What do I need to know before running Facebook Ads for my Business?

Spending money on Facebook Ads is a logical step to growing your revenue and increasing your exposure. But there are three questions you really need to ask yourself before deciding to put any kind of investment towards advertising your business.

What am I selling in my Facebook Ads?

This one seems pretty simple. “Do I have a product or service or offer to sell?”

Yes, there are ads you can run that aren’t based on selling outright, but if you don’t have an end result that you’d like your audience to come to, it may not be the best thing to run ads to promote your business. 

On the other hand, just because you have something to sell, doesn’t mean putting money behind it is going to actually help you to generate revenue. You really want to make sure that whatever your product or service offering is, it’s already converting and proven to be successful with your warm audiences.

Let’s say you had a course that you created and you wanted to start selling it. Before you send it out into cold traffic the first thing you want to do is actually hit your warm audiences and see what their response is to the product. This will help you to determine whether the product actually hits their pain points and if they are buying it for your price point. Ensuring your offer converts is essential before running ads to it. That’s not to say you CAN’T run ads to an unproven offer, it just means that you will pay a lot in ad spend to determine if it converts or not. 

Do I have an audience to sell to in my Facebook Ads?

When I ask clients who their audience is, a lot of times the response I get back is, “Anyone who is willing to buy from me!”

As great as that would be, you have to be very specific about who you’re speaking to. 

• Who is your Audience?
• What are their pain points?
• Do your products and services actually solve their problems?

Let’s say your product is geared for Moms. You’d spend far too much money in ads targeting ALL moms out there.

• What ages of children do they have?
• What are their demographics?
• What are their likes and dislikes?
• What hobbies do they have?
• What social pages are they following?
• What books are they reading?

All of these things will help you to be able to really craft your ads to have the right audience, so that it hits the mark better with them, and makes your ad spend go further. 

So really understand who it is you’re speaking to, and how you can get in front of them with your offer

Do I have a budget on how much I want to spend on Facebook Ads?

I frequently get businesses that come to me saying they want to start running Facebook ads because they want to generate revenue, but when I ask them what their budget is for ad spend, the response is usually “Whatever it takes to generate a return on investment (ROI).

Ads are part of an investment into your business; a part of your marketing budget. But a lot of  ads you may actually run, you can’t always determine what  that ROI means in terms of numbers. When you first begin, you need to run ads to build up a warm audience. These ads are designed to bring the “know, like and trust” factor to your brand, so they don’t necessarily show you a return on investment when you run them. 

So really it’s back to our first two steps.

• Do you have a converting offer? 
• Do you have an audience to sell it to?

If you can answer yes, then theoretically you’re ready to start running ads for your business. 

When it comes to your budget, you need to consider a few things. How much can you afford to risk, and how fast do you want the data from the ads?

So let’s say your offer is great and the audience loves it, but something’s happening with your ads and you aren’t making sales. There could be something in your ads that’s not resonating with your audience. 

• Maybe it’s the copy. 
• Maybe it’s the images.
• Maybe it’s the landing page you’re sending traffic to.

Ads cannot fix a broken business, they will only amplify the problems already happening. 

Ads will not only tell you what’s successful in your campaigns, but what’s broken in your offers. What your budget determines is how FAST you get to figure that out. Whether you spend $5 a day or $500 a day, the results will still be the same. You just get to figure that out within a day or two as opposed to 30-45 days. 

When you start running Facebook Ads, it should be used as a means of collecting data for your offers. This means knowing that your ad spend is going to be used to build audiences and testing out offers. Neither of which can guarantee an ROI. 

It’s like going to Vegas – if you’re not willing to put the money on the craps table and walk away empty handed, you’re not ready to run Facebook ads. 

If you’re at a point where you feel you just need to spend money on ads because you’re desperate to make a profit; I cannot stress enough – You should NOT be running ads. 

So there you have it. The three things you need to consider before running Facebook ads is:

• Do I have an offer/product/service to sell?
• Do I have an audience to sell to?
• And do I have a budget in mind to spend?

If you are at a point where you’re considering running Facebook Ads for your business, but don’t know where to start, check out my Facebook Ads Course and get set up for success the right way.

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My Facebook Ads Kickstart course is an amazing beginners resource for any business owner getting ready to run Ads. To learn more: https://www.bluepagesocial.com/kickstart/

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