Facebook is the largest social media platform with over a billion monthly users and growing each day. If your business isn’t on Facebook you are missing out on potential customers. Almost half of all business who run Facebook ads feels like their ads are failing. There are ways to fix this problem so you aren’t just flushing money down the toilet. We are going to go over common reasons, businesses fail at Facebook Ads and how to fix it. Lets first go over the big picture to get a better understanding of the problem.
Based on a survey of over 4,000 small business owners, 50% feel that they aren’t getting a positive ROI from Facebook. This is a huge number that small business deal with but not larger ones. Here is what small businesses are getting wrong.
Problem #1 – Not Understanding Content Marketing
Facebook isn’t the problem, small businesses are. There is a reason half of all small businesses fail by year five. These reasons correlate to their failed marketing attempts.
One reason is lack of experience. If a small business has never ran Facebook ads, it isn’t like placing an ad in a newspaper. Small business must have a basic understanding of content marketing.
Running a successful Facebook ad consist of having multiple campaigns, each one with different objectives, and target audiences with different levels of intent. You need to look at campaigns as a whole. No need to worry because Facebook helps you each step of the way.
When running a Facebook ad you must decide on your marketing objection. Facebook can help you in all areas of business. Whether you have low sales, want to build campaigns, or spread brand awareness, Facebook allows you to achieve these goals and more.
Problem #2 – No Solid Plan, Strategy, or measurement system
A huge mistake in any part of business is not having a strategy and plan. The potential to grow your business with Facebook is limitless but if you have no clear vision of what outcome you want to achieve, you will fail.
Before getting started with Facebook , figure out what your goal is with the platform. Some of the top goals from small businesses are:
- Building awareness
- Attracting new customers
- Getting phone calls from new customers
- Increasing website traffic
- Improving customer retention
Once you have decided on your goal, figure out how you’re going to measure success. Be sure to maintain an active presence on social media, this will be beneficial as time goes on . This is especially important is you are a small business with very little social media presence.
The best way to start building your social media presence is to define your goals. Decide on a content strategy around your goals and desired brand personality. After, you’ll want to know who you’re talking to. Your potential customer base should be focused on the type of audience you want to attract on social media.Having a deep understanding of your audience will help you create more engaging content which will lead to more effective paid ads.
Once you have content flowing, you’ll want to start tracking your metrics so you can prove that your social media is successful. Most people expectations with facebook ads are way to high, the average conversion rate is 9.21% with these being the highest conversions of all social media platforms.
In order to determine if your plan is working, you must continuously test. Don’t worry about A/B testing unless you have at least 1,000 conversions. The companies with the highest conversions aren’t testing variables, rather they are testing different offers.
Problem #3 – Not enough time invested
Over half of all small business on Facebook are only spending less than an hour a week on their Facebook Marketing campaigns. Your ads won’t be shown amongst the other noise on Facebook if you aren’t posting frequently. A branded facebook page, post at least 8 times per day. Social media can’t be an after thought, you will fail with this way of thinking. A stale business page could actually hurt your business than no business page. Anyone that comes across your inactive page can wonder if you’re still in business or even a real business. Facebook needs to be done right or not at all. On the other end of the spectrum, posting too much can be overwhelming to people where they’ll start tuning you out. Your goal should be 3 to 8 ad post per person as long as your ad is running.
Problem #4 – Not enough money invested
According to a recent survey, 82% of small business owners have spent less than $50 on a Facebook Ad campaign and more than half never bought Facebook Ads at all. It’s understandable, it’s hard to throw money at ads you’re not sure if it’ll work. The good thing about Facebook is you can experiment with organic posts to see what resonates best with your audience before spending any money. Look at the engagement of your current posts. If your post is creating a lot of engagement, it may be a good post to run Facebook ads with, this way it’ll have a better chance at success.
The reach with organic post have been declining over time with Facebook algorithm changes. Regular post doesn’t give you the ability to target specific people who are more likely to click on them. With paid advertising, you can target people who are more likely to be interested in your brand based off interests that they have expressed in the past and other data that Facebook has collected. Relying on free, organic results today on Facebook will doom you to failure.
Problem #5 – Not Targeting The Right Audience
According to surveys, small business owners were able to get clicks and likes but had very little to no sales or conversions. The problem is small businesses aren’t asking themselves the right questions to determine the right target audience for Facebook Ads. If you’re choosing the most basic criteria to let Facebook know your target audience, you will fail. You need to use more powerful insights into the behaviors and interest of your ideal audience.
With this, you’ll be able to deliver your ads only to people most likely to want what you have to offer. Make sure not to just combine your demographics with every interest and behavior you can think of. You need to set the criteria for only a couple of behaviors at a time.If you go too broad, you’ll just end up spending a lot of money on audiences that don’t convert well. You need to be very specific with telling Facebook who you want to show your ads. Once you know who you’re trying to reach, you can work on the content that will resonate most with your audience.
Problem #6 – Stop trying to go for the cold sale
Socializing on facebook is the new way of selling.If your plan is to only push cold sales on social media, you might as well log off of Facebook. You want to start focusing on benefitting and giving content to your consumers before asking them for anything. Engage with your online community to get the most out of Facebook in positive ways. If you’re a physical store owner and only used to selling to people once they walk into your store, you’re used to the hard seling. On social media, this doesn’t work, you need to build trust before pushing a sale.Hence why you can’t get away with posting once a week. Facebook is known to work extremely well for retargeting.This is one of the best things about Facebook Ads. A retargeted audience is four times more likely to convert. One main reason for this is customers are already familiar with your brand and your product., this is no longer a cold sell.
Problem #7 – You Have To Understand Facebook is a business
Some small business owners surveyed said they don’t believe that paid posts will reach a larger audience. They want to see instant results. Small business owners need to remember that Facebook is a business. It isn’t a free place to hang out and socialize. Your relationship with Facebook needs to be treated the same as you would with any business partnership. You will only get a return if you invest in it. If you don’t provide profit to them in some way, then they have no incentive to help you succeed. If you want Facebook to work for you, you will have to change your viewpoint.Treat Facebook like a business and be willing to invest time, money, and some data to get amazing results.
Over half of all small businesses are failing with Facebook Ad. Remember it’s not Facebook Ads but the small business that is failing. There are proven results that work for both large and small companies. Treat Facebook like a business partnership.Make a strategy, determine what your goals are and how you’re going to measure your return. Be ready to invest more time and money into it if you want better results. Facebook wasn’t designed as a place to cold-sell, It is social media. Remember to be social and build relationships, these connections can still be profitable!
