Podcast Description
In this podcast, I cover what I see as the 7 main reasons why Facebook marketing fails. Take note. These points all come from 10 million dollars spent in the last 5 years running Facebook Ads.
Podcast File
7 Reasons for Facebook Ads Failure
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Podcast Transcription
Alright. So, I’m here again with you guys on another podcast. Today, we’re going to talk about something really, really important because as I run Facebook ads I see people, I do seminars and I talk to crowds and entrepreneurs and there are lots of reasons why they don’t succeed with Facebook ads, there are lots of problems that they have running Facebook ads. But, the main reasons for failing with Facebook ads are only a few of them. If you understand these ones, you’re going to eventually be successful. 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, for Manuel Suarez and the things that I run every single day. Just because I love helping people, I love capturing attention, this is my thing so I’m 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. I was impolite to him, but my only thought was, “Man, your product must be horrible and definitely not wanted or desired by anybody.” 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 in which on average, when you sent 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, comes in and says something about 300,000 clicks and not a single, don’t waste your money in doing Facebook ads, didn’t know what he was doing or his company that he hired and paid a lot of money for had no clue what they were doing.
So, it’s not on him. It’s the company that he has trusted who didn’t know what they were doing and they were actually probably trying to do something that … A couple of reasons why either the product was not of any value to anybody – the audience was dead wrong, the shopping card was completely broken and a total mess, that thing was disgusting 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 look around, when you go to a restaurant, to a coffee place, to a doctor’s office, to a park, a plane, anywhere, and people are using the platform, how could you explain, how do you make any sense whatsoever that the Facebook platform doesn’t really work for advertising? What didn’t work was you and there’s a series of factors that we are going to cover in this podcast today that are the main reasons why your Facebook game might not be having success and I’ve gone through it. I have 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 cut the line and get there a little bit faster because if you look at my accounts, if you look at my ad spend, you’re going to be in shock. I’ve spent over $10 million running Facebook ads in the last several years. It’s a lot of money! I’m currently spending $500,000 every single month on Facebook ads. So, 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 on a corner crying, all have said because I can’t have results.
How can you sustain $500,000 in ads spent 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 I show the world along the way how to take advantage of these opportunities. Some of you have seen me what I have done with my dad’s company, with Dr. Berg’s company, my own brands and 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 not a fad but 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 along the way. So, you have to figure out how to get in there.
I made a list of seven reasons as to why you can be running Facebook ads and not see any results or not see decent results or 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 the experience myself that after years of testing things out I can tell you that it’s not one single factor. It’s either a combination of factors or one that’s particularly off. But, there are many things that could be off particularly seven of them that I have found all throughout the way throughout the last several years that I know if optimized and worked for long enough, you would accomplish results. So, if you are here listening to this podcast, if you’re paying attention, make a note of these points because you can just 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, number 1. I think this is the biggest one and I think this is the one that is the most common, common error that exists out there for all entrepreneurs and I am, myself, is 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 increase dramatically your probability of success. Not enough testing. What does that mean? It means that you are impatient and that you are not willing to put in the time and money, to find an audience, to find a creative, a message that works on social media. Now, you guys know what my area of obsession is today, right? We talk about Facebook, we talk about Instagram, we talk about Messenger Marketing. And that trio is what it is all about today.
2019, we will see that there’s something else we need to include in the picture. But, right now I can tell you that I have been running Google ads for a long time, I am a Google fanatic. I have YouTube channels that are big that I handle and I go all over the place on YouTube and Google. But, I am running right now some Facebook ads and I am running some Google ads at the same thing and the difference is dramatic when it comes to the cost of advertising, it’s ridiculous. To give you some example, I’m generating leads to go into my mini-courses, my training for $2. And if I do Google, I pay $25. Why? It doesn’t even make sense. So, it’s not a matter of an obsession on a platform or like, “Oh, he’s such a romantic with Facebook”. It’s just a matter of like, “Where can you get the most for the least?” One of the qualities of an entrepreneur is common sense, understanding where the opportunities are and jump in on top of them and doing something about them so you can take advantage of these opportunities. It’s 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 platform, and it’s going to be more expensive to advertise. So, today, it’s really affordable – it’s 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 on the first month from scratch and mind-blowing results, you can’t do that. You have to have the patience in place to recognize that it’s not going to give you enough results, it’s not going to get better in time if you don’t work hard at testing things out. There are several things that you have to test out. You have to test out the objectives on Facebook, on the Business Manager on Facebook. I don’t know if you are familiar with it but you should become familiar with it which is business.facebook.com. On that one, you 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 what is your audience. Do you want to target people that 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 do you want to go after and also is 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 audience. And, as the last step, you’ve got to select the creative. Guys, cookie cutter days are over. The idea of grabbing a single ad and just grabbing that exact ad and putting it out there for 30 seconds on a video commercial is gone. That’s no longer the case when it comes to what’s happening today in the marketing world. For television, 30-second ads, right? 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 new Instagram carousel stories. You heard me right. 45-second carousel story ads on Instagram. That’s a new phenomenon right now.
