So you’ve just launched your new product or business model, now you’re ready to hit your audience with some advertising. You’ve done your research and listened to gurus and how-to videos on social media advertising.

Which means, you most likely have the three most important things in a social media ad:

1. A message/offer
2. Your targeting criteria
3. A landing page to send traffic to

Every funnel is going to have some sort of variation of these three things. But just because you have all of these doesn’t mean you have a funnel.

Your message might not be interesting. Your targeting might suck. Your landing page might not be engaging.

Of course, if any web guru that advertised to you through Facebook with “growth hacks”, “lead generation”, or “My 7-Figure Sales Funnel”, they’re not going to make it look challenging, because they want you to think it’s easy so you buy their course.

We’ll it isn’t easy. Every market, every industry, every audience is different. One message that may work for one guy, isn’t going to work for everyone, which is where you’ll need to start assessing your own ad creative and funnel.

If there’s one thing I took away from my marketing classes in college, it’s that anything I learned that isn’t a principle, doesn’t applies to real world marketing. The reason why is because there are so many times and instances where even though you think you have the right message, the right delivery, and the right audience, your ad just doesn’t seem to convert.

If this seems to be the case after you’re amped up about learning from “social media experts”, don’t worry. What they’re saying DOES work, generally. It’s just they were essentially a car sales man that sold you a vehicle without telling you how to take care of it or fix and diagnose basic things.

Allow me to be your helpful social media ads mechanic and have this post serve as a reference for your future ads!

Review and Refine Your Targeting

One of the most common things I see with social media ad campaigns that aren’t performing well is the targeting. Unlike Google or Bing ads, targeting on social media isn’t primarily keyword based, which means you really have to know your audience.

The fantastic thing about social media, is the amount of data users are willing to put on the internet, which makes advertising that much easier in tracking down your target market!

**Laughs maniacally**

However, a lot of advertisers often have misconceptions about their target market. For example, I’ve often run into landscaping clients of mine who advertise primarily to men because that’s typically who they deal with during the install.

Little did they know, that if they paid attention to their audience demographics in both Google Analytics and their social media platform, they would have known that it’s the wives that are doing the research.

For the lack of a better example, in this case, the landscaper assumed that because the husband was the “bread winner” that he made the decisions when it came to a landscaping service provider, but really, he’d have a lot more leads if he’d simply prioritize advertising to women on social media.

You should know who your ideal customer is. Create a customer persona for your different customers and create targeting based off of the demographics you outlined in your fictional customer.

Don’t know how to do this? Hubspot has a really cool tool that helps you outline these.

 

Review and Refine Your Strategy

Maybe you have the right idea. You might have the right message, the right channel, and even the right audience, but you may not have the right strategy for what you’re trying to capture leads and sales on.

You could be trying to hit people in the decision stage versus capturing leads on your audience in the awareness stage. Each stage of the sales funnel have different types of messages even though they are promoting the same product with the same end goal.

Your strategy might consist of a landing page that leads directly to a sales page. If that doesn’t seem to be converting, try a different approach. Give something of value first such as a blog post, video, or webinar that answers a common question or teaches your audience something they would like to know.

Once you have their lead information is when you start guiding them down the funnel.

And if you’re not sure what to do with lead information after it’s been collected via social media campaign, well good news, I wrote a post just for you on that.

See: “You Just Collected a Bunch of Leads from Social Media, Now What?”

 

Analyze Your Ad Performance

Don’t just look at your ad performance and see overall statistics like shares, likes, views, etc. Look at trends.

– What times of day are people engaging with your ads (not a metric available on all social media platforms)

– What types of posts are getting the most engagement?

– Who is interacting with your ads? Gender, age, location?

– What days are your ads performing well and what days are they not performing?

 

Trends are very important to look after. Since our ad budget on search engines and social media is largely based on pay-per-click, we have to bid on either keywords or news feed impressions against other competitors trying to get that ad space.

If you have a limited ad spend budget, you want to avoid times of day, weeks, and even months as well as certain demographic targeting to prevent spreading yourself too thin in terms of cost-per-click or cost-per-impression.

If you ad isn’t only getting 10 clicks on Saturdays but getting 100 clicks on Wednesdays, then you may want to prevent your ad from showing on Saturdays. What Google, Facebook and other social platforms are doing, is budgeting your whole week based on 7 days, but if you limit your window, you won’t need to spend the same amount of money on the ad on a Saturday compared to a Wednesday.

As my dad always said, “fish where the fish are!”

