Today’s topic is Facebook Ads, and the top three mistakes I see people making when doing Facebook Ads.

This episode is sponsored by my eBook – Ultimate Beginners Guide to Facebook Ads – go to www.socialmediaandmarketing.com.au/ads to get it now.

Facebooks Ads can be so highly targeted that we can put out ad in front of the people who we know will buy our product, or do whatever action we wanted them to do – whatever our call to action in the ad was.

They are quite brilliant and as marketers – and if you’re in business, you’re in the business of marketing – we haven’t ever had access to such targeting EVER.

BUT, Facebook Ads (or Instagram, LinkedIn, Google) can be a MASSIVE suck of your hard-earned money and it happens really really quickly if you haven’t got your eye on the prize.

So that what this blog post is about, the things you really need to keep your eye on, know, and do before taking on a social media ad. And frankly, some points relate to any marketing/advertising in general.

Even if you’ve never done a Facebook Ad or social media ad before – read on, there’s some gold for you!

Facebook ads are powerful – but also a great suck of your hard-earned money if you’re not careful and don’t know what you’re doing.

There are three mistakes I see online marketers (yep, again, which is you – no squibbing, if you’re on social media you’re an online marketer), make constantly with their ads.

And, to be honest, this first one I see people make offline as well.  And it’s a critically important point to remember!

1. START WITH THE END IN MIND

This is not just another quote or motivational saying.

If you know the goal, you know the road to get to the goal.

If you don’t know the goal – then how on earth will you know if it’s been successful or not?

Say you decide to run a Facebook Ad for 5 days with a budget of $10 per day, and after that 5 days you have x result. If you haven’t set any goals at the start of what you wanted to achieve, how do you measure that $50 bucks success or failure?

But let’s go a little deeper with Facebook ads and starting with the end in mind.  If you’ve ever looked at Ads Manager, you’ll know the first thing you need to do when setting up your Facebook Ad is choosing an objective/outcome/goal.

If you haven’t got the end goal in mind, then how are you going to choose or even start your ad – you’re straight up stuck at the beginning.

Add into the mix the fact that Facebook gives you 11 objectives to choose from (actually, 13 if you count that engagement has three different options).

So, this is mistake number one.  The thing that trips so many online marketers up.

And before we go onto number two, just wanted to make the point that the goal doesn’t always have to be money – like if I spend $50 on ads I will get $100 into my business.  The goal might be around increasing subscribers to your email list or get x amount of people through your business’ door or have x amount of people engage with my ad.

WHATEVER THE GOAL – JUST MAKE SURE YOU SET ONE!

2. THE WRONG MESSAGE TO THE WRONG AUDIENCE AT THE WRONG TIME

That’s an extremely negative statement isn’t it – sorry!  But I was going for dramatic!

Lots of Facebook Ads experts talk about targeting.  Making sure you know who you are targeting and that you know your ideal client avatar and who your who is – and trust me, it crucially important but that’s not the mistake I wanted to highlight here.

Something not enough Facebook Ads experts talk about is where your ideal client sits when it comes to their buyer journey with you.

If you know your avatar, the people you’d like to attract more of in your business because you know if you get more of them, then your business will soar, but those avatars still sit in three different audience types:

• Cold audience
• Warm audience, and
• Hot audience

COLD TRAFFIC: These are the people who have never heard of you or your brand.  They have had no interactions or dealings with you at all – ever!

WARM TRAFFIC: These people at least know who you are.  They may have liked your Facebook Business Page or followed you on Instagram. They have some idea of who you are and what you offer.

HOT TRAFFIC: These people are your fans! They engage with you on social media, they are on your email list, or they may have already purchased something from you.

So even though you know your avatar, you need to make sure you are serving the right ad with the right call to action to them where they are in the buyer’s journey – the buyers’ journey being from learning who you are, to buying from you.

