Ah, the million dollar question.

Is your eCommerce store ready for paid Facebook Ads?

‘Do I have enough products?’

‘Is my website good enough?’

‘Will I go broke?’

‘Will I make a fool of myself?’

I hear you and your inner doom spiralling thoughts. Lots of online store business owners keep themselves awake at night with this same dilemma.

They’ve heard about the insane results others have claimed they’ve had.

But you’re not sure you believe them.

Or if you will be one of those big fat FAIL stories that everyone laughs at later.

If any of this sounds like you, today’s episode is essential listening for you my friend.

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For the speed readers, the transcript is below 👇🏻

Episode Transcript:

Today I’m talking about whether or not Facebook ads are right for your business because it’s a question I get asked a lot. And people are often quite fearful around wasting money pressing the wrong buttons and things like that. And there’s definitely some businesses that they’re great in for accelerating your growth and your success, but some other businesses might not just be quite ready yet. So today I’m going to take you through what that looks like whether or not you are ready or whether you’ve got to get some other elements of your business in order first, before you start looking at paid ads. I can’t wait to share this with you. Let’s go.

Okay, so paid social media ads, or Facebook and Instagram ads. Are they right for your business? Right now? Let me start by sharing with you why they might be right. So let’s get started. First of all, Facebook has a huge market share. And when I talk about Facebook, I also mean Instagram. But when you run Facebook ads, if you haven’t run them before, you might not realise when you actually create the ad, you can tick all of the boxes and share in Facebook’s Audience Network in other articles and other websites that they’re affiliated with. So your actual ads might not just be on Facebook, or Instagram, but they might also be in Facebook Messenger, they might also turn up on some random news article that you read. And you can see your ad at the bottom, their reach is wide. And as much as people keep saying that, you know, I’m sick of Facebook, most people still use it and or Instagram. So there’s a huge huge market share.

There’s no other place online, other than Google. And that’s a whole different kettle of fish and different advertising strategy that you can tap into to get in front of your ideal audience. Also, Facebook ads have never been easier to manage yourself because they’ve moved away from really detailed audiences interest based audiences, and instead encouraging us to use broad audiences. So all you need to decide is which country which gender, and what age bracket you want to target. And then the rest is all about figuring out what objective it is that you want.

For example, do you want sales? Or do you want traffic, and then creating a nice looking ad that will stop your audience scrolling? Also, the decline of organic reach, stop trying to hack the algorithm to try to do it for free? Yes, absolutely. You still need to be showing up online and building your audiences organically on your Facebook page or your Instagram account. But relying on just that social element and engagement to drive consistent traffic and sales to your website is very, very slow going. So slow going. In fact, you will probably end up chucking in your business thinking that it’s all a waste a big fat waste of time. Also, Facebook ads and Instagram ads will be the number one lever you can pull in your business to fast track your success.More than anything else. It is the number one thing I’ve seen time and time again for E commerce business owners that people can implement in order to fast track their success and build out marketing campaigns that offer consistent traffic and conversions at an affordable price. So they are the reasons why you should be looking at incorporating Facebook ads into your business.

Now you might wonder on the flip side why I have some reasons why you shouldn’t be tapping in and creating Facebook and Instagram ads right now. So let me tell you some reasons why it might not be quite right for you just yet. If you have tiny, tiny profit margins, Facebook ads and Instagram ads will most likely not be profitable and worth it for you. So if you are only making $5 $10 or $20, a sale, you will probably find that the cost to get that sale via the Facebook ads will be more than that, to give you information or give you perspective for Island, co my online fashion store right now, our ads to Australia and New Zealand cost us on average, about $50 per sale, give or take, if I was to average it out across all of my campaigns across a month, that would be roughly $50 per sale, it cost me and Facebook advertising to get that one sale. And that is still profitable for us because we manufacture our own products. And we still have enough profit margin in there to be able to say yes, this is worth it. And also keeping in mind that many customers will come and buy from us once and then hopefully they love their item. And they’ll come back and buy from us again and again. And that might come off the back of an email or a social media post. So it’s the lifetime value that we’re looking at as well.

So if you have tiny profit margins and or your average order, dollar amount is quite small, you might find that Facebook ads won’t be worth it. Also, if you have absolutely no idea on how to create an ad, if you don’t even know what the Facebook pixel is, or where to find ads manager and you’re thinking you’ll just boost posts, I’d say, Stop, don’t do it. Go and educate yourself on the basics, make sure that your website’s got the Facebook pixel installed before you start spending money. I have worked with a client a couple of years ago who had spent significant advertising dollars through their ad account. And while they’ll set it up through ads manager and the ads looked great. They didn’t have the pixel installed on their website, and was wondering why Facebook ads was saying that there was no sales and then when she tried to set up retargeting ads, where those customers were why she why she couldn’t find them.

So from day one, you want to have your Facebook pixel installed. And depending on whether your Shopify or WooCommerce, or Square space or GoDaddy or whatever it might be, you will find a bunch of free easy tutorials on YouTube or somewhere like that, which will show you how to do to instal that, but you will need to navigate the basics first before you start going in spending money. Another reason why you shouldn’t advertise on Facebook ads right now is if it will financially break you. If you are on your last legs financially and don’t have the the don’t have the funds to risk testing. To get the formula, right, I would say hold off, hold some sort of other sale offline, get some money in your account ready to then invest because you will find there is quite a bit of experimenting, when you start out, you might spend $500 Before you get that first sale when you first get going. So you do need to make sure that you have a little financial cushion to support you in those initial months and even the initial six to 12 months stage of getting the formula right as far as which audience, what type of ad and then the creatives that speak to your audience. So you’ve got to make sure you know it’s not going to financially ruin you and not expect that spending $10 a day is going to bring you in, you know, hundreds of dollars worth of sales, you need to manage your expectations. So making sure you’ve got a financial buffer experimentation fund for the advertising is quite important. It doesn’t have to be 1000s of dollars, but definitely some hundreds of dollars in order to get going.

So if you’re ready to start implementing paid advertising, be sure to sign up to my weekly newsletter over at Jodie minto.com, where I often share tips and tricks around what’s working strategies I’m using and I also have from time to time one on one coaching. depending on what’s going on in Ireland coach and life. Sometimes I offer one on one coaching where we can we can build ads out together. But also pop your name on my waitlist for online store success which is where I teach you how to get started with Facebook ads, but ensuring you have all of those other elements in your business setup correctly in order to fully benefit from the ads so things like making sure that pixels installed, making sure your website is built to convert. Making sure you have other marketing strategies that will support the Facebook ads traffic In order to fully get the value and the benefit from that ad spend.