T he Biggest Mistake in Social Media Advertising
“184H” by Ryan McGuire, used under CC BY 1.0 / text added.
Advertising is all about data. Your vision will blur from squinting at numbers. Your middle finger will ache from the endless scrolling. This is a good thing. The pain is how you know you’re doing it right.
How do you know if you’re doing it wrong? Take the short quiz below and find out:
QUIZ
Mr. Smith is selling a widget. He wants to advertise his widget on Facebook. Mr. Smith spends $200 dollars on a variety of ads. None of them convert into sales at the rate he needs to make a profit. Should Mr. Smith:
a) Throw more money on the ads that didn’t work.
or
b) Keep testing new ads.
Answer: Keep testing new ads.
What if Mr. Smith is confident that the ad will work as long as it reaches enough people?
Answer: Keep testing new ads.
What if Mr Smith needs results to show his investors?
Answer: Keep testing new ads.
What if Mr. Smith is only 3 months away from filing bankruptcy?
Answer: Keep. Testing. New. Ads.
The biggest mistake you can make in social media advertising is spending big before you find a funnel that works.
With the data available in fully developed advertising platforms like Facebook, there’s no reason to drop your budget on anything other than a proven ad campaign. Advertising feels like art and it looks like art, but success in advertising is science. Science built off long hours of meticulous testing.
So don’t rush the tests and don’t spend your valuable ad budget until you’re sure you have a winner.
Oh, one last question. What if you’ve found an ad that works for you?
Answer: Put more money into that ad!
AND… keep testing new ads. No matter how good an ad converts, it can always do better. Never stop testing. That’s just science.
Nick Cotton is a project manager based out of Los Angeles, California. He’s got a background in the entertainment industry, and uses his talent at online messaging to extol the virtues of content marketing, interactive fiction and sentences measuring 280 characters or less.
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