Don’t be afraid if you aren’t profitable in Week 1, the goal is to gather insights about what works and what doesn’t. What you learn with FB Ads can be applied to email marketing, your website, direct mail or any other kind of promotion. Think of it as focused market research that can result in sales. We want to understand what audiences, creatives, messaging work well.
You're probably really excited to start, and you should be. But there is an expectation management that needs to happen first. To be successful in your Facebook advertising ventures, you have to approach it with the right mindset. Let's first take a look at what Facebook advertising is not. First, this is not a guaranteed solution for sales. No advertising method is a guarantee. Putting up a billboard on the freeway, doesn't mean every person who drives by is coming into your restaurant. Similarly, putting up a Facebook ad doesn't mean every impression is leading to a conversion.
This is not a set it and forget it method. You're going to have to do a little more than turning on your campaigns and crossing your fingers. Setting it and forgetting it can cost you your budget, while having nothing to show for it. You're targeting the wrong audiences, wrong messaging, wrong platform, wrong placement without checking in on the campaigns. Well, you're going to burn through your ad spend without knowing why. However, if you approach your Facebook ad campaigns with more of an active management style, you'll have more control to see what's going wrong and where. As you adjust, you should start to see some improvements.
Obviously, this is not right for every business. Just like traditional advertising placements, not every placement is a perfect fit for each business. Small local businesses aren't buying national TV spots. Similarly, they shouldn't be targeting Facebook and Instagram users if they know their audience prefers print advertising. But just remember that the point of Facebook is to learn, so you don't want to make assumptions too quickly. Give yourself the time to test and see if it's a good fit for your business.
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Now that we know what this isn't, we should probably go over what this is. Facebook advertising is research, testing, more research, and more testing. Don't be afraid if you aren't profitable in week one. In the sense of return on ad spend, you may not even be profitable in weeks two through four. But it's important to re-frame what you consider profitable. Just because your campaign isn't making money, that doesn't mean it's a waste, or that it's not valuable. When starting out, your main goal shouldn't be conversions, but instead gathering important insights about what works, and what doesn't.
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Once you have the right mindset, then you can start to dive in. You have to pay to learn. Well, why pay at all? Facebook is smart, and getting smarter every day. It also has an incredible amount of information it collects from business partners and credit card companies. And yes, even your competitors, that you can use, for a price. With time, Facebook has the capability to hone in on your perfect audience. But you have to pay to learn what that audience looks like, what creatives they respond to, and what messaging convinces them to convert.
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As you gather insights and incorporate those learnings into your campaigns, you should start to see improvements. But beware of budget breakers. Once you change any one of those things, Facebook resets its learning period, and restarts all over again with the new information you fed in. When running Facebook ads, the more information you're able to collect, the stronger your campaigns will be. Facebook learns from every action your audiences take, and continues to narrow in as you feed in more information. By giving Facebook some room to grow with automatic placements, larger daily spend, and extended time frame without making changes, you're more likely to see the fruits of your labor.
Once you're able to uncover those findings from your Facebook ads, you can then apply them in email marketing, your website, direct mail, or any other kind of promotion. Think of it as focused market research, that can actually result in sales. So remember throughout this whole process, you're not just paying for advertising placement, but rather valuable market information.
