Are you wasting time, energy, AND money? If you’re making these simple mistakes, your Facebook and Instagram advertising campaigns could have an incredible amount of untapped potential! 

 

In part 1 of our 2 part series on Facebook & Instagram advertising mistakes, we will explore 2 pitfalls that keep business owners like you, from properly optimizing your ad campaigns, and earning as many customers as possible: Testing without a strategy, and overloading your audience with information.

 

With that being said, if you’re looking to maximize your advertising results while minimizing both time and money wasted, continue reading for more insight on social media advertising mistakes that you NEED to avoid. 

 

Testing Without Strategy

 

Are you optimizing your ads, or wasting your time?

 

The first advertising mistake that we will be covering in today’s blog post is testing without a strategy. Oftentimes, the importance of strategy is emphasized during the initial stages of an ad campaign. However, If you want your ad campaign to succeed long term, you need to apply the same effort from pre-launch planning, into your testing phase later down the line.

 

So, what is a testing strategy? 

 

It means tweaking your ads, and testing alternatives with specific intent in order to determine audience insights that you can take advantage of. Without it, an attempt to optimize your advertising can result in lackluster results, or inconclusive evidence that sets you on the wrong track.

 

For example, let’s say that you opened a brand new catering/meal prep business. In addition, let’s say that you first advertised your business by offering a discount, but the ad performance began to decline. In this scenario, the next logical step would be to “optimize” your ad campaign… But, there’s a right way, and a wrong way to go about this… In other words, you can do this with, or without a testing strategy!

 

For new businesses, offering an initial discount is a generally safe and effective promotion, however, your new customers may have been enticed by other factors of your business, such as quality or convenience. In this scenario, a testing strategy will give you the ability to determine what factors of your business earn the most sales.

 

So, this means swapping out your creatives, and running multiple ads (or a dynamic creative ad), each with their own distinctive approach. In this case, that could mean running multiple ads on the same dish, but one with a discount focus, a quality focus, and a convenience focus. That way, you can uncover the most attractive aspect of your business, which will in turn, allow you to adjust your ads in order to attract the most customers. 

 

On the other hand, without a proper testing strategy, any attempt to optimize your ads would be more similar to a “guess and check” test, which can be ineffective and expensive. For example, instead of promoting 1 dish with 3 distinct approaches, let’s say that you promoted multiple dishes instead. In addition, let’s say that your convenience-focused ads looked like clear winners. 

 

In this case, it may seem like running more ads based on convenience would be the best route to take, but, without a testing strategy the results of your ad campaign can be misleading! While convenience may seem like it matters most, in this example, the new dishes you promoted may be what actually earned you new customers.

 

At the end of the day, ad optimization requires specific and actionable data points. And, if your approach to optimization means randomly swapping out your creatives, and switching up your selling points, you simply won’t be able to uncover anything concrete.

 

In other words, without a testing strategy, it would be impossible to determine specific data points to optimize your ads. 

 

Here, the “testing” graphic on the right swaps out 2 variables, the dish and primary selling point (convenience). Because of this, it can be difficult to determine the best optimization strategy*

 

 

Overloading Information

 

The more the better right? Not quite…

 

When it comes to advertising on social media, showcasing more selling points won’t guarantee more sales!

 

The last advertising mistake that we will be covering relates to the amount of selling points and features that your promote – Overloading your advertisement with information.

 

As a business owner, it can be tempting to advertise every feature, benefit, and advantage that comes with what you offer… After all, you’ve worked hard to develop your products and services! And, while we’re sure that your target audience would love to hear more on how your business caters to their needs, you don’t have a lot of time to entice someone scrolling through social media.

 

On Facebook and Instagram, not only are you competing with other advertisers attempting to win over the attention of your target audience, but you also have to compete with their friends, every celeb they follow, and all of the other entertaining content that Facebook and Instagram serves to them.

 

This is why you can’t overload your audience with information!

 

For example, let’s say that you own a sports bar, and you’re looking to pack it for the NBA playoffs. You may have an elevated menu, great happy hour specials, as well as awards and accolades, but, if you want your advertising to bring in customers, you need to focus on what matters most… The game playing and the beers on special! By keeping your ad focused, short, and sweet, you can maximize the odds that your target audience spots the selling points they’re looking for, and takes a genuine interest in your business.

 

On the other hand, if you were to advertise every positive aspect of your business, instead of attracting new customers, your advertisement would be much more likely to overwhelm whoever it reaches. So, that means that the NBA fans that you’re trying to attract, are probably going to stop reading your ad after just a few lines, only to scroll right to the next post! 

 

With that being said, regardless of your industry, if you want to effectively advertise your business on social media you can’t overload your target audience with information. While it may feel counterintuitive, including more info only increases the odds that your target audience scrolls past your ad without a second thought!

 

In other words, keep things simple!

 

Here, the graphic on the right feature’s information that the target audience may find irrelevant. Because of this, the target audience can get overwhelmed and scroll right by*

 

 

In conclusion, in part 1 of our 2 part series on Facebook and Instagram advertising mistakes, we explored the consequences of testing without a strategy and overloading your ads with information; two detrimental mistakes that can lead to wasted time, energy, AND money, despite being easily overlooked.  So, now, you should be 1 step closer to running a fully optimized ad campaign and maximizing your results…

 

However! If you’re looking to fast-track your success, or spend your energy on other facets of your business, we offer social media advertising services that can take everything off your hands! To learn more, contact us.