Do Facebook Ads really work in gaining new customers for my business? The day I started my first business I wanted to use Facebook advertising…
But the question I kept getting stuck on was – Do Facebook ads really work, and would I see a return on the money I was about to spend?
In this blog post, I am going to share my personal experiences regarding using Facebook advertising, what Facebook advertising is about, and what I did wrong, as well as how I eventually got my Facebook advertising to work for my business.
What is Facebook advertising, and how does it work?
Having a Facebook business page will help you to grow your brand awareness, and display your products and services in a cheap way.
The only problem with this is that Facebook’s organic reach has started dying off dramatically over the last 4 years and reaching all your followers has now become a major challenge.
But, there are ways of getting around this challenge, one way is through Facebook advertising.
For the best return on your money, follow my instructions below carefully…
Facebook allows you to create many different types of ads, which helps you to reach outside of your existing Facebook followers, enabling you to grow your followers and fans, as well as market your products and services.
Below I have listed all of the current Facebook advertising tools that you can use inside of your Facebook business page:
- Brand Awareness
- Reach
- Traffic
- Engagement
- App Installs
- Video Views
- Lead Generation
- Messages
- Conversions
- Catalogue Sales
- Store Visits
I would recommend reading more about what these different Facebook advertising tools can do for your business, in-depth, by checking out our other blogs.
Using Facebook advertising…
So, about 7 years ago, I opened my first Facebook business page for The Learning Tree.
This was an exciting moment in my business, bear in mind that this was still the early days when gaining Facebook followers was easy and posting on your Facebook page had a high engagement rate.
As time went on, or shall I say, as I made more money, I started experimenting with Facebook paid advertising, also known as Facebook Ads.
If I can remember correctly, there were only about 2 or 3 different advertising methods that you could use on Facebook back then, a lot less compared to today, where there are over 15 different Facebook ad options to choose from.
Unfortunately, there was very little info back then on how Facebook ads worked, I’m sounding a bit old now lol!
The blog posts that were available back then did not help me much either, unlike today, where there are many different blog posts regarding how to use Facebook Advertising for your business.
So, after about 2 weeks of research, I decided it was time to launch my first Facebook Ad campaign.
This was exciting, and a little daunting, as I did not really know what on earth I was doing, but it was time to do something new, and action was the keyword of the day!
I kept repeating Arnold Glasow’s one quote in my head that day…
“An idea not coupled with action will never get any bigger than the brain cell it occupied.” – Arnold Glasow
Have faith in my wings
I know if I wanted to grow my business and learn more about digital marketing and Facebook Advertising, I was going to have to jump off the cliff that day and learn how to fly on the way down.
So, after going through the whole process of setting up my Facebook ad, and launching it, I learned to fly on the way down.
Please note, if you need help with your Facebook advertising or on how to grow your business, let our team at RAS Digital Marketing help you, with a spectacular digital marketing proposal, by clicking here.
Okay, so back to my Facebook ad, my ad started working I was getting clicks and impressions on the ad, with the odd conversion from time to time.
Before I tell you about the dark side of my experience, what I did wrong, and why my Facebook ads did not really work as well as I thought they would…
I want to first explain to you what impressions, clicks, and conversions are…
What are Facebook impressions?
When you launch your Facebook ads, each ad needs to be seen by people in their Facebook news feed, and each time your ad gets seen by someone on Facebook, this counts as an impression, and you will get billed for each impression.
And yes, you pay for it.
You will also get billed for each click on Facebook.
The cost of an impression and click can be extremely low, from as little as 10 – 50 cents per impression, and then maybe R 5 – R 10 per click.
This all depends on what you are willing to pay for a lead or a click. Find out more about costs and your Facebook ads by reading this blog post.
What is a Facebook conversion?
So, now that you know what an impression is, and how the impression leads to a click, it’s time you understand what a Facebook conversion is.
I’ll use the below example to help you get a basic understanding, of how these 3 steps come together to give you a lead or sale…
Say you run a Facebook ad, 1,000 people see your ad AKA impression, and out of those 1,000 people, 400 people click on your Facebook ad.
Out of the 400 people who have clicked on your ad, say 10 take action and decide that what your ad has to say, is just what they have been looking for, and they then take the next step, known as a conversion, asking you for a quote or better – buys your product!
