Alright, I’m here again with another article for you guys. Today, we’re going to talk about something really, really IMPORTANT because as I run Facebook ads, and as I see people at seminars where I talk to crowds of entrepreneurs, I see that there are lots of people out there who still are NOT successful with Facebook ads. There are lots of people who are having problems with running Facebook ad campaigns.
Now I can confidently tell you that throughout the years, in my own EXTENSIVE experience, I’ve come to find that the main reasons for Facebook ads failure are actually only a common FEW. Once you come to get a good understanding of these core reasons, and you can recognize them for what they are, then you’re UNDOUBTEDLY going to eventually be successful. The reality is that This is a Long Game. This is not something that you run for a few minutes, for a few days, for $25, for $100, for $1000 and then give up. This is something that you have to understand and master along the way because it does work.
I was running an ad on Facebook the other day just for branding purposes (for my “Manuel Suarez” brand along with the things that I run every single day). Just because I love helping people, and because I love capturing attention, this is my thing so I continuously am pumping out a lot of content. Somebody came in and commented, “Don’t listen to this mumbo jumbo! This is all garbage. I actually paid a company to do Facebook ads for me and I got 300,000 clicks and I’ve got zero conversion!!!”
Now, I wasn’t impolite to him, but my only thought 🤔💭 was, “Man, your product must be HORRIBLE and definitely not wanted or desired by ANYBODY.” Really, though…To get 300,000 clicks to a shop and NOT get a single purchase, it’s like epic. It’s the Guinness Book of World Records. It’s incredible. It’s an accomplishment. I mean, even if you TRY to do that, you probably cannot accomplish that. You literally cannot drive ten thousand people to a shop, even the worst shop and not convert a single one. That’s just not possible. I mean, we live in a world right now where on average, when you send a thousand people to a website you can convert one, two or three people for sure, pretty much guaranteed. So, this guy that comes in (a.k.a. my hater), he comes in and says something about 300,000 clicks and not a single conversion… either HE didn’t know what he was doing or the company that he hired and paid a lot of money to had no clue what they were doing.
So, it’s not on him. It’s really on the company that he trusted, who evidently didn’t know what they were doing, and as far as what they were actually trying to do, there are likely a couple of reasons why the product was not of any value to anybody – either the type of audience they targeted was ‘dead wrong’, or perhaps the shopping cart was completely broken and a total mess & all over the place. So, WHATEVER it is, when people tell me like, “Facebook ads don’t really work for my brand”, I tell them, “Wait for a second, does food not feed your body???” How does that make any sense, when you take a look around you NO MATTER WHERE YOU GO, whether you’re at a restaurant, a coffee shop, the Doctor’s office, the park, on a plane…anywhere, you see people are using the platform???
How could you possibly believe that the Facebook platform doesn’t really work for advertising, when that’s where virtually EVERYONE’S attention is fixated?
This might hurt a little bit, but the reality is this: What didn’t work was YOU, and there’s a series of factors that we are going to cover in this article today that are the main reasons why you may not be having success with your Facebook game. And believe me, I GET IT, because I’ve gone through it as well. I’ve actually wasted a lot of money running unsuccessful campaigns. That’s why I’m trying to make it easy for all of you to actually just benefit from my experience and my knowledge, and “skip to the front of the line” and arrive (at success) a little bit faster than I did, because if you were to take a look at my accounts, if you looked at my ad spend, you would be in shock! I’ve spent over $10 million running Facebook ads in the last several years. That is a lot of money!
I’m currently spending $500,000 every single month on Facebook ads. So needless to say, I have data. I can tell you right now that if Facebook ads didn’t work, I would not be sitting here talking to you about Facebook ads Failure. I would just be a failure myself, in a corner crying, all because I never had successful results.