There’s no use serving an ad to complete cold traffic saying “click here to buy my $1000 program” – they have literally no idea who you are or what you do or if you can serve them whatsoever.

To a completely cold audience you might be better off serving them a video ad with some amazing information based value to get them to watch it, to then perhaps retarget them with a follow up ad with a different call to action, because now they at least know who you are and a little of what you do and your expertise.

So, to spin my very negative heading of “The wrong message to the wrong audience at the wrong time” on its head, you need to make sure you are serving the right message to the right audience for where they are in their buying journey with you.

3. CHECK YOUR ADS!

This third mistake is so common it makes me want to cry – literally cry.  I absolutely know what it takes to make money/earn money as a small business owner, the highs the lows, and it’s gutting when I see this hard earned cash go to lining Mark Zuckerberg’s pocket instead of the business owners.

Marketing has never really looked like this before.  Never have we really had the opportunity to place an ad somewhere and then once published, go back and tweak or fix or stop altogether.

If place an ad in a newspaper – once you’ve approved the draft, that’s it – you can try and measure the metrics or outcomes from it (because you’ve started with a goal – with the end in mind) but you certainly can’t change it, well not unless you want to republish it and repay!

So, we aren’t in the habit of checking what we’ve done when it comes to marketing and paying for marketing – but we need to start.

SOCIAL MEDIA PAID MARKETING IS NOT A SET AND FORGET STRATEGY!

When you place an ad on Facebook, Google, Instagram, LinkedIn, wherever online, please oh please, go back about 48-72 hours later depending on the platform and targeting required, and check it.  Make sure it’s hitting the goals you set for it, make sure it’s working and if not, switch it off altogether or edit it and set it going again.

I say you need to give it some time – 2 to 3 days depending on targeting.  Take Facebook ads for instance, you have asked it to target women aged between 26-54 who live in a 50-mile radius of your business, who like cats and dogs but hate (for example) birds!  You need to give the algorithm a couple of days to find those people – the more targeted, the more time needed perhaps – however, definitely don’t wait longer than 72 hours.

Not checking your ads is the best way of lining someone else’s pocket!

So please promise me, if you undertake an online paid marketing strategy, that you’ll set yourself an alarm to go back and check in with that ad after a couple of days to see how it’s performing.

If you’ve never run a Facebook Ad before OR you have with no success OR you simply get confused every time you try and create engaging, lead generating, sales driven Ad copy then, please head to www.socialmediaandmarketing.com.au/ads and go download my eBook the Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Facebook Ads.

These little critters are so powerful.  It’s my goal to get every small business owner with a vision to grow their business, either online or offline to see the power in this type of marketing.

The targeting capabilities are amazing, you get to tweak what you’ve done and change it if necessary, as your ad is running. AND (my favourite part) you learn so much about your ideal client and their challenges etc, by the huge array of metrics available to you once you start running successful ads.

I get it though, this can be scary. If you’ve ever had a look at them or run an ad with limited or no success, it’s because the choices are endless and if you hadn’t done your research, it’s so easy to get wrong.  Not to mention that “Boost” button is so prevalent and makes life so much easier (or so you think!) that it’s easier just to press that and put some money behind it.  We need to stop that by the way ….

So that’s why at the end of August 2019, I launched my first digital course, Facebook Ads for Beginners (linked here: https://socialmediaandmarketing.com.au/shop/facebook-ads-for-beginners/) And when I say it’s for beginners, I mean beginners!  If you’ve never run a Facebook Ad, and you don’t even have an Ads Manager account, or you’ve tried before and got confused and gave up or wasted your money or all you do is boost – then this is where you need to start.

Got questions?  I’ve got answers! Let’s continue this conversation in my Facebook Group – Like Minded Business Owners. Not joined yet.  Well welcome … let’s do that!

This blog is a transcript of an episode of my podcast Small Business Made Simple – to check that podcast out and listen in go to www.socialmediandmarketing.com.au/podcast