Will Facebook ads work for my store?

 Today I want to talk about Facebook ads for your store, and whether it will work. 

I get that many of you are curious about Facebook ads, but at the same time hesitant of the unknown and whether you’ll get a return on your investment. 

Let me be honest, Facebook & Instagram ads don’t work for everyone, at least not in the way you probably want them to. 

Let me explain. You most likely want to run ads to get sales, which is fair enough, you’re running a business after all, not a fan club. 

Sometimes direct to sales ads are not going to work for your business, and there could be a multitude of reasons why. 

Tune in to hear more 🎧

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Transcript

Welcome to the New School of Marketing podcast. We’re almost halfway through July and isn’t it ironic that I did a podcast episode about batching content a few weeks ago and I haven’t been able to batch any content this month. 

 We’ve had gastro in our house, a teething baby, crazy weather and just the general chaos of family life.

It’s a juggle but we’re working it all out. I’m sure that at some point (maybe when the kids are both at school) things will settle down. I’m sure there are parents listening and giggling about what I don’t know yet. 

Anyway, it is what it is. We try to roll with it.

Today I want to talk about Facebook ads for your store, and whether it will work. 

I get that many of you are curious about Facebook ads, but at the same time hesitant of the unknown and whether you’ll get a return on your investment. 

Let me be honest, Facebook & Instagram ads don’t work for everyone, at least not in the way you probably want them to. 

Let me explain. You most likely want to run ads to get sales, which is fair enough, you’re running a business after all, not a fan club. 

Sometimes direct to sales ads are not going to work for your business, and there could be a multitude of reasons why. 

• Your store might not be optimised for conversions
• It might not work well on mobile and your shoppers are on mobile
• Your prices might be too high for a direct to sale from a cold audience
• You could be targeting the wrong audience

There are honestly so many options as to why your ads might not work right away. 

Here’s what I do want to say though. Facebook ads WILL work for your store, but only if you get your strategy right. 

Like I mentioned, a direct to sale campaign might not work for your business. You might need to run a warm up campaign first, or maybe you need to go through your website with a fine comb to see if you can make improvements so it converts better.

It’s not easy from where I’m sitting to tell you what’s going to happen when you run Facebook ads, but the rule of thumb is that Facebook ads amplify what’s already happening organically. 

So if you’re making sales organically and you know your conversion rate and your average order value, you should be able to replicate this by driving more traffic to your store with ads. 

So will Facebook ads work for your store? Yes, but it depends on your strategy. 

Let’s go through a few different scenarios.

You have an online store selling items that are mostly under $50, but people often purchase more than one item so your AOV (average order value) is higher. Often over $100. Your store consistently attracts traffic and your conversion rate is over 2.8%. In other words, your stuff sells. If you were to run ads to a cold audience you will most likely see good results, as long as you target the right audience.

If you have an online store that sells high priced items, let’s say fine jewellery at $1,000 or more per piece this strategy most likely isn’t going to work for you. Firstly, a cold audience rarely spends $1,000 in an online store they don’t know, secondly, your conversion rate is most likely a bit lower than the average ecommerce conversion rate of 2.8%. 

This doesn’t mean that ads won’t work for you, it just means that you need to take a different approach. You would most likely be running ads that showcase your business, highlight the dream or life-style rather than the product and positioning it as the go-to store for fine jewellery in your niche. For example, you could be crafting jewellery for dance and ballet mums. Your niche is small but very targeted so you can start running ads that really position you as the go-to store for bespoke jewellery with a ballet/dance focus. Your aim with ads is to be seen and remembered for your work so that people will start talking about your brand. You will see sales from this in the long run, but it’s not a simple ‘click and purchase’ type of campaign, but instead you’re in this for long-term brand recognition. 

So when I see people asking in groups whether ads will work for their business, I always want to shout YES, BUUUUTTTT… 

A lot of people seem to put Facebook (or Meta) as a money hungry machine, and they probably are in it for the money because they’re a business afterall, but they also want to see your ads succeed. The better your ads perform, the more likely you are to spend more right?

Sadly a lot of people give Facebook ads a bad rep because they may not have seen any sales from it, but that doesn’t mean they don’t work.

Without looking at their numbers specifically there could be a ton of things that contribute to the ads not working and most of the reasons probably  have nothing to do with the ads themselves. 

Like I said earlier, if your website isn’t optimised for conversions no Facebook ad is going to change that. 

Also, Facebook only attributes a sale for 7 days, so if you have ads running and someone purchases on day 10 it won’t be attributed to your Facebook ad even though that’s what brought the person to your store in the first place. 

Facebook ads do work. It just depends on your business and what the most suitable strategy is for you. 

I want to take you back to before Facebook ads, before smartphones, when all the advertising we had available to us was a newspaper ad, magazine ad or tv ad. Back in those days it was incredibly hard to quantify your ad. You’d have no real idea if it actually worked, it was mostly a cross your fingers approach. 

Facebook and digital marketing has completely changed this. We now have metrics we never had before, but we now also have much cheaper ways to get our business in front of our target audience.

Sometimes I think we just need to change our perspective and make some tweaks to our marketing strategy before we say that something doesn’t work for us. If Facebook ads didn’t work for businesses, they wouldn’t still be running them.

Ok, time to get off my high horse and stop ranting about this topic. I know facebook ads work. They work for my clients, they work for my students, they work for me. 

If you’ve been struggling with Facebook ads, I’m inviting you to join me in my program eComm Expansion. Where you’re supported on your digital marketing journey and where I help you grow your ecommerce business by building your foundations so that you can successfully scale and grow your income. 

It’s time to stop the Facebook ads struggle, because it can be mega lucrative as long as your foundations are solid and you’re using the right strategy.