If you’re getting a ton of clicks on Wednesdays, imagine how many more you could get if you shifted some or all of your Saturday budget over to Wednesdays and other higher performing days of the week.

 

Analyze Your Competitors’ Performance

One of my favorite quotes by Sun Tzu is the ‘Know Your Enemy’ quote. The whole thing goes like this:

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

Let me break it down for ya real quick.

Your competitors are testing out marketing messages for you. They’re like free marketers that work for you by doing all the leg work. And all you have to do is pay attention to which of their posts are getting interactions and which ones are being ignored.

If your competitors are doing something right and getting a lot of engagement, then it’s in your best interest to not only replicate that, but do it better. If they’re not getting a lot of engagement, well… you know what not to do.

But you don’t have to go to each competitors Facebook page to see what posts are getting engagement.

Facebook has this really handy tool called Pages to Watch.

Simply head over to your business Facebook page and click on Insights.

 

Also, give EverGrow a like. I could use the support 😉

 

Once you click on this, scroll down until you see Pages to Watch. Simply add a page you’d like to watch and monitor their Facebook page against yours. Of course you’ll have to add at least 5.

 

If you want to check out their individual posts, then click on their name and check out a condensed feed of their top performing posts.

 

Assess Your Landing Page

I hate to break it to you, but a good landing page for a social media campaign is not your typical website page.

First let’s get something out of the way, the page you send traffic from your ads to is a landing page, but more importantly, it’s a conversion page. And it’s important to know the difference between the two.

All conversion pages are landing pages but not all landing pages are conversion pages. A conversion page is simply a landing page that is designed to convert a visitor to a lead, whereas a typical, content heavy, landing page is designed to attract visitors through organic means, like SEO.

Your landing page should be clear and concise as to what you want your visitors to do, like “Hey you! Want a social media scheduler that creates posts for you?!  Fill out the form to get your free eBook!”

(By the way, that’s what TASSI does)

And then an arrow to the form.

Well, that’s a really simplified version of a conversion page.

If you think your conversion page is lacking substance, I highly suggest checking out HubSpot’s free Inbound Certification course. There’s a super handy section in it that covers well-done conversion pages.

Otherwise you might want to check out ClickFunnels, LeadPages, or even OptimizePress if you use WordPress since their conversion page templates are designed to convert visitors to leads.

 

Review Your Message/Offer

At the end of the day, you could have a fantastic looking ad, a great landing page, and excellent funnel, but your message is could be crap.

Do you think your customers are relating to your message, or are you?

I’ve noticed a lot of the landscaping community regularly advertises “‘Fall Clean-Up” services, you know, gutter cleanings, leaf removal, flower bed maintenance, and occasional winterization of irrigation systems like sprinklers.

But what I’ve realized is that I’ve never heard anyone say, “Man, I need to get a quote on a Fall clean-up for my yard.” No, it’s always something more specific like, “I need to call someone about my gutters.”

So I did what any self-proclaimed, good marketer would do, I created a poll. I simply asked whether customers call looking for Fall clean-up services or if they ask for specific services that fall within that blanket service.

The answers were overwhelmingly for the latter.

So my follow-up question was simple:

“Why are you guys advertising a service in terminology your customers don’t use?”

They’re advertising their Fall clean-up services but getting calls for gutter cleanings and leaf removals? I think that means their current messaging isn’t working.

What if the message was, “Free gutter cleanings with complete Fall clean-up!”? Now we’re speaking to what customers are looking for as well as advertising an offer AND the service we want to advertise for.

Speak your customers’ language!

 

Split Test

Also known as  A/B testing…

Just because your ad campaign isn’t performing as expected doesn’t mean your message, landing page, or delivery is completely bad. It could be as simple as using a different word or varying the targeting ever so slightly.

Duplicate your ad and change something simple in it that you think might be causing the results you’re getting and run both ads at the same time and see which one performs better.

Your ad campaign doesn’t even have to be performing bad, you could just want to improve your results. The best practice is to ALWAYS split test, even if your ad is kicking butt. Because that’s what a good marketer does. Optimize performance 100% of the time.

The cool thing is, a lot of conversion pages like ClickFunnels or LeadPages offer split testing on their landing pages and they’re super easy to implement. So you don’t to just split test your ad, you can easily A/B test your landing pages as well.

 

Get to Work!

Sorry, this was more of a piece of advice rather than a command. Although, I really do hope I brought some good insight into why your ad campaign may not be getting you the results you deserve.

 

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