If you’re like most small business owners, you’ve probably wondered if Facebook Ads are right to help your business grow. You’re probably looking for new customers or clients, but the world of paid advertising seems like a totally different world to you. Ultimately, you might worry about wasting money — valuable money that you need to feed your family and pay your employees.
So, how do you know if paid ads on Instagram and Facebook will work for your business? Here are a seven things you might consider:
1. Do you need more customers, more clients, or more business?
If you don’t need more business (or at least have a really good alternate strategy such as growing your email list, or creating general brand awareness), you probably shouldn’t run ads. It seems like this should go without saying, but if you don’t have the time and capacity to follow up with prospects that come in from paid ads, you’re likely going to be wasting money. You need a good follow up strategy to be successful.
2. Do you have the right kind of revenue?
Paid ads work best with businesses that have moderate-to-high ticket revenue types. For example, you’re going to have to sell a lot of $1.99 hamburgers to justify a $1,000/mo ad spend.
On the other hand, if you sell $3,000 sofas at your local furniture store, it could be pretty easy to get a positive ROI and be successful with ads.
One thing that people often fail to consider is the lifetime value of acquiring a new customer. For example, if you are a high-end hair stylist, it might not seem that it makes to spend $1,000 on ads to get a $100 hair styling customer. However, if that customer comes in once a month that’s $1,200 per year. If that customer is loyal to you for five years, you’ve exchanged $1,000 for $6,000 over the life of the customer. And, that’s if you only get one customer per month from your ad spend. Imagine if your $1,000 ad spend gets you 10 new customers. Wouldn’t you want to exchange $1,000 for $60,000?
3. Are you patient?
Here’s the thing, unless you are one of the few people who instantly find gold with their ads, it can take a little bit of time to see positive results with ads. Often there is some trial and error with writing the best ad text copy, designing the right ad images, finding the right audience, etc.
It’s not uncommon to see very little positive ROI for the first few months.
If you have the kind of personality that panics when you see money going out and none immediately coming back in, you probably aren’t a good fit for using Facebook ads to grow your business.
4. Are you willing to get help?
Success with Facebook and Instagram ads can be tricky. Most people are smart enough to figure it out on their own…eventually.
The people who have mega success with leveraging ads for their business are those who are willing to hire an expert to guide them. Not only will it expedite your positive results, but it will also improve the width of your success.
5. Do you know your customer’s problems?
The best online advertisers (and business owners in general) know their customer’s problems and pain points, agitate those problems, then present themselves as the best solution.
If you don’t know and can’t clearly and succinctly articulate your customer’s problem(s), you might not be quite ready for Facebook and Instagram ads.
6. Do you have the right objectives?
Do you even know what objective you’re trying to accomplish?
Yes, we’re all trying to make more money, but do you have a strategy for how you’d like to do that through ads?
An expert (such as us!) can help you figure this out, but success in paid advertising requires that you have a well-thought-out plan for what you’re trying to do with your ads.
Are you trying to get people into a sales funnel (i.e., get them on an email list where you send them a series of follow up emails headed towards an eventual sale)? Are you trying to sell a product directly? Do you want people to message you or call you? Are you trying to raise awareness about your brand? Get someone to walk into your showroom? Register for an event?
Different types of objectives require different approaches, so understanding what you’re trying to do is essential to being successful. If you haven’t given this much thought either hire someone to help you with it or understand that ads might not be right for you.
7. Do you have a good story to tell?
At the end of the day, the businesses that see the most success with ads have a good story to tell. They know their customer’s needs and do a great job at solving the need. They’re well positioned and have a great offer.
If you’ve got these 7 areas figured out, Facebook and Instagram ads are probably a good fit for your business. If you think you’d like to try paid social ads, but don’t quite have all of these ironed out, we can help. We’d love to work with you to help you discover if ads can work to help you get more customers.
Contact us to get started with a no-pressure, no-obligation conversation about whether or not we can help you get more customers using paid ads.