It can be overwhelming, especially if you’ve never invested in ads before. Personally, I’m a lover of all things Pinterest and Promoted Pins, but in an effort to diversify my own knowledge and experience, I decided to take a fabulous course, and add Facebook to my list of services.
Since having run multiple Facebook campaigns, it’s really given me some great insight into what works for each platform, and a list of some important things to think about before deciding to invest your ad spend into a platform.
All that’s to say, each niche is unique, and your audience will also interact differently. But once again, this is a good jumping-off point!
Promoted Pins vs. Facebook Ads: How are they different?
Let’s start basic, girl.
Pinterest is a visual search engine and Facebook is a social media platform. So people very clearly use each differently, and just as people use them differently the way that they are set up and the overall strategy for using and optimizing each is very, very different.
So let’s get back to my list of important factors to think about when deciding on which platform to invest in…
1. Audience
It’s important to know if your audience is actually on the platform, and using it.
Let’s be honest, most of the world is on Facebook and Pinterest doesn’t have nearly as many users as Facebook does. Do you know for sure your audience is on Pinterest? Do you have an organic strategy with data to back this up?
People interact with each platform differently.
Since Pinterest is a visual search engine, it’s used a lot for inspiration and discovery. However, a lot of people also go to Pinterest with a problem that they need to solve! On the other hand, people go to Facebook to be social, so if you’re investing money in ads, you’ll need to stop people’s scrolling.
2. Budget
I’ve heard time and time again that people think Pinterest is more expensive. Do you have proof and data of this? If so, fair enough, if not… stop poo-pooing my Promoted Pins, girl!
From my experience, Pinterest is less expensive, and not to mention… after your campaign wraps up, what do you think happens to that pin? Yeah, it continues to live on Pinterest, and can still bring in leads and/or sales!
- When I get on calls with clients, I tell them that I do not advise spending less than $10/day on a Consideration campaign. Otherwise, you’re really not giving Pinterest enough latitude to work with.
- Budget also heavily depends on the objective of your campaign, as well as if the audience you’re targeting is business to business or business to consumer.
As I mentioned, most of my experience has shown that Facebook ads tend to be more expensive, however, you also have to think about the quality of the lead. You might be paying more, but are you more likely to get the sale from your Facebook lead or Pinterest lead?
I’ll get more into this in a bit. In the meantime, I’ll just leave you hanging with that thought.
- If you’re going for leads, I’d say at least a $20-$50 daily budget for Facebook. If you were wanting to just have a few awareness campaigns running in the background, and receive traffic or engagement, you could definitely go with a lower budget. However, these lower-budget types of campaigns aren’t as aggressive, and their objective isn’t really for the signup or sale.
So you once again need to really think about your objective and why you’re running ads.
3. Timeline
Promoted Pins are newer! They take much longer, like way longer, to optimize than Facebook. I actually require that my clients run campaigns for at least 30 days. You could do 14-21 days; I mean heck, you can do whatever you want!
However, if you aren’t running them for long enough, then they’re just basically optimizing as you’re turning them off. This means you never really get a chance to hone in on targeting, what’s working, scaling the budget, etc.
Facebook ads have been around a lot longer than Promoted Pins. They optimize much faster, and you can make changes to them much sooner than you can Pinterest campaigns.
Want to run a Facebook ad for 5 days? Perfect, no problem.
4. Conversions
Okay, so I started to touch on this earlier. I’ve seen, read, and also experienced different scenarios where one platform a client is getting much cheaper leads, sometimes it’s Pinterest, and sometimes it’s Facebook.
There are so many factors that play into this, and I don’t need to give you every nitty-gritty detail. I’m here to give you some important takeaways before deciding where you want to invest.
Let’s talk about Pinterest. So Pinterest is a great way to get top-of-funnel leads. Top-of-funnel leads are those people that are basically in the infancy stages of the decision-making process, and if what you’re offering is what they want and need.
Pinterest is great for top of funnel because there’s so much searching and discovering going on. That’s not to say that if someone has a problem and you’ve got their solution, they won’t take immediate action, but this is a generalization of how people use it and what type of leads to expect.
Facebook, and this goes back to their ads being around much longer, is much stronger and more powerful with retargeting. So what does this mean in regards to the sales funnel I was just mentioning?
It’s really great for closing the lead, so people in that final point in their decision-making process where they actually take the final action you’re asking them to. You can also retarget on Pinterest, and there are definitely some great strategies to apply there. However, I think there’s a lot of power in actually using both platforms together.
Promoted Pins vs. Facebook Ads: which platform do I use?
We started with the basics, let’s end with the basics.
Don’t even worry about which platform to run ads on if your funnel is garbage. Not going to sugarcoat it, girl. Seriously, if you have issues with your funnel, or it’s not already converting well, guess what? Putting money behind it is not going to change that!
If you do have a funnel that’s converting well, it’s important to understand that there are different strategies that play into both platforms, and even if your offer converts well on one platform, doesn’t mean it necessarily will on both, unfortunately.
Do you have a brand new funnel?
Using ads is a super quick way to give you important information about where the bottlenecks are within it! Then, you can use that information to tweak it, so you have a funnel that’s converting and helping you achieve your goals.
If you have a funnel that does convert…in the end, it’s all about testing and optimizing the campaign performance when appropriate.
Allowing the campaign to run long enough that you can make informed decisions about what tweaks you can make, and then analyze the final data after the campaign wraps up.
Feeling overwhelmed about which route to go?
Click here to book a consultation call today. We can chat about your goals and discuss the next best steps for your business!
You can also grab my Promoted Pin Essential Guide for more help!
