With over 1.59 billion monthly active users, Facebook stands as the largest social platform in the world. Good on you, Facebook. For us, the important note is that Facebook users are the most responsive to marketing campaigns on social platforms. They are more likely to click on an outbound link than users of any other social platform. If you’re going to run ads, you need to consider Facebook.
That said, it is possible to get it wrong when advertising on Facebook. The sheer size of the Facebook community means that you have strong chances of running the wrong type of campaign. Here are 5 mistakes you could make while marketing on Facebook; and I’m here to tell you that some of them have the ability to totally ruin your marketing campaign. Trust me. I’ve been there.
1. Being Too Salesy
Your Facebook audience knows if a post is sponsored. Facebook tells them. You will be doing yourself a great disservice if you sound like you want to force them to get the product. People are on Facebook to connect with other people. They are there to find out what’s going on. They want to learn something new and discover something interesting. Offer to help your audience first. Allow the sales part to follow. Your post can be used to educate them or it can be in the form of a question. Surprise them or keep them in suspense. Let it be a mix of different things. What you shouldn’t do is blatantly sell to them. People are tired of seeing outright promotional ads. They could easily hide it from their timeline and block your posts from reaching them in the future.
2. Having Too Broad of an Audience
One of the first things you should decide when getting into business is your target audience. The demographic you’re serving should inform your every operation. For instance, you can’t run an online marketing agency and expect all your clients to come in through the doors of your physical office. An online marketing agency needs to be mostly based online. The same goes for your marketing efforts. You should decide right from the onset, who you will be targeting with your ads. You should decide who your ideal customer will look like. Is he a 45 year old man with a wife and 2 kids? Is your ideal customer a 50 year old woman who makes $300,000 annually? These are questions you need to answer. You can end up with multiple “ideal customers” and that’s fine. That simply means you should have different campaigns to satisfy the different segments of your audience.
3. Killing Winning Ads Too Fast
This would be a good place to explain what a campaign means. A campaign is simply a series of actions taken to achieve a particular goal. This means that a marketing campaign is a series of ads that are meant to help you reach your goal – this could be more sales, greater exposure or greater awareness for a cause. When you launch a campaign, you should expect some ads to flop while others will meet or exceed your expectations. I call those that flop “Losers” while the others are “Winners.” Too often, I have seen people pull the plug on winning ads. Why would you want to stop promoting an advertisement that is guaranteed to make you money? I cannot for the life of me understand this move. What you should be focusing on is how to spend more on winning ads, not less. If it takes you $100 to make $120 (which leaves you with a $20 profit) why don’t you increase your ad spend? If you increase you ad spend five times, you would easily bring in $100 in profit. The way to go is to find a winning ad and to scale it as fast as possible.
4. Not Getting Rid of Losing Ads Early Enough – Stop the Insanity
In the same vein, I have also come across people who keep running losing ads with the hope that something will happen. Such people might have to wait for a long, long time. Numbers don’t lie; and you can’t improve your numbers simply by doing the same losing thing over and over and over waiting for a different outcome. That’s the very definition of insanity. If you are certain one of your ads is a loser, kill it immediately. If you don’t kill a losing ad, you are killing your business.
5. A Weak Conversion Strategy (or none at all?)
Another mistake I often see is money spent on Facebook Ads Campaigns without a conversion strategy in place for the leads that are brought in. You cannot build a business without having a strategy for converting new visitors to customers. You can’t keep looking for a new audience each time you want to promote an ad. You might as well set your money on fire. If people don’t know you, it can be difficult for them to buy from you. Your best bet is to get yourself or your product in front of people as many times as possible. You need a funnel, a system that starts with people giving you information like a name, email, or phone number. Those that reach the tail end of this funnel will buy from you. The good thing about a funnel is that the buying process can be repeated multiple times since you already have their details.