Think about this: 🤔
How can you sustain $500,000 MONTHLY spent on ads if you’re not being successful? So, trust me. If you have been following me for a while, you know what I’m talking about. I am not a talker only even though I DO talk a lot. I’m a walker – I “walk” WHATEVER I talk, and along the way, I show the world how to take advantage of these opportunities. Some of you have seen what I have done with and for my dad’s company, with Dr. Berg’s company, as well as my own brands. We go all-out building systems, establishing and retargeting funnels, establishing strategies that work — because social media, Facebook advertising, all these platforms, they’re NOT something that is going to pass away. It’s definitely not a fad; IT’S HERE TO STAY. These are the new communication platforms that exist on this planet and they’re going to keep on evolving and getting better as time goes on. So, you HAVE to figure out how to get in there.
I made a list of seven reasons why you can be running Facebook ads and either not see any results, or not see decent results or not at least get a return on your investment that justifies the actual activity of Facebook ads. Let’s cover them one by one because this is something that I’ve gone through and experienced myself, like I stated earlier.
After years of testing things out I can tell you that it’s not just one single factor. It’s either a combination of factors, with perhaps one that’s particularly WAY off. But, of the many things that could be off, these seven of them are what I have found most commonly along the way throughout the past several years. I know that if these seven are optimized and worked for long enough, you would accomplish results. So, if you are here reading this article, and you’re paying attention, make a note of these points because you can simply work one by one, optimizing and correcting, and eventually you are going to have winning ads, winning campaigns, winning audiences and you are going to be able to scale your business to the moon. It doesn’t matter if you have a brick and mortar, e-commerce, an Amazon store. WHATEVER it is that you have, if you know these points, you will get your business where it belongs.
All right. So, let’s get into it….
#1: NOT ENOUGH TESTING
I think this is the biggest, most common error that exists out there for all entrepreneurs and I am, myself, have been guilty of this. And, I know that a lot of you are, too. This is something that I want you to drive home into your Universe, into your mind, and make sure that you understand that if you have this point, then you will dramatically increase your probability of success. Not enough testing. So what does that mean? It means that you are impatient and that you are not willing to put in the resources (time and money) to find an IDEAL audience, to find a creative, a message that works on social media. Now, you guys know what my area of obsession is today, right? You hear me talk about the “Holy Trinity” of Social Media all the time: Facebook, Instagram (including stories and IGTV), and Messenger Marketing. And that Trifecta is what it is all about today.
As 2019 goes on and 2020 approaches, we will likely see that there’s going to be something else we need to include in the picture. But, right now in PRESENT TIME, those 3 are the Royal Family of Social Media. 👑👑👑
Now, I can also tell you that I have been running Google ads for a long time; in fact, I am a Google fanatic. In addition, I have YouTube channels that are HUGE that I handle, and I go all over the place on YouTube and Google. But, right now I am running some Facebook ads AND I am running some Google ads at the same time, for the same thing, and the difference is so dramatic when it comes to the cost of advertising, it’s ridiculous. To give you an example, I’m generating leads to go into my training mini-courses, for $2. And if I do Google, I pay $25. For me it’s like: “Why?” It doesn’t even make sense. So, it’s not a matter of having obsession for a platform or like, “Oh, Manuel is such a romantic/biased when it comes to Facebook”. It’s REALLY just a matter of : “Where can you get the most for the least?” One of the qualities of an entrepreneur is common sense, understanding where the opportunities are,jumping into and on top of them and doing something about them so you can take advantage of those opportunities and make the absolute BEST of them. After all, even though the platforms are HERE TO STAY, the OPPORTUNITIES of THIS MAGNITUDE are not going to be around forever, right? Down the line, there’s going to be a bigger supply of advertisers, there’s going to be more demand of the platforms, and it’s going to become increasingly more expensive to advertise. So, today, it’s really affordable – it’s STILL quite cheap to get massive, massive traffic for next to nothing. You can scale but you HAVE TO have these points in place. You will not be able to run a campaign in the first month from scratch and immediately produce mind-blowing results; you just can’t do that. You have to be in it for the LONG GAME, have the patience in place and recognize that it’s not going to give you enough results the first time, BUT it IS going to get better in time if you consistently work hard at testing things out. And there are SEVERAL things that you have to test out. You have to test out the objectives on Facebook, In the Facebook Business Manager. I don’t know if you are familiar with it, but you definitely should become VERY familiar with it: the URL is business.facebook.com.
