Social media ad campaigns are the lifeblood of many small business owners and marketers. However, not all these campaigns hit their mark. Some of them are near misses, while others are complete failures. However, they are designed strictly within the acceptable rules of the respective social media platform, they are created in good faith, and they offer actual, genuine benefits.
So, what went wrong with them? There is not just one, but several issues which cause ad campaigns to miss their target on the social media. Most of the time, this failure stems from poor targeting and scheduling, while in other cases the core problem is the lack of proper understanding of how social media works.
Looking back on our track record with several clients we have identified, from discussions with them and through understanding what they were doing before coming to us, the most typical reasons why social media ads fail. We’ve left out things which pertained to specific conditions, or specific products, and we have come up with this list of five ways in which social media ad campaigns do not return the expected results. Here they are:
1. The Campaign Does Not Have Specific Goals
The first and most critical reason why your ad campaigns miss the target is that there isn’t really a target to hit. When you try to do more things with one ad campaign, it is like running after two hares – in the end you catch none. When people browse Facebook™ or Twitter, they react to powerful and clear calls to action. Either they are promised a discount on a project, or invited to download a freebie or like a Facebook™ page. In each case, the target is clear.
But some campaigns get muddled up between promoting a product and increasing engagement on the social media page, or simply they have weak calls to action which don’t give people a strong motivation to click or tap on it.
2. You Have a False Understanding of How Social Media Works
When people log on to their social media accounts, they want to connect with friends, to find out useful and interesting things, to be entertained and educated, or simply to pass the time while waiting for the bus with a cute cat video or some photos from their friend’s vacation. They do not log on thinking “let me check out what X brand has to offer”. If your ads do not offer a little entertainment, stir up the users’ curiosity, inspire them or make them lust after your products, you’ve lost them. They do not care what you have to sell – they care about what benefits they can get from whatever you have to sell.
3. You Are a Social Media Wallflower
Your ads may be catchy, but people have little idea what your business is about and how competent you are to solve their problems. They look at your social media page and find few reasons to engage with you and to find out more about your products and services. For this reason, very few will click on your ads – even your own followers. They are still waiting to be convinced that your ad is worth their time.
4. You Don’t Optimise Your Ad Content for Proper Keywords
Social media has become the biggest search pool for Google. If you do a simple check for various products or companies, the first results will be their social media pages. Ads that are not well optimised will not show up for people who are typing the specific keywords you wish to rank for. Never leave your SEO guideline behind when you start planning your social media ad campaigns.
5. You Hire a Beginner to Do Your Work
Outsourcing…ah, the perils of outsourcing! When you trust something so important as your social media brand image and sales funnel to a cheap overseas beginner, you will get exactly what you pay for: poor ad performance, poor engagement for your posts and an amateurish looking social media account.
If you do want to outsource your social media ads, choose a team of professionals who know the ins and outs of creating ads with a high conversion rates and will do all the nitty-gritty work for you, allowing you to enjoy the results.