as volume and learnings rise.
4. Measuring
Google and Facebook offer channel analytics and measurement that are superior to smaller competitors. Despite the fact that both platforms have had difficulty tracking off-platform conversions since iOS14, user actions within the platforms’ wallsed gardens can be tracked reliably (with the right integrations).
The Cons of Staying with Facebook and Google
All of that being said, there are compelling reasons to diversify your channel mix. (In the next section we’ll discuss brand-specific conditions that should make diversification an easy decision).
1. Prices
Everybody advertises on Facebook and Google, which means that engagement costs can be very high.
Advertisers can potentially find cost savings in the macroeconomy. There are also many other benefits to early adoption of new channels and smart targeting of high value audiences where there is less competition.
2. Audiences
You’re not reaching Gen Z or younger Millennials if you stick with Google and Facebook. TikTok Snapchat, too. If you don’t explore Bing, you could be leaving out a large segment of Boomers who are highly valued.
No matter which demographic you identify as your most valuable users, there’s a good chance they don’t limit their online interactions to Google or Facebook. So think about how you can engage them on other platforms.
3. Overinvesting in Risks
Diversifying your investments is a smart idea. The same principle applies to advertising spending. Diversification can help you protect yourself from financial disasters that could result from overinvesting.
You might be surprised that this can happen to you. Do some research on the effects of the Google Panda Update in 2011Or, perhaps, a bit more recently, the impact iOS 14 had on Facebook advertisers. This ultimately led to Facebook’s first quarterly revenue decrease.
4. Diminished Returns
According to the law of diminishing returns, the greater your investment in something, the smaller the benefit you will realize. Simply put, increasing the amount of money that Google and Facebook spend on growth won’t work as well as exploring other avenues to grow.
Companies looking to grow should be prepared to pay more for Google and Facebook CPAs, or look at other avenues of acquisition.
Expansion Signposts
You should also be looking out for signs in your advertising campaigns that indicate it is time to consider other channels.
- With more volume, engagements lose value
- Creative testing has very little or no effect on performance
- Consistently high CPAs from users other than your core audience
- Demographic trends that are not related to your core channels (see Gen Z or TikTok above)
- Current business goals aligned more seamlessly with other channels
How do you start expanding into new channels?
If you’ve read this far you should be open to the idea channel expansion and diversification. What now?
Although I have touched briefly on channel options, the number of platforms available is growing by the month. BeReal It may be making headlines because of its rising prominence among Gen Z.
It is vital that you choose the right channels to test. You should also understand the role of each channel in the buying process. Also, you should have realistic expectations about the time it will take for the results to appear.
Any channel you have some visibility on and are able to do so again Use first-party data Nearly immediate direct-response data will be generated for any channel (including email, SMS, and retargeting), or any channel where you can assume inbuilt purchase intent (Amazon Shopping, Google Shopping). Every channel that you are introducing your brand/product for the first time (social, display, podcasts and native) needs to be evaluated using different KPIs. They will take longer to evaluate.
If you choose channels that are not aligned with your business goals or evaluate them with KPIs that do not match channel strengths, it will result in a lot false negatives. This can reduce your desire to find new growth paths and would be a disservice to your marketing campaigns, both in the short-term and the long-term.
You don’t have to hire a team of experts to start a new channel. There are many freelance professionals available in today’s market that can help you get started quickly and with minimal investment. You can create a test environment and set expectations for channel impact. This is crucial to determine whether or not a channel is viable.
An agency should have a lot of talent and be able make recommendations about new channels that would work best for your business.
Companies with long-term growth plans should consider expanding into new channels. But it’s much more. Your organization will be able to thrive in an industry known for its rapid pace of innovation if it has the right mindset and processes for testing adoption.