In there, you’ll have to select which objective you want to optimize for. Do you want to optimize for messages, for traffic, for engagement on your page, for video views? You want to select what you want to optimize for. You also have to select the audience that you wish to target. Do you want to target people who are interested in certain things (what they call “core audiences”)? Do you want to target people based on their interactions with other pages or other websites? Do you want to target people based on the interest and engagement with your own brands and your own things or your own websites? Do you want to target cold traffic? You’ve got to decide what traffic you want to go after and also it’s going to vary depending on your offer. If you have a really deep discount offer that you want to promote, then, that’s a certain audience. If you have a full price funnel that you’re trying to set up, that is also a certain type of audience. And, as the last step, you’ve got to select the creative. I cannot say this one enough, you guys… “cookie cutter days are over”! The idea of grabbing a single ad and copying/pasting that exact same ad and putting it out there for 30 seconds on a video commercial is gone. That’s no longer effective when it comes to what’s happening today in the marketing world. For television, 30-second ads are the “thing”, right? RIGHT…FOR TELEVISION.
BUT…For Facebook, you have carousel ads, videos, single videos, presentations, collections. You’ve got so many different formats. You’ve got Instagram stories that are 15 seconds. Now, you have the newer Instagram carousel stories, which 45-second carousel story ads on Instagram. That’s still a relatively new phenomenon right now.
There are so many different creatives that you can select, and it’s all about making sure that you connect with people, and that you communicate the right thing to them. You have to find that testing has to be enough for you to be able to produce a result along the way.
Another factor to take into account is Facebook is going to get better with time. Meaning, they DO want to use your results. They WANT you to be successful because if you’re not successful they don’t get more money. That’s one thing that most people don’t understand. Facebook’s customers are not the users. Facebook customers are US, THE ADVERTISERS – you, me, the ones who are giving them OUR money to be able to actually grow on their platforms. So, if they give us the results that they desire, then we can give them more money and they can ultimately keep growing. It’s so powerful. So, in reality, you want to work hard at communicating with Facebook consistently for your ads, for your audiences, for your testing, so they can better understand the audience that tends to respond the most to your messages.
So, that ⬆️ first and foremost, is the most basic and most common reason for failure. Not enough testing because people get impatient. They spend $500, or $100, or however much, and then they say, “You know what? Facebook ads didn’t work. I knew it. This whole thing is shenanigans and I’m not going to be able to grow my business with Facebook. Let me go and print some media mail…let me go and get into a magazine.” Guys, lack of patience and lack of testing. That’s what that is.
#2: WRONG AUDIENCE
This goes hand in hand, along the same lines as “not enough testing”. If you are talking about hair growth to a person that has a head full of hair, you are going to lose every single time. If you are talking to males about makeup, you’re going to lose every single time. So, you have to understand that finding an audience is really important.
(Don’t be that ☝️guy…TEST your AUDIENCES and find the RIGHT one for your brand!)
There are 170 million people on Facebook in the United States alone who are actively using the platform every single day. 220 million use it monthly. So, as you can see, there are a lot of people. What I can ABSOLUTELY guarantee you is that most people are not your customers. I can’t say that enough. So it is important for you to know that you have to work hard at testing out your audiences so you can actually find a winning audience that is interested in what you have to offer. The beauty of it is that Facebook offers a lot of options for that. If you set up your Business Manager on www.business.facebook.com and you go to “Audiences”, you can see that there’s an audience that you can create – audiences from people who visit your website, audiences from your email list and audiences from people that watch your videos. You can also go to a tool called “Audience Insights” in the Business Manager, and research people that are interested in certain pages, what their demographics are, their socio-economic levels… targeting information that Facebook has access to that we as advertisers can also utilize to target our messages. So, you have to work on finding your audience actively. The tools are THERE for you!
