Here’s the thing with paid advertising if you don’t get it right: It entails a relentless charge on your card, it’s a constant burden on your budget, it’s a colossal waste of time, effort, opportunity, and resources.
While you have taken a step up from many entrepreneurs who dream but don’t dare put money up for an ad, your work is far from over if you just thought that putting up an ad on Google or Facebook is going to solve your problem forever.
Digital Paid advertising is a boon in the sense that you get access to phenomenal reach. You have access to possibly every single person on earth. All that is available for much less than what you’d have to spend to advertise your business locally.
With Paid advertising, you also have access to analytics, insights on your visitors, a much better understand of your leads, and you’d even be able to precisely pinpoint who saw your ad first and where and then when they actually purchased something from you (attribution).
You could take informed decisions, you could control your own results, and you could generate leads like a machine.
Just not when you continue to do silly mistakes, however. Here are some of them:
Set it and Forget it
There are Shady agencies guilty of this, and I’ll reserve my spite for them but it’s sad to see so many businesses just launching campaigns (and even that’s not done right) and then leave it to Google, Facebook, or whatever platform you use for paid advertising to do all the heavy lifting.
Google and Facebook don’t care. In fact, they’ll punish you for being stupid. You’ll end up spending tons of money while you sleep without ever knowing why all that ad spend just watered down a hole.
You’ll then say, “Paid advertising doesn’t work”.
Paid campaigns — whether you choose Google or Facebook – require active management. Dedicated campaigns each for multiple products or services, dedicated landing pages for each offer you make, connecting all those landing pages and your email auto responder service together, managing leads, nurturing leads, and tracking sales (if you are tracking sales offline, that’s another story).
Paid Advertising to Cold Audiences
I’ll come out with it right away: this isn’t a deal breaker, but the fact that most advertisers, marketers, and business owners only do this and nothing else (like retargeting) numbs my mind.
I recently wrote on How to Warm up your audience so that you could sell better, drive leads at a much lesser cost, and make it easier for you overall.
It’s not wrong to launch paid advertising campaigns to completely cold audiences. What you’d need to do in addition to this (after the campaign runs for a while) is to build up audiences for retargeting.
Not running campaigns long enough
There are way too many folks out there guilty of this, and that includes me when I first started: we don’t run campaigns long enough. Without giving campaigns the time they need to sort out the best possible ad and copy combinations, the offer, the bidding strategy, your optimization game, and you’re a/B testing, you are not doing the campaigns justice.
Think of campaigns are little plants in your garden – they’ll fall flat and die if you don’t water them, prune out the dying leaves, and care for your plants, right?
Google Adwords and Facebook are incredibly smart platforms that also rope in machine learning, complex algorithms, and savvy technology to gain a better understand of what you are trying to achieve with your campaigns.
Related: Why you Should Run Facebook Ads Longer Than You think?
Stop doing these silly mistakes. I am assuming that your money still matters to you and that you can squeeze the most out of every dollar you spend on ads.
How do your campaigns look like?