I have worked with many clients from a wide range of industries over the past 6 years, to grow their businesses using strong and effective online marketing strategies.
I have learnt what works and more importantly what doesn‘t work.
Facebook Advertising has become a major part of my business, not only to grow my own global business but also those of my clients. Facebook Advertising allows you to target your audience accurately so that you are only paying for people to see your ads who are potential paying customers.
When consulting with new clients I often hear “Oh, I have tried Facebook Advertising but it just doesn‘t work for me“. But when I drill down into the details there is usually a common theme as to why they are aren‘t working. I am going to to go through those common mistakes in this article so that you can avoid wasting your ad budget and start to see results a lot quicker.
The number 1 mistake business owners make with their Facebook Advertising
Many times in business we hear stories about how other business owners are achieving success and all too often business owners jump in eagerly to test things without thinking about the strategy behind it.
This is exactly what happens with Facebook advertising.
Business owners are quick to assume that there is a quick way to get results with Facebook advertising but it is the same as any other marketing platform. To get results you need to have a strong strategy that has a specific objective. In addition to that your results need to be trackable so that you can determine exactly what you are getting in return for your ad spend.
Lets look at this in more detail.
Objective Of Your Advertising
Before choosing your strategy, you need to be clear on what your ultimate objective is for your business. Is it to sell more of your product? Is it to get more clients? Once you have decided on the objective than everything within your advertising strategy must be focused on this objective.
Target Market
Once you have your objective, you then need to be crystal clear on who your target market is. Such things as their gender, age, geographical location, interests, etc. This will make it easier when you start to use the targeting in your Facebook ads so that you you are only targeting your ideal target market. Your target market will also determine the language, tone and ultimately your offer in your advertising.
Test, Test, Test
This is where a lot of advertisers get it wrong. They have one image or one set of creative to use in the ads and because that is what they like the best they run with that. However, to get the best possible results at the best price you need to be continually testing. Testing different images, testing different creative, testing different audiences and testing different landing pages.
Test one variable at a time so that you can use the process of elimination to see what is actually getting you the better results. It is so important not to get complacent with this. Even the most experienced marketers continually test. Also keep in mind, that what works best today may also be different to what works next week or next month. So the testing process must be ongoing.
Tracking Your Results
You need to have the appropriate tracking in place so that you can monitor the exact results of your campaign and make the necessary adjustments if something isn’t working. You should be able to start to pinpoint exactly where you strategy is falling down and not getting the best results so that you can then make changes where needed.
If your goal is to get email optins or sales from your ads than you need to have the Facebook Pixel installed on your website and a custom conversion created so you can see exactly where the results are coming from.
Strategies
Your complete strategy should be determined by your ultimate goal but one thing that I highly recommend you keep in mind is making the most of all ads you run to get something tangible. So what do I mean? I very rarely recommend to clients that they run ads just to increase the likers of their Facebook page. This is building something that ultimately you don’t own. Instead you want to be driving people to your website where you can either capture their email addresses to market to them in the future or by using the Facebook pixel, to start building an audience of people that visit your website so that you can target them with future ads.
No matter what ads you are running, you will find that your Facebook page likers will naturally increase through people that see your ad and decide to like your Page.
More often than not, the best strategies include ads with different objectives over time to lead to the one ultimate outcome.
Let me give you an example:
A real estate agent has the ultimate goal of increasing their listings that they have for sale so their client is the home owners wanting to sell their property. However a strategy for their Facebook Ads wouldn’t be to just run ads to get more listings as this wouldn’t give them the best return on investment.
Instead they may have a free PDF or eBook that they could promote to home owners in their local area, that gives them information on what to do to make their house ready to put on the market for sale.
They are giving something of value to a prospective vendor who is going to be putting their house on the market in the future plus they are getting their email address so that they can keep in touch with them via email.
The real estate agent could also publish blog posts on their website providing valuable information about the process of selling a home and run ads to these posts to get more readers.
They could then run Facebook Ads with the final goal of getting the listing. However these types of ads need to target a warm audience, an audience that is already familiar with the company. So the audience they are targeting for these ads would include people on their database, who have visited their website and who have liked their Facebook page.
So even though the final outcome is to get more listings, the approach needs to be more strategic and detailed to get the best results.
I would love to hear your thoughts...