Okay, let’s move on to reason number 3…
#3: WRONG MESSAGE AND WRONG CREATIVE
On Facebook, when you’re running Facebook ads, you have to understand that the first thing that somebody sees, the thing at the top, is the actual copy. So, if you have a wrong message then people are not going to respond. You have to practice that skill and it’s not always easy to practice. Now, there are tools that came up along the way that have made it easier and easier to use winning copy. (When I say copy, I mean written text above the images, above the videos, the call to action, the descriptions, the text that somebody has to read before they decide if they want to actually engage with your brand.) And so, that is a skill that needs to be honed and optimized consistently and actively in order for you to be able to find your ideal winning audience. The actual message is really, really important. (Do you see how there are a lot of people and a lot of things that you have to test out consistently? It’ll take some work and tenacity, but it will totally be worth the time and effort, once you know how to do it.)
Now, another thing that goes in line with the actual message being WRONG is people that try to “sell” too much at the beginning of the relationship, before the relationship is even established. 🙄It’s like when you start dating your wife or your husband, at the beginning you cannot flirt too heavily because otherwise, it looks like you’re just looking to get something from them, instead of trying to build a relationship that is going to be here for the duration of lifetimes. Right? I, personally, have been married for 14 years. In the beginning, I romanticized my wife and I let her know how much I really care. I slowly but surely approached her before we went in for the close, right? So, in reality, the same principle works with the actual messages that you put out there in your ads and content. You most certainly DO NOT go for the close on the first contact..or even the second…or the third…fourth…fifth…or even the sixth, for that matter. (Heard of the RULE OF 7? 😉) Make sure that you OFFER VALUE FIRST. And, as you offer value, you get better along the way, and you get closer and closer to that person so they can come back and engage with your brand. Now, you might be wondering, “But, Manuel, what are you talking about? How do I do this? I don’t know how to retarget on Facebook.” Well, you’ve got to learn how to retarget on Facebook. Because in reality guys, this is one of the most underutilized areas that we have today to access. (In fact, if you haven’t read my recent articles about “The Power — and IMPORTANCE of RETARGETING”, you can access part 1 here and part 2 is here) If you go to Business Manager, and you go to “Audiences”, again, you can create an audience of people who have seen your videos. And now, from there, you can create an audience who sees a text message that’s only for the people who have consumed that content. And you know what are you doing when you do that? You’re building relationships. You communicate that message correctly and you continue building relationships. So, that’s point number 3.
#4: LACK OF PATIENCE
So, this Point number 4 is basically summarizing all of it, right? Lack of patience is a BIG ONE, a MAJOR factor for all of these things, okay? This one is connected with all of them because I have mentioned patience several times on the first point, “not enough testing”, simply because it’s connected with this one. But, this PARTICULAR point in itself, I’m going to go ahead and list it as its OWN point and reason for Facebook ads Failure, and in fact, it’s connected to ALL of the other reasons. Because if you don’t have the patience to test your creative, to find your audience, to be testing consistently (ABT – Always Be Testing), it makes it difficult along the entire way for you to scale and grow your business and find your “winners”. Now the thing is, once you actually find a winner, you hit it and stride, and you go fast, and you expand and then “off you go to the races” to grow your business, because it scales. Like, you can be running a campaign and initially be paying about $20 per conversion and as you get better and better, you can eventually literally pay only $1 or $2 per conversion. That’s what’s going on right now today in social media and in this platform. These things happen often, and they are TOTALLY achievable, BUT…IT TAKES PATIENCE.
#5: WRONG OBJECTIVES
So, we briefly touched this earlier. What do I mean by “Wrong Objectives”? Well, when you’re doing Facebook ads as the first step on your Business Manager, when you select “Create a Campaign” as the first option, you’ve got to make sure that you have several options to select as your objective. On the first column on the left side of the Business Manager, you’re going to see something called “Branding and Awareness”. Those are campaigns that are designed to just put your message out there. In the middle column, that one is called “Consideration”. Those campaigns which include engagement, traffic, video views, application installs – all those things – you’re basically trying to get people to consider engaging with your brand. That is also an objective. Even “Messages” is an objective in there. So, if you want to send people to your Messenger channel, you can select the objectives called “Messages”, which Facebook uses to optimize their ads to put their messages in front of as many people as possible who are more likely to engage with your Messenger channel. If somebody doesn’t have Messenger, then they don’t even see that ad on Facebook. Otherwise, it would be a waste of money, right?