So, there are many different creatives that you can select and it’s all about making sure that you connect with people, that you communicate to them the right thing. 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. So, 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 that are giving us their money to be able to actually grow on their platforms. So, if they give us the results which they want, then we can give them more money and they can keep growing. So, that’s why 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 understand more the audience that tends to respond the most to your message.
So, that is the first and foremost the most basic and most common reason for failure. People get impatient. They spent $500, they spent $100 and 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, not enough testing.
Point number 2. Wrong audience. This goes into the same thing. If you are talking to a person about hair growth 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. There are 170 million people on Facebook in the United States alone actively using the platform every single day. 220 million of them use it monthly. So, there’s a lot of people. What I can guarantee you is that most people are not your customers. So, you have 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. And, Facebook offers a lot of options for that. If you set up your Business Manager on business.facebook.com and you go to audiences, you can see that there’s an audience that you can create – audiences from people that visit your website, audiences from your email list and audiences from people that watch your video. You can also go to audience insights in the Business Manager – that’s what it’s called, it’s a tool – and research people that are interested in certain pages, what are their demographics, 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.
Okay. Reason number 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 copy that wins. 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 be a part of your brand. So, that is a fact that needs to be optimized consistently and actively in order for you to be able to find a winning audience. Do you see how there’s a lot of people and a lot of things that you have to test out consistently? The actual message is really, really important.
Now, another thing that goes in line with the actual message is people that are trying to sell too much at the beginning of their relationship. 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 that person is just looking to get something from them. Instead of you’re trying to build a relationship that is going to be here for the duration of lifetimes. Right? Like I 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 works with the actual message on the messages to not going for the close on the first contact. 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. If you go to Business Manager, business.facebook.com, and you go to Audiences, again, you can create an audience of people that have seen your videos. And now, you can create an audience that sees that text message that only from the people that have consumed that content. So, what are you doing? You’re building relationships. You communicate that message correctly and you continue building relationships. So, that’s point number 3.
Okay. Point number 4. So, this is basically summarizing all of it, right? Lack of patience is a big one for all of these things, okay? So, this is the big one and it’s connected with all of them because like I have mentioned patience several times on the first one, not enough testing, it’s connected with this one. But, this one, I’m going to put it at the top of all of them 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 way for you to scale and grow your business and find winners. Now, once you actually find a winner, you hit it and stride and you go fast and you expand and off you go to the races to grow your business because it scales. Like you can be running a campaign and maybe paying $20 per conversion and as you get better and better, you can eventually literally pay $1 or $2 per conversion. That’s what’s going on right now today in social media and in this platform.
Point number 5. We briefly touched on that but wrong objectives, okay? What do I mean by that? Well, when you’re doing Facebook ads as the first step on your Business Manager on business.facebook.com 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. On 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 that 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 in giving you more and more value so you can keep on scaling your business and helping them grow along the way, too. That’s how it works. Also, in the last column… So, we’ve talked about the left-hand column, we’ve talked about the middle one, we want to talk about the last one which is on the top, on the bottom on the right on the objectives. That one is called “Conversion” because, in this one, you’re trying to get somebody to convert into a customer to buy something from you, buy your products, give you a lead, give you their phone number, their email. That is a Conversion Objective Campaign. So, you have to be willing to test out and try out different objectives. If you are running a Messages Campaign but you have selected the Video Views Objective, that might be a reason for failure. You have to test out different objectives along the way to make sure that you give Facebook the data that they need in order to give you the results that you are looking for.
All right. So, now we’ve got a lack of strategy, okay? Now, this is something that you have to understand and is 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 with those people along the way to make sure that they are becoming your customers slowly but surely and for sure, definitely interested in what you have to offer in your brand. 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 do content. Now, are you going to also do videos? Are you going to write articles? Are you going to just take pictures and infographics? Are you going to do a podcast like what I am doing right now? 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 there 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, grab 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. You’ve got to have your business plan to expand and to grow your business. I hope that makes sense.
Point number 7, guys, this is a sad one – product is not good or does not have a demand. Some people that are romantics, they try to just run their ads and run their Facebook advertising with a product that doesn’t have a demand. And, if they don’t have a demand, it’s going to be a problem because they’re 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 get that message out there and 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. Okay?
So, those are the seven reasons why. Well, you can’t be romantic in the last one. Don’t be in love with your business or your product. If you have to adjust your business, if you have 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 training and got good at it and you still were not able to expand your business, then, it might be time to readjust the services, the products, and then go for it again. But, persistence is going to be key, patience is going to be key. Keep on pushing on making yourself better and along the way you’re going to be successful.
All right. So, I hope that you liked that one and it’s giving you some value. You’ve got make a list of all those things and always be testing and always be updating. Work on the custom audiences, work on the actual messages, work on the actual creative, 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 podcast.
