Are Facebook™️ Ads the silver bullet to sales?

Are Facebook Ads the silver bullet to sales? I’m about to take you on a journey where we’re going to look at some real data and some cold, hard number. So I’ll apologise right now, incase I burst your bubble in if you’ve been thinking, “I’ll just launch some ads, and I’ll make a squillion dollars.” If this is the case, honestly, you’ve been delusional – #coldhardtruth

Facebook ads take work. If it were easy, everyone would be sitting on a beach somewhere drinking their Mai Tai and living that laptop life. But the cold, hard fact is that Facebook Ads take hard work and not everybody is going to make it. You need persistence, resilience and determination so that when your Ads fail (and they will) you’ll come out fighting again with new copy, new creatives and new audiences to test.

So many Coaches, Consultants and “Expertpreneurs” will not succeed in growing their business to 5 or 6 figures per month because they quit too early. That’s a mistake I see all the time. They will launch some Facebook ad campaigns, try a couple of different stock images, try a couple of different audiences, then throw their hands in the air and proclaim “Facebook ads don’t work!” So the give up and and start cold calling, or worse yet, go to Indeed to look for positions vacant.

Facebook Ads work.

I was listening to The Perpetual Traffic podcast recently where the episode had the Founder of Wicked Reports, Scott Desgrosseilliers as a guest on the show. Wicked Reports is a Software that can track your traffic and Sales from multiple platforms so you can stop guessing where sales are coming from. (Fun fact Wicked Reports’ Active Campaign integration was setup using my client’s database)

On this podcast episode Scott was sharing results they’ve seen with over 1 billion dollars in ad spend over user accounts. They have accumulated very interesting data about the customer acquisition journey. So you know ads about running cold traffic to a webinar and instant sale…. Well, it does happen – I see it every day, however, it’s not where the majority of sales come in. The time it takes from someone to opt in, to purchase from you is, on average, 43 days.

So you can see that if you throw up some Facebook Ads to make a quick buck, you’re just spending your money on Facebook Ads – not INVESTING your money. You need to continue to nurture the relationship with your potential customer in their Facebook Newsfeed (because up to 70% of your email subscribers will never open your emails!) That is your best chances to turn that $3 Lead into a positive earning per lead.

So it’s a matter of staying front and center of mind, continuing that relationship with your potential clients and positioning yourself as the authority in your niche that has the solution to their problem. So when they are at that point where they’re ready to make a decision, when they’re saying, “Oh man, I need to get over this now,” you are person that comes to mind.

This is where surface level Facebook Ad strategies fail. They do not have a plan to nurture a 43 day customer acquisition journey – or longer. If lucky, they’ll have a seven day retargeting window, maybe 14 or 21 days then they drop out of their Newsfeed never to be seen again… just as your potential customer was getting to trust you.

With just a couple of dollars a day you can continue to get in front of your potential clients that have already given you a ‘Yes’ by opting in. Isn’t that a worthwhile investment?

Taking them on a journey of acknowledging they have a problem to overcome, the pain that will exist if they do not overcome that problem, what their reality looks like after resolving that problem and establishing your authority that you have the solution to help them achieve it, doesn’t all happen in a day in a majority of cases.

Staying front and center of mind to your clients so that, after they’ve got to know you a bit more, after they know who you are, what you’re about, that your values align with their values and that your methods align with their methods so that when they’re in that moment where they have to take action NOW – you’re the person they go to.

Facebook ads. Are they a silver bullet? Well, most likely not instantly. Yes, you can run some ads, get people to register for your webinar and make a sale or two straight away. However, you’ve got to commit to the long game. When you do some ads that you think were going to crush it and they don’t, just create some new ads. Look for the bottlenecks and then look to address them, okay?

It’s a matter of staying the course, staying front and center of mind with your potential client and while they’re not a silver bullet instantaneously, Facebook ads can produce long term gains. And that’s what you need to be aware of and be prepared to commit to when you set out with Facebook Ads to build your business.