Help! My Facebook Ads aren’t working!
When your business starts running Facebook ads, there can be a whole laundry list of reasons why they may not be as successful as you’d want. Most of the time business owners don’t even realize they have these issues and they are convinced that ads are not for them. But I have found there are 3 common reasons why your Facebook ads aren’t working the way they should be.
Who are you speaking to?
The first reason your Facebook ads aren’t working is that you’re not clear on who your audience is. I know that you want to say you’ll sell your products and services to everyone that is willing to buy them, but the truth is you don’t. You want to be able to solve the pain points of a specific audience archetype to help them. This allows you to craft your messaging for them as well as narrow down that audience size. So you really want to take a look at who you want to attract to your business.
Let’s say you have a product designed for new moms. You wouldn’t want to run an ad to all the women between the childbearing ages, who have a newborn child. That audience could be over 200 million people!
But maybe you want to target organic moms
Or you want to target moms of a specific age bracket
Or moms who like a certain activity, like yoga.
If you haven’t done market research to see what traits your target audience has, this is an opportunity for you to touch base with your current customers to see where the common bonds are. This can be done with polls, questionnaires and general inquiries to them to see what their pain points are and what common interests they may all have. The more specific you can get on these targeting interests in your campaigns, the smaller and more targeted your audience will be, allowing you to reduce your ad spend and get better results for it.
Solving the Pain Points of your Audience
The second reason your ads might not be working is that you haven’t hit the pain points of your audience with your products and services. This is why it’s critical to understand your audience and their needs before you start running Facebook Ads.
Sometimes it’s as simple as a messaging problem that needs to be addressed in order for your ads to succeed. When creating your ads, testing out multiple types of copy can help you to see if the message is the issue, or the offer. Long form copy can be beneficial for more warmer audiences because they tend to be more invested in you already whereas a cold audience who doesn’t know anything about you might be more receptive to shorter copy.
But more often than not, the offer is out of alignment with their pain points and they don’t see how it can solve their problems. By using your customer lists to create polls, asking questions in groups to understand what they’re struggling with, and learning what their biggest desires are can help you to see where those gaps are and how you can make your products and services match their needs better.
Be very, very clear on what those pain points are and how your products and services solve them.
Don’t give up, you’re almost there!
Running Facebook Ads is an investment in your business, but they aren’t a “cure” for a bad offer. A lot of businesses think ads don’t work because they end up not getting the results they expected, or they “tried” it out only to have them not make any profits. You have to be willing to invest into ads. Plain and simple.
Ads are an amplifier of your business, they’re not going to fix a broken business.
You can run ads to an unproven offer, but it will require a lot more money and time to see if it converts. This means you should ensure your offers are actually converting well to your customers on an organic level before you start throwing money into advertising.
What a lot of businesses tend to do is go for the sale right away. Unless you have a fairly hefty budget, this isn’t always the best way to sell your products and services through ads. If you think of your audience as someone you want to date, you understand that a period of getting to know each other is necessary. Your audience needs to know, like and trust you before they turn around and purchase from you.
This can mean a portion of your ad spend will go towards brand awareness ads. These ads are designed not to go for the sale, but to nurture your audience. So while they are important, they tend to get shafted because they don’t produce heavy sales.
Your ads will actually give you important data needed to be able to see whether your products and services are hitting, and it can help you to determine where the broken parts of your business are. This can show you things like people are hitting your landing page but not clicking the link or they’re not taking action. That can actually show you that there is a disconnect somewhere on that page such as the messaging isn’t right, or the page doesn’t load fast enough, or the order form isn’t loading properly.
You have to understand that running Facebook Ads is all about testing offers and collecting data. They’re going to amplify whatever is currently happening in your business, good or bad and they need time to collect the data to prove an offer is converting or not.
If your ads aren’t working the way you thought they would, ask yourself, Am I speaking to the right audience, is my offer hitting the pain points of my customers and have I given the ads enough time to collect data to make an informed decision.
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