Why Facebook Ads Fail for Small Business
If you want more leads and sales for your small business . . .
. . . eventually you're gonna need a Facebook ad.
Here's the hard truth: most Facebook ads fail. Especially right now, during COVID. According to a recent Harvard Business Study article, trial-and-error is a huge part of getting new leads during the pandemic. No one has done this before, so we've all got to run creative experimentation in our advertising.
Bookmark this blog post: you'll learn WHY most of our clients' Facebook ads fail (including three training videos you can use to fix your ad issues), and you get a blueprint for how to fix them to get leads & sales faster.
#1: YOU'RE USING THE WRONG FACEBOOK AD TYPE
STOP boosting posts from your Timeline: those ads never produce results. You're limited to general audiences that simply aren't profitable enough.
A boosted post is a simple ad type, and one I recommend IF you create it from Ads Manager. You can create an Engagement Ad, promoting an existing post, and select a far more profitable audience than you can from the Timeline.
Watch this training webinar showing you the different types of ads for small business and which ones I recommend (this was a $297.00 webinar for Socialmediaonlineclasses.com members):
#2: YOU'RE TARGETING THE WRONG AUDIENCE
Most of our clients start advertising to a local audience (if they're brick and mortar). When they try taking their product/service national or international, they target an audience based on interests related to their brand. Those audiences are not terrible choices, but they're not the best.
Why? Because they are cold audiences, meaning they've never, ever heard of you. So you have a much larger hurdle to clear to gain their trust. Instead, advertise to warm audiences: people who have heard of you and already trust you. Warm audiences are your website visitors, email subscribers, and Facebook fans, and they're far more profitable. These are the audiences we always start with for our clients.
Learn how to build your most profitable audiences in this webinar (this was a $297.00 webinar for Socialmediaonlineclasses.com members):
#3: NO ONE CARES ABOUT YOUR OFFER
This is probably the most challenging reason to understand: your offer is what you're giving away or promoting in your Facebook ad. Most of the time, your offer isn't compelling enough for people to hand over their email or pay for it.
Your offer might have worked great when you were advertising locally, but failed when you expanded to a larger, cold audience. Remember, local people (warm audience) already know you and trust you, so they're more likely to take you up on your offer. A national or international audience (cold audience) has never heard of you, so you have to make them:
- care about your offer
- trust you
- be convincing enough for them to stop their FB scroll, click on your ad, and give you their email
Those are BIG goals for an offer to people who have never heard of you. So your offer has to be amazing & convincing.
Learn how to create a foolproof offer — to the right audience — by watching this webinar (this was a $297.00 webinar for Socialmediaonlineclasses.com members):
#4: YOU GIVE UP TOO EARLY
It takes time and experimentation to develop a winning Facebook ad, and that's even harder during a pandemic. For most of our clients, we recommend split-testing their first Facebook ad, so we can identify winning elements that work with their audiences.WHAT YOU SHOULD DO NOW
Done well, Facebook ads are the most affordable & effective advertising small businesses will ever do. Here's how to fix yours:
- Watch the webinars included with this post ($891.00 worth of training provided with my compliments).
- Still have questions or need help? Book a free strategy call with Maria Peagler here.
- Want to learn from our experience? Review our case studies here.
- Want to learn how to do your digital marketing yourself? Read popular articles on our blog.