Cool stuff. Facebook is working hard on giving you more and more value so you can keep on scaling your business and helping it to grow along the way, too. That’s how it works. Also, since we’ve talked about the left-hand column, and we’ve talked about the middle one, let’s go over last column, which is on the top, at the bottom right-hand in the objectives. That one is called “Conversion” because, in this one, you’re trying to get somebody to convert into becoming an actual customer who either buys something from you, or they become a lead by giving you their phone number and/or their email. That is called a “Conversion Objective Campaign”. In a nutshell, you have to be willing to test out and try out different objectives. If you are running a Messenger Campaign but you have selected the “Video Views” Objective, that might very well be a reason for failure. You have to test out different objectives as you go, to make sure that you give Facebook the data that they need in order for them to give you the results that you are looking for.
#6: LACK OF STRATEGY
All right. Now, this is something that you have to understand and it’s really important because, if you don’t have a strategy in place, then Facebook ads is NOT for you. You NEED to have a strategy. You need to be able to put people through a funnel, meaning that they see the video first and then after that video, they see another video and then you continue building a conversation and a relationship with those people along the way to ensure that they are becoming your customers slowly but surely, and that they are definitely interested in what your brand has to offer. So, a strategy basically entails what is it that you’re trying to accomplish with your business, how are you trying to make the world better through your content, how can you improve somebody else’s life? Are you going to entertain or are you going to educate? Or, are you going to inspire? What are you trying to do? Those are the only three things that you can do. You have to create and share content. Now, are you going to also do videos? Are you going to write articles, like this one that I’m sharing right now? Are you going to just take pictures and infographics? Are you going to do a podcast? What is it that you are trying to do in order to captivate that audience? That is basically a part of having a strategy. You can’t just go out there and start putting things out and posting without knowing exactly what you are trying to accomplish. It’s a very, very important point that you have to keep in mind when it comes to being successful with Facebook ads. So, you’ve got to sit down, open up a word document or grab a pen and a piece of paper and write down a strategy that is going to help you get your business established in social media. It has to be run as a business, and it has to have DIRECTION. You’ve got to have a purposeful plan to expand and to grow your business. I hope that makes sense.
So let’s move on to our last one…Point number 7.
#7: PRODUCT IS NOT GOOD/DOES NOT HAVE A DEMAND
This is a sad one – Some people are romantic about their brand and their products, and they try to just run their Facebook advertising with a product that doesn’t have a demand. And if their products don’t have a demand, it’s going to be a problem because they’re simply not going to be successful. The market is the market. You don’t make the market, you don’t decide what the market is, you don’t actually establish a market, you usually have to find the market and put a message in front of them and once you get that message out there, you try to convert those people with a special offer and a special product of high quality that you can use to get your business going and expanding. After all, your products and the quality thereof are reflections of YOUR BRAND, and you’ve got to think with THAT.
So there you have it, the seven reasons why Facebook ads fail. You’ve got to know that that you can’t be romantic in the last point. Don’t be SO in love with your business or your product that you become inflexible. If you have to adjust your business in order to get it going, if you have to change the strategy, ALWAYS be willing to do that. If the market didn’t respond, if you did all the different six points, if you’ve worked your butt off to understand these platforms, and, you actually did test and train and got good at it and you still were not able to expand your business, then it might be time to readjust the services and/or your product line, and then go for it again. Remember that persistence is going to be key as well as patience. Keep on pushing and making yourself better and along the way you’re going to be successful. I promise you that.
Well, I hope that you enjoyed this article, and that you derived some value from it. Now it’s up to YOU to actually IMPLEMENT it. You’ve got make a list of all those things and Always Be Testing (ABT) and always be updating. Work on the custom audiences, work on the actual messages, work on the actual creatives, the ad sets, finding your message, finding your niche market and along the way you will continue to expand.
I will see you guys in the next article.
