We love Facebook at DME Digital. It’s an incredibly powerful marketing tool that we’ve found great success with in the past.

In fact, over 91% of marketers say they’ve used Facebook ad campaigns in the past. But many report failing to make a meaningful ROI on the platform and leave disappointed.

We’re here today to tell you why your Facebook campaigns suck, and what you can do about them NOW.

The key to successful marketing is matching the right offer to the right audience at the right time.

You can do everything else right, but if your offer is the problem then that’s it – you’re done. You won’t get any meaningful engagement and you can say goodbye to prospective leads.

Facebook ad campaigns are no different:

Think about your own Facebook feed. How many times have you seen an ad that first caught your eye, then sold you with an amazing deal?

Now think about all the ads in your feed that were dead-on-arrival because they just didn’t provide you with anything meaningful.

See the problem?

Base image courtesy of List Shack

Think of Facebook ad campaigns as the marketing funnel in miniature.

You capture someone’s interest with good creative that stops them from scrolling past your ad immediately.

Then you engage their interest with some compelling copy.

Next you get them to consider your product or service with a good offer.

And that’s where things fall apart for a lot of campaigns.

Before you can think about sales and nurturing a lead, you have to hook them with something.

And don’t get us wrong, we’ve made the same mistake – it’s a rare marketer who can craft a perfect campaign on the first try.

One campaign, for example, did everything right:

• We created an eye-catching video to draw attention
• Then we wrote compelling copy that nurtured interest
• Next, we designed a successful, user-friendly landing page
• Finally – we achieved an average cost of engagement of just $0.02

But we didn’t get any conversions at all.

Why?

That campaign failed because we were linking people to the landing page without any sort of discount or offer.

We ended up having to pull the plug because our client didn’t want to provide customers with an offer. We were generating interest and driving traffic to the page, but that’s where the funnel ended.

You can optimize Facebook campaigns for video views, and if that was our goal we’d be golden.

But that wasn’t our goal.

And that’s the problem for a lot of Facebook ad campaigns we’ve seen.

In order to make a sale you need to show the customer that they need your product or service. Make yourself essential to their strategy or life:

And then you make them an offer they can’t refuse.

Okay, you don’t have to go that far when it comes to making an offer.

But you still need to provide your customers with something valuable. That can be a lot of things, depending on your niche:

• A 25% off discount to any order
• Free shipping on all purchases
• Complimentary consultation with one of your team members*

*Note that it doesn’t really matter if you already do consultations for free, what matters is that your offer sounds valuable and unique to your customer.

Sometimes an offer is even simpler than that. Facebook is, after all, moving towards a pay-to-play model of business. As such, they’re pushing more and more for businesses to pay to boost their page posts and content.

Your offer might be something simple – a piece of content your audience might find valuable. In that case, your offer is the product – all for free!

Now obviously paying money to boost your content isn’t something every business will do:

It’s all about providing value. Your product or service is already valuable, but you can make it seem even more so when you pair it with a special discount, deal or other offer.

There are plenty of other reasons a Facebook ad campaign might fall flat. To list just a few:

• Ad targeting might be too broad or too narrow
• Your bid settings might need some tweaking
• The ads might not have compelling imagery or copy

You could easily fill an entire guide for any one of these topics. But let’s focus on imagery and copy for now.

Let’s say you’re scrolling through your Facebook feed. An ad pops up, but the imagery is a lifeless greyscale stock photo. If you bothered to read the copy at all it’s a generic 50% off sale at a local retailer – you think. You didn’t really read it.

Because that’s the thing. Generic images that don’t draw the eye won’t stand out to your customers. No matter how tasteful or artistic an image is, if it’s not immediately visually interesting it’s going to flounder.

You have less than a second to convince a customer to stop scrolling and look at your ad. Make sure you give them a reason.

Sometimes, though, even a good offer placed in front of the right people at the right time isn’t enough.

No, not that bad Reputation!

So what happens when you try to market on Facebook for a business with a poor offline reputation?

What tends to happen – in our experience – is you end up having to delete a lot of negative comments and carefully monitor any incoming interactions.

We’ve done this for a few businesses who – for whatever reason – have a pretty negative rep off the internet.

Now this isn’t always a dealbreaker. Some of our top-performing campaigns were for clients with less-than-stellar reviews.

Online reputation management is its own thing entirely. There are companies and freelancers dedicated exclusively to this particular process.

One common way to handle bad reviews and a bad reputation is to try to suppress negative feedback – paying to delete reviews or doing as much as possible to hide the bad feedback.

This is, needless to say, the wrong way to go about this.

The fundamental problem with a bad reputation is a bad customer experience. Rather than sticking your head in the sand, the solution to this is to do some introspection within your company.

Think about the pain points of your process – where are customers falling out of the funnel, where are the positive experiences being lost? The best long-term solution is a deep reevaluation of your business practices and customer journey.

Right now, though, you have a pile of negative reviews on Yelp and your ads on Facebook are saturated with mean-spirited comments.

What do you do?

In the short term you should work to address customer concerns. On review platforms, reach out to concerned or disappointed customers and foster a public dialogue and resolve their problems.

Your customers know there are other companies offering the same product. Luckily, you don’t need to stand out from their ads on Facebook:

All you need to do is stand out from your customers’ news feeds.

How will you do that? What will catch their eye?

And more importantly, what are you willing to offer your customers to convince them to work with you?

Crafting an offer takes time and careful consideration. But it’s worth it.

Tell us about some of your most successful campaigns on Facebook! What worked and didn’t work for you?