Facebook Ads Mistakes

Facebook is a wonderful advertising platform.  It is established, has a wide audience, very flexible targeting and the ability to focus clearly on your target audience.

Saying that, Facebook isn’t a miracle working platform, you cannot just run a marketing campaign, set of ads and results will come.  Facebook needs a strategy, like all advertising.  Larger businesses can run awareness campaigns, they don’t need an immediate return, they are reminding people ‘they are there’; however, most small businesses need a much faster return on their advertising and marketing.  That is the reason why good strategic marketing can help and avoiding common mistakes can help maximise your profit.

Why leave money on the table for someone else to pick up?  Avoid these common 5 mistakes when planning your campaign.

If you have a page on Facebook and have done a page post, straight away you will have noticed an invite from Facebook to Boost your post, it may come with a recommendation along the lines of ‘boosting your post may reach x number of new people’. A lot of people use this, especially those without a marketing strategy. It’s quick, easy, low cost and when you see the number of people you can reach, it pulls you in. However, if you are serious about your business page, you will have an advertising strategy.

Your posts will be designed for a variety of reasons.

1. Designed to educate & update. You may have an interesting piece of information for your page followers, it maybe a product or service update. It’s there primarily to inform.

2. Designed to gain traction. You want more followers and engagement, so you create a post that is designed to draw in a response and encourage your followers to share and get others to ‘like’ your page.

3. Designed to be used as an advert. You have a product or service that you want to sell. You create a page post which has copy designed to draw a response, helping peoples needs, solving a problem.

All 3 options will trigger the ‘Boost’, but don’t be tempted by boosting your post. It generally does not get as much traction as a well thought out and planned advertising strategy.

Not having an advertising strategy to go with your advert can lead to leakage, lost money in advertising by not capturing and following up with your leads.  A great advertising strategy is the key to maximising your advertising revenue.  A bad advertising strategy is either using the boost button or having a great advert with no follow up capacity.

When you start an advertising campaign it will ask you what you want to pull through from your business page; it could be a video, image carousel, or a post you have done.  If you remember option 3 from above, it wasn’t just an advertising post to your followers, you are now going to ‘target’ new people interested in your product.  So you spent a lot of time creating a brilliant advert, you now are spending some thought in creating your ‘marketing campaign’.  [You can read about creating a marketing campaign in another article or ask our team for a facebook marketing checklist using the form blow].

You now set your budget, allow Facebook to run your campaign and ‘bill’ you for advertising, and guess what, some people respond!  A campaign with a laser focus on the targeting will likely bring in a much bigger response (audience targeting is one of the keys to having a successful campaign).  How they respond depends upon what you set in your campaign, it could be a phone call, visit a website page, respond via Facebook Messenger and more.

Now how do you follow up on visitors?  How do you respond to people on messenger?   How do you deal with the influx of phone calls?  You need a ‘funnel’, essentially, a system designed to capture their information and then follow up with different touch points (email, phone call, page/group post).  If you are directing people to a page because you want them to sign up for an item, buy a product, how do you follow up with page visitors who don’t sign up?  If people go to your shopping cart but don’t buy, how do you follow up with them?  If someone manages to sign up for a ‘free offer/trial’ how do you follow up with a system of communications encouraging them to ‘buy’ what it is you want to guide them to.

There are tried and tested systems of following up, capturing visitors and engaging with your prospects and encouraging them to become customers.

By not having a system into place you will loose the traction and potential sales that you wanted by spending advertising money in the first place.

Now you are busy, you have worked hard in creating an advert on your page with a slick video and posted it out to your members. You have created a well thought though marketing campaign on Facebook. Wisely you have developed a good funnel with the help of our funnel building guide. Now, you can leave your campaign to run and get back to focusing on the work of your business, hoping that this campaign will bring new business in for the tomorrow and on wards.

Wrong. If you leave an ad just to run without regular reviews it will suffer from ad fatigue, this is where a regular constant exposure to an ad, may keep your brand presence in front of your target audience, but the response rate drops. This term is know as ROAS ‘Return On Ad Spend‘ and this starts off with your campaign, it can grow as the ad becomes more effective and then fatigue hits and it drops, you then get a lower ROAS and each conversion (sale, client, positive response) starts to cost more as a portion of your advertising cost.

So, you need to be watching your adverts on a semi-regular basis, look at your statistics at the quality ranking, conversion ranking or landing page ranking; monitor them and when you start to see a downturn, act.

You don’t need to turn off your advert, maybe change the image/text, video, differentiate the offer (especially if you didn’t A/B test first) or change your audience.

Can you leave it to run, yes. Should you let it run without reviewing regularly, not unless you want to loose financial effectiveness.

Facebook has a number of marketing tools available to advertisers and marketeers. To not take advantage is to loose sales opportunities for both re-marketing, targeting profitable audiences and far more.

Re-targeting

You can place adverts right in front of users who have visited your website, landing page or offer. You can put up reminder adverts, reminding a visitor why they visited you, by putting your brand again in front of them with a different offer. Testimonial adverts, work very well, quoting others who have used your service/product and how it helped them and how good you are! A good marketing agency will run these in a strategic campaign over a period of time and measure effectiveness.

There are other tools you can use that can create highly effective campaigns. You can contact our team using the form below to ask for the Facebook Ads Checklist.

Setting up Facebook Pixels is a key marketing tool that no business owner should ignore. Anyone with a business and no website is missing out on the opportunity to capture more sales.

When you register for a Facebook Business Manager account you can generate a bit of code from Facebook which goes onto your website (a bit like putting Google Analytics on your site). Anyone with a Facebook account who then visits your website can then be tracked

Facebook is a powerful marketing tools, in other articles we look at 5 more mistakes people can make with their Facebook marketing activities and other ones with 5 insights into making a Facebook marketing campaign effective!

Sign up on the right to get new features, search the tags for Facebook if you want to read about other reports with a Facebook element.

Do You Want Help With Anything Mentioned Above?

These are some of the key areas mentioned above, if you have any questions, please use the chatbot, social media contact (footer) or form below:

Facebook pixels?

How to target your audience?

Prospect re-targeting?

Funnel building tips?

Facebook marketing checklist?