Alright, Iâm here again with another article for you guys. Today, weâre 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, Iâve 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 youâre 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 âManuel Suarezâ 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, âDonât 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 Iâve got zero conversion!!!â
Now, I wasnât impolite to him, but my only thought đ¤đ was, âMan, your product must be HORRIBLE and definitely not wanted or desired by ANYBODY.â Really, though…To get 300,000 clicks to a shop and NOT get a single purchase, itâs like epic. Itâs the Guinness Book of World Records. Itâs incredible. Itâs 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. Thatâs 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 didnât 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, itâs not on him. Itâs really on the company that he trusted, who evidently didnât 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 â either the type of audience they targeted was âdead wrongâ, 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, âFacebook ads donât really work for my brandâ, I tell them, âWait for a second, does food not feed your body???â How does that make any sense, when you take a look around you NO MATTER WHERE YOU GO, whether youâre at a restaurant, a coffee shop, the Doctorâs office, the park, on a plane…anywhere, you see people are using the platform???
How could you possibly believe that the Facebook platform doesnât really work for advertising, when thatâs where virtually EVERYONEâS attention is fixated?
This might hurt a little bit, but the reality is this: What didnât work was YOU, and thereâs 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 Iâve gone through it as well. Iâve actually wasted a lot of money running unsuccessful campaigns. Thatâs why Iâm trying to make it easy for all of you to actually just benefit from my experience and my knowledge, and âskip to the front of the lineâ 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! Iâve spent over $10 million running Facebook ads in the last several years. That is a lot of money!
Iâm 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 didnât work, I would not be sitting here talking to you about Facebook ads Failure. I would just be a failure myself, Â in a corner crying, all because I never had successful results.
Think about this: đ¤
How can you sustain $500,000 MONTHLY spent on ads if youâre not being successful? So, trust me. If you have been following me for a while, you know what Iâm talking about. I am not a talker only even though I DO talk a lot. Iâm a walker â I âwalkâ 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 dadâs company, with Dr. Bergâs company, as well as my own brands. We go all-out building systems, establishing and retargeting funnels, establishing strategies that work â because social media, Facebook advertising, all these platforms, theyâre NOT something that is going to pass away. Itâs definitely not a fad; ITâS HERE  TO STAY. These are the new communication platforms that exist on this planet and theyâre 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. Letâs cover them one by one because this is something that Iâve gone through and experienced myself, like I stated earlier.
After years of testing things out I can tell you that itâs not just one single factor. Itâs either a combination of factors, with perhaps one thatâs 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 youâre 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 doesnât 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, letâs get into itâŚ.
#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 âHoly Trinityâ of Social Media all the time: Â 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 thereâs 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. đđđ
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, itâs ridiculous. To give you an example, Iâm generating leads to go into my training mini-courses, for $2. And if I do Google, I pay $25. For me itâs like: âWhy?â It doesnât even make sense. So, itâs not a matter of having obsession for a platform or like, âOh, Manuel is such a romantic/biased when it comes to Facebookâ. Itâs REALLY just a matter of : âWhere can you get the most for the least?â 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, thereâs going to be a bigger supply of advertisers, thereâs going to be more demand of the platforms, and itâs going to become increasingly more expensive to advertise. So, today, itâs really affordable â itâs STILL Â 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 canât do that. You have to be in it for the LONG GAME, have the patience in place and recognize that itâs 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 donât know if you are familiar with it, but you definitely should become VERY familiar with it: the URL is business.facebook.com.
In there, youâll 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 âcore audiencesâ)? 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? Youâve 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, thatâs a certain audience. If you have a full price funnel that youâre trying to set up, that is also a certain type of audience. And, as the last step, youâve got to select the creative. I cannot say this one enough, you guys… âcookie cutter days are overâ! 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. Thatâs no longer effective when it comes to whatâs happening today in the marketing world. For television, 30-second ads are the âthingâ, right? RIGHT…FOR TELEVISION.
BUT…For Facebook, you have carousel ads, videos, single videos, presentations, collections. Youâve got so many different formats. Youâve got Instagram stories that are 15 seconds. Now, you have the newer Instagram carousel stories, which 45-second carousel story ads on Instagram. Thatâs still a relatively new phenomenon right now.
