In today's episode, we speak with Tim Burd, better known as "The Godfather" of Facebook Ads. With 15 years of helping companies grow their ad-posting prowess, Tim teaches us how to make your audience an offer they can't refuse.
If you're just starting out, you may be wondering if you should put your ad budget into training or traffic? Training is essential, but Tim warns that tossing money into learning the tactics of supposed ad gurus will be disappointing. There are a lot of great training methods on the market. At the same time, there are a lot of jokers out there who fake their results to con you into shelling out your hard-earned cash. Any results-driven method is going to need you to already have a solid base of traffic and a little extra cash-flow to invest in it. If you're on the ground floor, put that money into buying traffic, then after you have built a foundation, build upon it by investing in more detailed strategies. You can have all the knowledge in the world, but they will not work for you if you have no money to invest in implementing the methods.
The age of profitable, unbranded pop-up e-commerce is coming to an end. If you're not building a brand by up-selling and repeat customers, the competing companies that are doing so on Facebook will push you out of the market soon. Tim stresses that this is something you need to begin planning for now if you wish to remain in the game. The algorithm on Facebook favors more data, which indirectly favors larger ad-spend budgets. However, they also highly favor small local businesses over big corporations. In the US alone, there are over 30 million local businesses and only about 6 million advertisers on Facebook.
Google has limited ad space on the search results page. On the contrary, Facebook is adding new features, including ads in Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and VR via Oculus. For instance, imagine visiting New York in VR and instead of big brands on the billboards in Times Square, users see your brand. Pair those features with a social network of over 2 billion users and this is a massive opportunity to grow your ad strategies to reach millions over the next few years.
Tim expands on the most common questions companies ask when their Facebook ad campaigns fail to meet the desired goals. In his experience, most people miss the mark when it comes to the creative aspect of their strategy. Often, companies will just throw a somewhat relatable, but mostly random image up in their ad and hope that it wins. But, it's a losing strategy. Instead, invest in a professional production. If your budget can't handle that, shoot some quick stills or using free software and your smartphone, create a personalized, branded video in minutes. The personalized touch will help to speak to your audience more than some stock photo or video that loosely relates to your brand or product.
The next biggest mistake is cutting the campaign too early. Setting the budget low, then cutting it after a low budget fails to meet its goals can be detrimental. With machine learning and the algorithms, it is imperative to give your campaign enough time to gather some information. A $5/day budget is not likely to yield many results over the course of a week. But, in time, it will build up the data you need to better refine your campaign and give you better targets.
So, how do you increase your odds of having the thunderbolt hit you? There is a hierarchy of importance that all businesses should follow in their campaigns when decided where to allocate resources:
You can still find success with bad targeting if you have a decent budget. Similarly, you can be successful despite having a small budget if you have good creative and copy. But, it's extremely important that you have at least three of the four characteristics in this formula. If you're severely lacking in more than one area, your campaign is bound to underperform.
