Facebook is arguably the most used social media platform around the world, for both personal use and business use. When it comes to the business, avoiding Facebook ad mistakes can help marketers reach a large audience and leverage the high number of users Facebook has.
Facebook stated that in the third quarter of 2020, 10 million active advertisers were using their social media platform to promote their products and services. This number is increasing at a rapid rate consistently.
The Facebook Ads platform has helped many marketers increase sales and brand awareness by providing them a platform that has impeccable reach. However, as sweet as this may sound, there is a dark side to this platform.
It is a very dynamic platform, which requires you to change your practices from time to time and be constantly updated with the new features being added and discarded. So, it becomes easy for marketers to make certain mistakes which result in a wastage of time and money as their advertisements are not visible to their target audience.
What are the mistakes to avoid on Facebook?
Let’s have a look at the 5 Facebook Ad mistakes every marketer should avoid
1. Targeting the wrong audience
There are millions of active users on Facebook every day, and you must be able to segment your target audience. It is very common for marketers to target the wrong audience, which leads to the waste of time and effort they have put in
You may be able to design the perfect marketing campaign and have the most compelling advertisements, and yet have no clicks on your ads or traffic to your business. This can be solely because you didn’t research thoroughly about who your target audience is, and what they want to see on their feeds.
Many big brands fail to leave a mark with their ad campaigns on Facebook mainly because of this. In simple terms, imagine you are selling a digital marketing course online and decide to use the Facebook Ad platform to endorse your course and attract customers.
If you fail to conduct a thorough target audience research, you will end up showing in the feeds of users who are not interested in the course or may have different interests altogether. This would lead to your ad campaign not delivering the desired results and all your efforts and money would go to waste.
You must be able to avoid this mistake and make the best use of the Facebook Ad platform. You should gather certain pieces of information about your target audience, such as how old your average customer is, where they are working, how much money they are willing to spend on your product, etc.
To start with, you can analyze the data that you can collect about your existing customers from your Facebook page and get a fair idea.
2. Having unclear objectives
Before you implement any of your marketing ideas, you must have a set of clear, concise, realistic, and measurable objectives that you want to achieve with your marketing campaign.
The approach you choose on Facebook to optimize your ads may vary based on your goals such as, increasing brand awareness, increasing reach, boosting traffic, increasing engagement, encouraging app installs, lead generation, messages, conversions, and many more.
Planning and knowing your objectives before you start your campaign would not only help you plan everything better, it will also ensure that you can measure accurately whether you are obtaining the desired results or not.
Having a clear and concise goal is a great start, you need to back it up with an action plan to achieve the objectives you set out to achieve.
Let’s have a look at how you can develop and set objectives and goals for your business.
Identify the short-term and the long-term goals
Break down each goal into actionable business objectives
Set up the right team that is working collectively towards the goals
Monitor and measure progress regularly
3. Not creating quality content
Creating quality content is one of the most important things if you want to ensure that your audience will stop scrolling, view your promotion, and click on it. There are thousands of ads available on Facebook, so if you want to grab the attention of your audience, you need to create content that is visually appealing and stands out from the crowd.
There are many different types of ad forms available for you to use, such as text-based, videos, photos, etc. So, before you set out to design the most appealing ad you can, you must have an idea as to what type of ads your audience wants to view.
Do they love videos? Statics posts? Carousels? Text-based ads? You need to learn about your audiences’ tastes and preferences so that you can get the maximum ROI from your advertisements.
After you have determined what type of ads your audience wants to view, it is time to design it in such a manner that your audience is forced to stop scrolling and check out what your ad has to offer. You need to grab their attention instantly and hook them to your advertisement, as this will boost up the chances of them clicking on your ad and doing business with you.
4. Creating and running too many ads
Let’s bust a myth: Having too many ad campaigns running is not always good for your business. If your business is creating and running too many ads, especially on a tight budget, you are harming your business and probably not realizing it.
This will reduce the efficiency of your ads and lead to a lot of confusion as it would be a headache to track and measure the performance of each one of them.
However, this problem has a very simple solution. Reduce the number of ads and use your budget wisely by allocating enough funds for every ad to perform to its best capability.
Allocation of funds is also very important when it comes to taking full advantage of the Facebook algorithm, as you would need at least 50-100 conversions per ad set per week.
So, if you can allocate enough funds to each ad to achieve this goal, you would be able to obtain a much higher ROI.
5. Failing to optimize your ads for all devices
We all have a smartphone with us at all times, and no one would disagree with the fact that we spend a substantial amount of our time everyday, scrolling through social media platforms, such as Facebook.
The use of mobile phones has increased in the recent past and is only going to increase more in the future. According to reports, more than 98% of active user accounts throughout the world access Facebook using their mobile phones, and almost 80% of these people, only access Facebook using their mobile phones.
So, one more major mistake marketers make is that they don’t optimize their ads to work seamlessly on all types of devices, especially mobile phones. As you can see, from the statistics mentioned above, if you are not optimizing your ads for mobile phones, you are asking for your ad to fail or underperform.
However, one thing to note is that, if you are optimizing your ads for mobile phones, never compromise on the quality of the content and the visuals, as no one likes to view low-quality ads or content.
Make the best use of Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads are a great way to reach out to a larger section of the audience, at a relatively lower price, on one condition: If it is done right.
There are many basic and common mistakes marketers tend to make when they are advertising their products and services on Facebook.
So, this was a small list of Facebook Ad mistakes you need to avoid to ensure that you can generate as much revenue as you can by investing in these ads.