10 Reasons Why Your Facebook or Instagram Ads Aren’t Working: Part 2
Today I want to wrap up our series on the top 10 reasons why your Facebook ads or Instagram ads are not working for you. So here we go. We’ve already gone through number 10 through number five. So let’s start with number four.
Mistake #4 Not Testing Audiences
If you’re new to Facebook ads you might be like, well what do you mean audiences? But if you’re a veteran then you definitely know what I’m talking about. Audiences are divided into two categories.
The Warm Audience
There are warm audiences -people who have been to your website before, interacted with your Facebook page, interacted with an ad, interacted with a video, even uploads of your current client list. These are all warm audiences.
And so when you do Facebook, Instagram ads, you need to be marketing to that warm audience because perhaps they just haven’t quite pulled the trigger yet in purchasing your products or services. Consequently, there’s a whole type of marketing that should be going towards this type of audience.
On warm audiences, you got to do some testing with them. Maybe it’s better to go after people who have engaged with you in the last 30 days versus the last 60 days. Maybe it’s better to give somebody an offer or a discount. Maybe it’s better to get people into your email list and move them over to another funnel. There are lots of different things that you need to test, but the most important thing is to test different audiences.
The Cold Audience
The second type of audience is a cold audience or people who are unfamiliar with your brand.
A majority, around 80% of your marketing budget inside of the platform should be spent on cold audiences. This audience consists of people who are unfamiliar with your marketing services.
So what can a cold audience look like? Facebook has many different targeting options available to you. You can target age, gender, location (whether they’re there or just visiting). You can target certain interests or behaviors.
Facebook knows a lot about you. Your search behaviors online, whether it’s on the Facebook platform or you’re just Googling, that information is being collected by Facebook. And so Facebook already knows what you’re interested in. So let’s say that you’ve been recently searching for a mattress. Well, there’s an audience that you could build of people who are interested in mattresses. I know it seems crazy, but that’s available.
Additionally, you can market to people who have liked certain pages. Maybe because they’ve liked certain pages they’re a good target for your product or service. You could target certain states: maybe people are more likely to buy in Indiana versus Ohio. You don’t know until you test. Bottom line: test different audiences to see what is the best audience to engage with your marketing and get them into your warm audiences.
Mistake #3 Not Testing Ad Copy
What I mean by ad copy is the written text that is either above on a Facebook ad or below on an Instagram ad. You might be thinking that you already know what the ad copy should look like. You might use your tagline since you already built it out for your website. It’s your best guess and a resounding maybe. You just don’t know what is going to work and what’s not going to work with this cold audience of people until you test.
So you should constantly be testing different ad copy to see which one resonates with your audience. You’re battling for attention.
Your ad isn’t necessarily competing with your competitors on the Facebook and Instagram network.
What you’re competing against are mom and dad posts with pictures of their children, vacation posts or cat videos.
Yep, you’re competing against cat videos.
Your first job Facebook is to get people to stop scrolling. So if you’re not testing different ad copy to get people to stop scrolling and engage with your ad, then you’re probably not going to get good results.
Mistake #2 Not Testing Ad Types
Facebook offers a variety of ad formats. You are not typing or testing a variety of ad types. You can run video ads, carousel ads and image ads. Don’t stop at testing different types of videos: long or short for example. Test a video ad, versus a carousel ad, versus an image ad. They’re all going to perform differently. If you’re not doing ongoing testing or optimization in order to see what is performing better, you could diminish results.
Mistake #1: Relying Solely on Facebook and Instagram
The number one reason why your ads are probably not performing is that you’re relying solely on Facebook and Instagram. These platforms are just one type of marketing.
Multi-Channel Marketing
We are a big believer at Elevated Marketing Solutions that you should be running on multiple channels: Facebook ads, Twitter ads, LinkedIn, and definitely Google Ads. You should definitely be doing Google ads. We’re a big proponent of them. I mean Google ads targets all the way at the bottom of the funnel, generally, depending on the keyword intention. And so I think you need a mixture of channels.
Off Platform Considerations
You also need to make sure you have a great website. You need to make sure your SEO plan is developed. You’ve got good content, so you need to be in multiple types of marketing, both online and offline in order for your ads to work.
If you don’t have a good brand to start with, then you’re going to struggle when it comes to Facebook and Instagram ads because you’re going to be marketing constantly to a cold audience. Consequently, you might struggle with convincing them to move over to your warm audience.
Bonus: Facebook and Instagram Aren’t Working Because…
So that’s it for our top 10 reasons why your Facebook or Instagram ads might not be performing. But I do want to throw in a bonus. My bonus is it’s finicky. Facebook is a very finicky platform. So your ads might not be performing, not because you haven’t avoided these top 10 mistakes, but because sometimes you just need to keep changing it up.
It’s kind of like running the same commercial a year after year. People get tired of the same commercial, even if it worked spectacularly at one time. You have to constantly be creative and come up with new and interesting content.
Also the Facebook algorithm changes. Facebook is constantly updating its platform. As a result, what worked yesterday might not work today.
