Facebook is a tremendous social media platform that reaches over 2.2 billion active users every single month.
But the vast majority of companies, freelancers, and agencies don’t launch Facebook campaigns properly.
In most cases, campaigns are activated with minimal audience research, followed by the creation of 1-3 ad sets coupled with a small number of images and ad copy.
The campaigns are launched, fingers are crossed, and the data begins to present itself in terms of Facebook’s key performance metrics – click through rates (CTR), cost per click (CPC), return on ad spend (ROAS), and cost per acquisition (CPA).
So what happens next? The numbers land far below expectations, and companies start to grumble about “trying Facebook and not seeing a proper return”. In many cases, the social platform is written off completely.
I know this because I’ve been there. I was as guilty as anyone, quickly creating campaigns and ad groups that generated leads and sales, but were not optimized for long-term success based on proper targeting, testing, and optimization.
Without a strategy-first approach to profitable Facebook marketing, this becomes a “fire, ready, aim!” tactic built on hope. It not only misses the mark but worst of all provides no path for scalability to take what IS working and ramp it up to new levels of success.
It’s my goal to change this. And to get started, I’m sharing the top five reasons Facebook campaigns fail, along with a link to the Campaign Matrix.
This is a spreadsheet I created to help campaign managers stay focused and on track as ads are created, tested, optimized, and scaled for greater profitability.
https://www.davidsmania.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Campaign-Matrix.xlsx
Here are the Top 5 Reasons Most Facebook Campaigns Fail (and what to do about it).
1 ) Lack of proper customer profile identification.
Most companies have many different types of customers. For example, a financial software company has a variety of buyers – business owners, CPAs, CFOs, and consultants. They all have very different needs, and ad copy should speak directly to each group in a way that resonates.
Generic ad copy is wasteful ad copy. Customer profile development is very important, and most companies don’t invest the proper time in this area. Even the most brilliant ad copy and creatives will fail if the message is not properly aligned
2 ) Insufficient development of ads with hooks that trigger interest and response.
Once you’ve identified your customer profiles, the marketing hooks used to capture interest and consideration start to form more naturally.
This happens because you’re thinking specifically about a certain type of buyer, and you gain focus and clarity on creating hooks that will pull this person into your offer. Contrast this to writing generic ad copy that doesn’t activate any of the psychological triggers to inspire action.
As an example, a company that has five customer profiles can easily develop many different hooks. Five customer profiles with five different hooks result in 25 different ads – all laser-targeted to a prospect’s unique needs.
Note: writing ad copy should also resonate with the prospect’s position in the buying funnel. Facebook advertising reaches what’s referred to as a cold audience. This audience knows nothing about your company, so trust needs to be developed over time by providing value.
I cover this in a separate article titled The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Marketing Funnels that Drive Sales and Conversions.
3 ) Not investing the time identifying Facebook audiences that match your customer profiles
Once you’ve put the time into identifying your customer profiles, the next step entails deep research to explore the distinct markets, and how they align to the audiences that Facebook makes available.
Facebook offers an abundance of targeting options – interests, behaviors, engagement, and custom audience development. But when you’re creating your first campaigns, it’s vital to spend the time with Facebook’s audience insights to discover and identify a target market that aligns with your unique customer profiles.
This step should take HOURS – sometimes even days. But in most cases, this important task isn’t given proper time and attention.
A lot of market research happens outside of Facebook. Where do your target customers hang out? What at their favorite trade shows, conferences, blogs, magazines, tools, and resources?
By identifying the interests and behaviors of your unique customer profiles, you can use this information to find audience targets within Facebook.
As an example, I provide digital marketing services. My targeting can include business owners of a specific size, marketing conferences, favorite books, authors, or interests aligned with specific marketing software (Marketo, Hubspot, etc). The point is to identify as many potential audience sources so you can begin testing and optimization.
4 ) Boring or ineffective ad creatives.
Facebook provides the ability to create ads with single images, carousels, or video. Effective imagery is something that catches a prospect’s eye while they are thumbing through the newsfeed.
Unlike Google Ads where someone often has high-commercial intent or interest as they’re actively searching with a goal in mind, people use Facebook for different reasons.
Because of this, you need to take an approach similar to traditional media. Imagery and videos need to capture the attention of passive users who are often in browse mode, passively flipping through Facebook for joy and entertainment.
Ads that do well on Facebook contain colors that pop and offers that natively align with the newsfeed. Ads that try too hard and are over-produced typically don’t do as well. Ads that provide images that capture the user’s attention and ad copy that speaks with a conversational tone typically does best.
Open up Facebook and what ads do you see? Old, stodgy writing that is overly promotional and screams “advertisement”! This is the marketing that gets ignored and skipped over. Or worse yet, negative social interactions, which hurt performance and raise the cost per click.
5 ) The inability to scale WHAT WORKS
This is huge. Without a systemized, methodical approach to Facebook advertising, companies never get a chance to truly test proper messaging to distinct audiences. In most cases, it’s a cannonball approach to marketing where a random message is lobbed in a direction that misses the target.
By identifying your customer profiles, then writing ad copy that speaks to each group in a way that meets their needs, you can truly test the waters to see what works versus doesn’t.
This provides you with a MUCH better chance of success. Who wouldn’t want to take 20-30 swings at the plate until something connects and sails right out of the park?
Once your ads have been launched using the approach above, it’s time to analyze the data to determine the winning campaigns vs. those that are coming up short.
This is where the campaigns REALLY start to shine, as you cherry-pick the winners and boost performance by increasing the budget, shifted from the underperformers, and scaled accordingly.
At this point, it’s also important to keep testing and building out new campaigns aimed at audiences that are most receptive to our offers, or ad copy that is producing the best return based on whatever metric is most important to you.
In Closing
It’s my goal to help companies like yours avoid the common advertising traps within Facebook. It’s so incredibly easy to launch ads, and most advertisers rush through the process. Don’t do this. Let your competitors waste ad dollars by approaching it this way.
To recap:
- Time and attention should be invested upfront to truly identify your customer profiles.
- Once this is complete, multiple marketing hooks should be developed so you can test many different ads for each customer profile. Ad copy should be written specifically to each customer profile in a way that resonates with their unique needs. This is not one-size-fits-all.
- Proper time needs to be invested in target audience research. Using the customer profiles above, it’s important to take a deep dive into each customer type, then matching their unique attributes to the targeting available within Facebook.
- Ads should contain creative imagery that matches the marketing hook in a way that is interesting and captures the attention of someone scrolling through the newsfeed.
- As the ultimate reward for all the hard work above, it’s time to scale top-performing campaigns! After a few days, select your winners based on metrics that are important to you and turn off the others. Shift budget into the top performers, and continue testing.
Need help? I obsess over driving top performance out of Facebook and would be happy to discuss your campaign goals to see if this could be a good fit.