Facebook advertising works for everyone - even you!

This past year I’ve seen thousands of dollars being spent on Facebook advertising for various clients and companies I mentor. I’ve also seen thousands of wasted dollars and frustration behind the lack, or perceived lack of ROI, from these ads.
Unfortunately it is not the Facebook advertising platform that is flawed, at least not completely (there is plenty they could be doing to make it better, but that’s for another post), but rather the mentality of the advertisers that needs the overhaul.
Excuse me while I channel my inner Grandma for the next paragraph.
In the olden days, back when Facebook wasn’t the number 1 advertising platform in the world, if you wanted your local product or service to be seen by the local masses the options available to you included:
- local magazines and newspapers (expensive)
- local pinboards in community centers (time consuming)
- word of mouth (if you were lucky)
- repeat business (if you were good)
- if you were flush, local TV or radio stations (expensive)
- designing, printing, distributing fliers through letter boxes (expensive and time consuming)
- email marketing campaigns (if you had a database of email addresses)
- sponsoring community events and community outreach (sometimes expensive and time consuming)
ALL of the above took time and money, lots of time and money, for an oft unmeasurable ROI.
Now from the comfort of your home office or office office you can select who you want to target, what you want to say to them and click GO for mere $$ a day. Yet, all too often I hear “stop the ad it’s not working.” Or I spent $100 and didn’t see the results. We have become conditioned to seeing our advertising spend as 100 clicks, costs you $50 and 5 people bought my product which cost $10 each so I made my money back but it wasn’t worth it for me… NO you are WRONG! It was worth it… even if 0 people bought your product it was worth it, and here’s why.
HOW ELSE ARE YOU GOING TO GET 100 PEOPLE TO CLICK THROUGH TO YOUR WEBSITE!! Stop thinking of it in terms of wasted clicks and money and start driving traffic to your website where you sell your product. THEN you need to optimize optimize optimize optimize. If 100 people click through and 0 people buy then something is WRONG! Maybe you are sending the wrong traffic to your website? Maybe it’s the price? Maybe it’s the way you display your product? Maybe it’s the way you take payments…? You obviously MUST keep optimizing and fixing until you hit that sweet spot. You have to completely SWITCH your mindset from $50 a campaign and let’s measure results — to — “I am willing to spend xxxx a month to drive traffic to my website.”
From that traffic to my website, I expect to see results and data that will help me measure what they are doing, and change my product to be more saleable. It’s called a product-market-fit and without it you are wasting your time. Seriously, for $5 a day (which is the minimum you can spend on an adset by the way) you are looking at $35 a week, which is $140 a month, which is ONLY $1,680 a year. If by the end of the year you are still not getting conversion then seek professional help! I doubt one local paper ad, or one printed and distributed flyer will get you as much traffic to your website or brand exposure for only $1,680. Once you nail that product market fit and start to see goal conversion, then you can up your budget and scale!
I will leave you with this thought!
When you stop your ads because you are not getting the click-through conversion you think you want it’s like saying you will take away the door to your shop because people come in and browse and don’t buy!Good luck and if you want training on how to set up and optimize Facebook advertising or want an agency to run your ads for you, ZoecialMedia is here for you. But please don’t come at me with small one-off budgets. They are so last year :)