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Facebook Ads: A Love/Hate Relationship
I have a love-hate relationship with Facebook Ads. That’s mostly because Facebook continually changes their own algorithms and rules regarding advertising. They also constantly adjust the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) they use to measure the success of advertising and ultimately charge you for. Those are things that I dislike with a passion.
The things that I love? Facebook is a great equalizer for the start-up, for the entrepreneur and small and mid-size business to cut through the clutter and the conversation. On Facebook, you can feel as if you are on equal footing with the corporations that are dropping millions of dollars to reach the desired audience in order to promote your business and, ultimately, sell those products or services. That, I love.
Before social media, the great equalizer was the Yellow Pages, where companies competed on the basis of services they offered. But Yellow Pages were static. They couldn’t respond to a customer. They couldn’t let you talk to your friends. Facebook Ads remedy this by allowing its viewers to freely engage in threaded conversation as part of the ad.
If the customer base you are trying to reach is in one of the demographic groups that frequents social media, you need to promote your business there. Of course, some demographic groups need not apply. Let’s say you’re marketing a retirement plan — social media’s probably not where you want to go. The same goes for home-lending. Those business needs require privacy and expert help — they’re not subjects you want everyone to know you’re seeking information about. The companies that deal with those matters are not discussing those subjects on social media accounts. But any medium to small business that is selling public products or services through a website should absolutely have a social presence — Facebook, at minimum, if not both Facebook and Instagram, and they should be leveraging Facebook advertising.
How to Think About Facebook Ads
When I say “leverage,” that doesn’t mean you should throw a random amount of money at advertising every week, but really focus on the key things you want to communicate about your product or service. Who do you want to reach? Who do you want to motivate to make a purchase and become a lifelong repeat customer? Once you make those determinations, you can craft content that will resonate with the targeted people. Once you determine how much you want to spend over a year, then you can dedicate a certain percentage of that money every month to reach those people through a Facebook Ad or series of Facebook Ads.
One thing that is important to advertising on Facebook is to have infrastructure set up to handle the potential traffic you might have as a result of your promotion. You don’t want to attract more people to your Facebook page without having someone to assist in dealing with the added attention. It’s like advertising lemonade for sale on a hot summer day, but not having anybody around to operate the stand.
You don’t want to start advertising on Facebook without having a couple of key people in place. Where a lot of companies think they can skimp and try to do it with one person instead of two. But your campaign should always be running. There should never be a point in time when you’re not running a Facebook Ad. What you need is one person who is focused on creating and analyzing your advertising and another to be available to respond to questions and requests.
Adequately Staffing a Facebook Ads Team
Ideally, the first person on your Facebook Ads team should have an analytical background — a marketer, an advertising writer, someone who understands cost-per-click or multilevel marketing — and is able to analyze the results of a campaign and can report on it. The second person is needed because, unlike a Yellow Pages ad that just sits there waiting for a physical response during regular working hours, a great number of people may be responding to your ad post most any time of the day or night. And, the expectation of people on the internet is to be promptly served with an answer.
Your immediate response lets potential customers know that you are listening, that they are going to be taken care of. That, in turn, endears them to you even more. You can’t have the person who creates and analyzes your social data also be responsible for dealing with all the contacts you’re going to be making — creation, analysis and response are all priority issues. If you fail at one, you’ll fail all three. It really is going to take dedicating two people a minimum of 30 hours a week to be running a good, successful ad campaign at first. And, as you grow, it may take more.
This prospect is something that initially scares companies who are just beginning a social media campaign. That’s two salaried positions that get factored into your cost of advertising. But if you’re going to be successful, you have to consider it in the long run. If I have these people in place and I execute the strategy well and I have a predetermined, dedicated budget, how much money could that potentially bring in? How much new business do I need to bring in to justify having them? Work from that position, knowing that you need to determine these things.
For many brands, I will typically recommend that they approach advertising in a three-prong way. First, you should have some money dedicated every month to awareness. That’s vital for a business — they need to get in front of people so people will recognize the name. Second, have a dedicated piece of your advertising for driving traffic to your site. Third, focus on the thing that gets you sales. Money from sales will keep all the pipelines going and feed the costs of those first two prongs. It requires having the right infrastructure to be able to focus on creating the right advertising for those three prongs and analyzing how they’re performing.
For any company, determining the amount of money you’re willing to put into the campaign is crucial. That may take many meetings and many conversations across many teams, but you should have that in place before you start. An open-ended approach usually leads to frustration and failure. Early on in the campaign, beware of the easy success. It’s easy to get excited about an ad that seems to be performing well, making you want to increase the spend in order to double-down on that success, but that’s not how the math works in the real world. Piling on extra money doesn’t guarantee you’ll receive an order-of-magnitude in returns. Many times, you will see diminishing returns. There is a shelf life to advertising. Even the most viral, successful ad you create is going to have a short shelf life. It is difficult to avoid the temptation to simply throw more dollars at a success, thinking that more dollars will equal more success. It simply doesn’t work out that way.
Money, in and of itself, does not equal success. That’s why I urge companies to devote a finite amount of money to social media campaigns that are spread out over a year. From that finite amount of money, it is divided through the year as a specific amount of money a month. As you spend this money and run ads, you are always analyzing the success of the ads you have presented to the public. From this analysis, you can start to rejigger your investment. For instance, if you have a breakout ad, one that performs much better than the others, you can take money away from the ads that aren’t performing and push it to the ones that are, but your total spend for the year has not changed. Just stay true to the dollars you have committed at the beginning when first thinking about getting into social media advertising. It keeps you honest. It also makes it easy to measure throughout the year what your spend looks like, what your performance looks like and what your growth looks like from a return-on-investment perspective.