Before you decide to launch Facebook ads for your business or your program, there are a few things you need to consider. First and foremost- you need to establish a proof of concept.
Here’s an example – you are a gym owner who wants to build some additional revenue streams for your business. You know there is a large population in town of people over the age of 50, so you decide to create a “Legends” or “Fit Over 50” program. You want to use Facebook ads to sell the enrollments for this program.
Using ads at this point in the process would be immature. You need to first see if people in your network will buy this “Fit Over 50” service. If you can’t sell someone who walks into your gym on that program, then the chances of you selling it to complete strangers on the internet is close to zero.
Even after you sell 5 people into your new program, you need to iterate on the service to make sure it consistently yields the results that you promise.
Only AFTER you establish that your program works and that there is demand (meaning you’ve been able to sell it without the aid of paid advertising), you can begin to make some hypotheses on how to increase sales with Facebook.
At this point, you’ll need to make some educated guesses on the types of campaigns you want to run. Form a hypothesis on the message, the media, and the market. Meaning, you’ll need to make a few guesses on what combination of ad copy and imagery will resonate with the audience that you want to target, but you should have some preliminary data with which to start out. If you’ve been able to successfully sell your program without paid advertising, then you’ve interacted with your potential clients, you know a little bit about their challenges and what problems they are looking to solve.
After you’ve made your message, media, and market hypothesis and you are ready to build out your ads, you can make an investment in Facebook ads. You do, however, need to treat it exactly as such, an INVESTMENT. You need to establish a test-budget and be completely ok with losing all of it.
The last thing you should do is put your last $1,000 worth of savings on a campaign to try and resuscitate your business.
When advertising on Facebook, I always assume that I could lose 100% of the money I put in. If you are looking to get started with online ads, look at your business’ cash-flows and determine the amount you can safely risk testing on your ads each month. When you assume that risk, you remove the emotion from the process.
The worst investors bet their money on things that they NEED to work. When you establish your test budget, you are identifying your hard stop number and you limit your downside.
Treat your ads like a professional investor. That’s how you set yourself up for success with Facebook.