So, 10% of 400 will give you 40 leads, or 10 sales, depending on what your call to action was.
What did this whole process cost you?
Now that you know what the process of gaining a lead or sale is, let’s have a look at the costs.
If you have 1,000 impressions of your ad, and each impression costs you 50 cents, then the total would be R 500.
We know that we gained about 400 clicks from this ad, we now need to look at what the cost of that was.
We need to take the R 500 and divide it by the 400 clicks, this gives us R 1,25 per click.
ROI
Next, we take the 40 leads or sales that we have and let’s say we sell a product or service at the cost of R 1 000, we need to work out what our ROI is. (Return on investment).
Let’s work with a 20% sales conversion, as not all the 40 people who became leads will buy, so let’s be safe.
This is not bad at all!!!
If you look at it this way, I only spent R 500 to gain an ROI of R 8,000.
What if I could take R 500 out of that R 8 000, and reinvest it every day into my Facebook Advertising, and then gain R 7,500 a day, giving me an ROI every month of R 150,000 which would mean, that the total costs of my Facebook ads for one month would only be R 10,000.
So, let’s just get it straight, you pay R 10,000, and you get R 150,000 in return, that is a definite winner!
You would be crazy not to see the insane value of Facebook Advertising, in a business using Facebook Ads! Click here to let our team help you with your Facebook Advertising Strategy.
But hang on…
Before you go and dive into creating your first Facebook ad, thinking you are going to get the same return for your business right away…
I need to stop you right there, as there is a lot more that needs to go into creating one of these Facebook ads and getting these types of results.
The Facebook ad that cost me thousands
What I did wrong…
It’s important for you to know, that getting the ROI that I just spoke about in the last section of this blog, did not happen on my first attempt…
Or second, or third…
It took me a couple of months to turn my Facebook Ads into winning campaigns that started to convert like rock stars!
What works vs. what does not work
To learn what worked and what did not work, I had to spend countless hours, pouring thousands into my marketing budget. Sad story, I know.
Talk about expensive lessons!
But all that information is for a different blog post, and for a different day.
The one thing that I learned, which had the most impact on my Facebook ads, was learning how to use the Facebook Audience tool, to research my target market the right way.
This was a big problem. Even though my ad was getting conversions, it was extremely low. My ROI was hardly covering what I was spending on marketing.
How I eventually got my Facebook Ads right
Simple Fix
The first thing I did was take my R 500 and split it into smaller bits. So instead of just one campaign, I split it into 5 and had 5 X R 100 campaigns.
I would then build 5 different Facebook ad campaigns for each one. I then researched 5 different Facebook audiences for each of them.
Instead of running one campaign, with one audience, I now had 5 different campaigns. Each of them is segmented into different market audiences.
I would run all 5 campaigns for about a week. Then select the top 2 campaigns that were converting the best and stop the other 3 campaigns.
Then, for the next week, I would go on to build 3 new campaigns and test them against my previous 2 winning Facebook campaigns from the week.
I repeated this process for about 3 months. Once I had 2 Facebook ad campaigns that had an audience that was converting the best, I could start breathing. Then I pushed my whole Facebook marketing budget into those 2 Facebook ads.
So, are Facebook Ads worth it?
110% YES!!!
Right now, Facebook Advertising is dirt cheap. It gives you the ability to reach more than 2 billion people all around the world.
So…
If it’s not working for you, then you are doing something wrong!!!
Over the past few years, I have reached more than 1 million people on Facebook.
And got my lead conversion down to R 3 – R 5 per lead.
I basically ate, slept and breathed Facebook marketing strategies each waking moment of my day, and seriously, the time that I have invested into this has paid off in more ways than I could ever have imagined!
My recommendation
I would recommend that you start today, go open a Facebook business page if you have not done so yet, and start learning about Facebook Advertising.
If you need some help, then come try out our FREE Digital Marketing Strategy consultation at RAS Digital Marketing.
Our team specializes in creating digital marketing strategies, and working with them can save you a lot. As I said previously, these lessons are expensive, so come to us and let us show you the right and most cost-effective way to do things.
Your challenge
Here’s a challenge to start and run a Facebook ad:
Please use the comment section below if you decide to run your own Facebook Ad campaigns. If you need some advice, then please leave a comment below and I will be happy to assist you.