There are so many different creatives that you can select, and itâs 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 youâre not successful they donât get more money. Thatâs one thing that most people donât understand. Facebookâs customers are not the users. Facebook customers are US, THE ADVERTISERS â 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. Itâs 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. Â
So, that âŹď¸ 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, âYou know what? Facebook ads didnât work. I knew it. This whole thing is shenanigans and Iâm 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.â Guys, lack of patience and lack of testing. Thatâs what that is.
#2: WRONG AUDIENCE
This goes hand in hand, along the same lines as ânot enough testingâ. 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, youâre going to lose every single time. So, you have to understand that finding an audience is really important.
(Donât be that âď¸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 canât 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 âAudiencesâ, you can see that thereâs an audience that you can create â 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 âAudience Insightsâ 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, letâs move on to reason number 3âŚ
#3: WRONG MESSAGE AND WRONG CREATIVE
On Facebook, when youâre 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 itâs 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? Itâll 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 âsellâ too much at the beginning of the relationship, before the relationship is even established. Â đItâs like when you start dating your wife or your husband, at the beginning you cannot flirt too heavily because otherwise, it looks like youâre 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? đ) 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, âBut, Manuel, what are you talking about? How do I do this? I donât know how to retarget on Facebook.â Well, youâve 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 havenât read my recent articles about âThe Power — and IMPORTANCE of RETARGETINGâ, you can access part 1 here and part 2 is here) If you go to Business Manager, and you go to âAudiencesâ, 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 thatâs only for the people who have consumed that content. And you know what are you doing when you do that? Youâre building relationships. You communicate that message correctly and you continue building relationships. So, thatâs 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, ânot enough testingâ, simply because itâs connected with this one. But, this PARTICULAR point in itself, Iâm going to go ahead and list it as its OWN point and reason for Facebook ads Failure, and in fact, itâs connected to ALL of the other reasons. Because if you donât have the patience to test your creative, to find your audience, to be testing consistently (ABT â Always Be Testing), it makes it difficult along the entire way for you to scale and grow your business and find your âwinnersâ. Now the thing is, once you actually find a winner, you hit it and stride, and you go fast, and you expand and then âoff you go to the racesâ 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. Thatâs whatâs 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 âWrong Objectivesâ? Well, when youâre doing Facebook ads as the first step on your Business Manager, when you select âCreate a Campaignâ as the first option, youâve 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, youâre going to see something called âBranding and Awarenessâ. Those are campaigns that are designed to just put your message out there. In the middle column, that one is called âConsiderationâ. Those campaigns which include engagement, traffic, video views, application installs â all those things â youâre basically trying to get people to consider engaging with your brand. That is also an objective. Even âMessagesâ is an objective in there. So, if you want to send people to your Messenger channel, you can select the objectives called âMessagesâ, 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 doesnât have Messenger, then they donât 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. Thatâs how it works. Also, since weâve talked about the left-hand column, and weâve talked about the middle one, letâs go over last column, which is on the top, at the bottom right-hand in the objectives. That one is called âConversionâ because, in this one, youâre 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 âConversion Objective Campaignâ. 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 âVideo Viewsâ 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 itâs really important because, if you donât 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 youâre trying to accomplish with your business, how are you trying to make the world better through your content, how can you improve somebody elseâs 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 Iâm 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 canât just go out there and start putting things out and posting without knowing exactly what you are trying to accomplish. Itâs a very, very important point that you have to keep in mind when it comes to being successful with Facebook ads. So, youâve 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. Youâve got to have a purposeful plan to expand and to grow your business. I hope that makes sense.
So letâs move on to our last one…Point number 7.
#7: PRODUCT IS NOT GOOD/DOES NOT HAVE A DEMAND
This is a sad one â Some people are romantic about their brand and their products, and they try to just run their Facebook advertising with a product that doesnât have a demand. And if their products donât have a demand, itâs going to be a problem because theyâre simply not going to be successful. The market is the market. You donât make the market, you donât decide what the market is, you donât 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 youâve got to think with THAT.
So there you have it, the seven reasons why Facebook ads fail. Youâve got to know that that you canât be romantic in the last point. Donât 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 didnât respond, if you did all the different six points, if youâve 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 youâre 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 itâs up to YOU to actually IMPLEMENT it. Youâve 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.