Facebook advertising has become an important marketing asset for small businesses looking to increase their brand awareness and grow their customer base online.
Facebook ads give way for your brand to be seen by your ideal customers in particular income brackets, geographical areas, age range, and so on.
By targeting your ads, you are getting to the people who are the most likely to pay attention to them and seek out your services and product.
However, many small businesses make costly mistakes when using Facebook’s advertising platform when creating and running ad campaigns themselves.
As a result, ads can fall flat and create little or no leads.
In this situation, you may want to blame Facebook, but the problem is almost always the fault of the business. Luckily, these mistakes are easily avoidable.
Read on for beginner Facebook ad mistakes often made by small businesses.
5 Facebook Advertising Mistakes Small Businesses Love to Ignore
1. Forgetting to Set Goals and Objectives
Before launching a Facebook advertising campaign, you must first identify your goals. Why? Your goals will help you measure the success of your ads.
- What is the primary objective of your ads?
- Do you want to increase brand awareness, gain more quality customer leads, increase traffic to your website?
Your goals should go beyond immediate sales and revenue.
Many small businesses make the mistake of focusing on profits alone and forget about the long term: creating loyal return customers, for instance, or at least engaging customers enough, so they have the potential to come back.
By establishing long-term goals, you will help your business grow beyond initial sales.
2. Brushing off New Ad Types and Features
Facebook offers various ad types, each based on the different goals you may have for your business.
Some of Facebook's ad objectives and types include clicks to website, website conversion, page likes, post page engagement, and brand awareness.
New types of ads and ad features (Facebook Canvas being the most recent) are continuously rolled out, but they often go ignored in their infancy.
It’s smarter to jump on new ad types that are relevant to your current business objectives because their novelty naturally invites more clicks.
If you’re an early adopter, you will likely see the most returns on new ad types because they tend to lose their potency over time as they gain popularity.
3. Targeting Too Narrow or Too Broad of an Audience
As you begin to specify the criteria for your ad’s audience, Facebook will you give an estimate of how many people (your audience) will potentially see your ad.
If you’re targeting too few people or too many, you will be missing the sweet spot of where your ad is most likely to hit, your ideal target audience.
Many small businesses either think too broad or too narrow when it comes to their target audience.
To avoid this ad targeting mishap, we suggest you narrow down on your buyer persona by targeting your persona's interests or likes or maybe even their job titles in addition to age, location, language, etc.
We even recommend using custom audiences to improve the effectiveness of your ads; Custom Audiences allow you to reach your current customers with ads.
4. Stuffing Your Ad Sets with Everything You Have
As you’re creating your Facebook advertising campaign, you may make the mistake of staying static with ad campaigns that seem to be working.
While this is fine as long as they have a good return on investment (ROI), your ads won’t keep performing steadily forever.
The longer an ad runs, the less it will perform.
You should plan for this time by trying to find your next successful ad or opportunity.
Also, you may make the rookie mistake of having all of your ads in one single ad set.
By putting your eggs, so to say, in one basket, many of your ads may not be shown to a good amount of people. As a result, you limit your data and lose the opportunity to measure whether or now they were effective
A best practice is to organize your ad sets based on your target audience and your goals.
5. Launching an Ad Campaign and Forgetting About It
A big mistake some small businesses make is starting an ad and expecting it to continue to perform well without any monitoring or tweaking.
Facebook ads are relatively static as they based on interests, location, age, etc. Also, the frequency in which a particular user sees them can quickly escalate to the point of over-saturation (when users are tired of your ads).
Therefore, as your ads are running, you must constantly watch over them to see how things are going.
How to Get More Out of Your Facebook Social Media Marketing
Capitalize on the many strengths of Facebook marketing. Establish SMART objectives, clearly define your target audience, create optimal campaigns and watch your social media marketing ROI soar.
Now, as a small business owner, you may find it too difficult or time-consuming to carry out an effective Facebook marketing strategy on your own, especially when it comes to running ad campaigns with high conversion rates.
To combat your lack of time, lack of knowledge and to avoid the five Facebook mentioned above ad mistakes you can seek the expertise of a reputable internet marketing firm or take the time to learn some Facebook lead generation basics by downloading our free marketing playbook.
