3 Common Ad Mistakes & What You Need to Do About It

If you aren’t moving the needle at ALL with your Facebook ads, not seeing sales, or not getting leads-

-read on as we share 3 ad mistakes that cause your ads not to get sales and what you need to do about it.

3 Ad Mistakes To Avoid With Ads

Ad Mistake #1: You need better photos or videos.

Your creatives need to be high-quality, creative, beautiful, and clear.

If your photos don’t look like these…

…then they’re probably not doing anything to get your audience’s attention.

And yes, we say photos too.

That’s because even though we preach videos on this channel for organic growth…

…when it comes to advertisements, in particular, we think photos can still outperform videos some days.

It’s just something that you need to test out.

But we’re not ruling out photos for advertisements because we think some social media users get tired of being talked at all day in ads.

In fact, we’ve recently published a post tackling why short-form videos are failing these days.

Sometimes a beautiful photo can almost be a refreshing, soothing alternative to someone who just loudly jumps in with another ad on their feed.

OR, maybe the crazy video ad is what gets their attention. Like we said, you need to test.

Either way, video or photo, you need to make sure they aren’t blurry, outdated looking, boring, offensive, off-brand or stock image-y.

And please keep in mind we’re purely talking about aesthetics right now. We’ll get into the substance later.

But going off that last one of looking too much like a stock image, we would suggest you either produce your own fantastic-looking creatives.

Or if you absolutely HAVE to use stock photos or stock videos, be extremely picky about the ones you use. The more colorful and candid, the better.

Anything too posed, or anything that has that washed-out white-blue aesthetic is INSTANTLY recognizable as a stock image.

What Not To Do

And that’s going to make your audience scroll right past it…

…because they’ve probably seen that image or video 100x times over, know it’s not yours, and know it’s a boring advertisement.

Skip! The best ads START with an aesthetically pleasing, sharp, creative, current photo or video that draws them in (as opposed to sending them running).

Here’s a quick tutorial on how to design your business ad graphics that you can read next.

Ad Mistake #2: You’re not running the right campaign.

Ad mistakes like this is such a small fix but it makes a HUGE difference.

A lot of people look at the Facebook ad objectives when setting up their ads and say, “Okay, I want more website traffic, let me pick the traffic campaign.” WRONG.

Do you really want more website traffic? Or do you want sales?

Because anybody can send thousands of people to your website all day long who never buy anything.

But if you specifically want conversions on your website? You need to pick the sales objective.

Or if you are trying to garner high-quality leads, choose the leads objective.

But don’t just choose engagement because it’s the easiest to set up and then wonder why you’re not getting sales on your website.

You need to understand that each campaign optimizes for its unique goal.

So let’s say your target audience is women between 25-35 years old in Dallas, Texas.

If you target that demographic with a traffic campaign, Facebook is going to show the ad to people within that group who are most likely to click.

Whereas if you target that demographic with a sales campaign, Facebook is going to show the ad to people within that group who are most likely to click AND convert.

That’s why it’s so important to pick the right campaign objectives. If you need help setting up your social media goals, read this one next.

It’s one of the most common mistakes we see with new clients and yet it’s one of the easiest things to fix.

Speaking of which, if you’d rather have a professional social media advertising agency to handle all of your digital marketing for you…

…get in touch with us today to get your free, custom proposal. Now let’s get to the final reason why your ads are not getting sales.

Ad Mistake #3: You’re not addressing anything the audience cares about.

Remember we told you we’d get into substance!

The content within the ad needs to directly address a goal your customers want to achieve or a problem they’re trying to solve.

If you’re talking about your company, the awards you’ve received, or how you get from point a to point b…

…you’re gonna lose your audience because they don’t care about any of that.

At least not in this Facebook ad.

They just need to see how they benefit. So you need to show them how they benefit in as few words or seconds as humanly possible.

Take LYFE Marketing for example.

We wouldn’t lead a Facebook ad with all the awards we’ve won, what makes us a great agency, or the strategic process of how we generate sales for our clients.

Even though all of that is true and wonderful! We would lead with, “We help small businesses drive sales and leads via online marketing.

Because that is the bottom line goal of our target audience: to see revenue from digital platforms.

Once they fill out our contact form, they can learn more about us and we can get into why we’re the best agency to work with.

But don’t lead with that in a Facebook ad.

Wrapping Up

So those are the common ad mistakes that you should avoid.

Now, if you feel like you’re doing everything you’re supposed to already in your creative and copy, then it might be time to ask yourself a harder question:

Does your product or service fundamentally meet your audience’s goal or solve one of their problems?

If not, it’s either because you’ve got the wrong audience, OR it’s because you need to work on your offerings more to better serve them.

This is an obvious example but it gets the point across.

If you sell dog toys, and you are relentlessly targeting people who do not own dogs, it doesn’t matter if it’s the best digital marketing campaign this world has ever seen!

It’s getting wasted on the wrong people. Now as we said, that’s an obvious example, but the same principle applies to less obvious circumstances.

When we worked with the client Polar Bear on CNBC’s The Profit, one of the things we helped them work through on the show was who their audience was.

They sell coolers, and they thought one of their target demographics would be groomsmen…

…we think because sometimes that can be a good bachelor party gift or what have you.

But Keran asked the all important question, “Does the data tell you that’s who your customer is?”

We think a lot of times, business owners have an idea of who they think their audience is, or who they would like them to be, but that’s not reality.

In the instance of Polar Bear Coolers, they’re better off targeting outdoorsmen, tailgaters, soccer moms, and other demographics…

…who would use coolers regularly and find VALUE in the specific features their coolers possess.

You can market the HECK out of something and create a beautiful campaign.

But if you’re sending that campaign to the wrong audience, it’s not going to produce any results.

The other possibility we mentioned is that maybe you’ve got the right audience selected and you’ve created a great ad…

…but the reality is your offerings aren’t strong enough for your audience to care.

If that’s the case, then you need to look at your product or service and figure out what you can improve based directly on what your audience would find valuable.

Again let’s say you sell dog toys, you’re targeting dog owners this time around and you have a great ad highlighting the fact that the toy is chew-proof.

Your dog won’t be able to just rip it to shreds within 48 hours.

That’s a great pain point!

But if you’re not getting sales from it, and all the other boxes are ticked, it could just be that that’s not the pain point your audience cares about.

Maybe they want something that will keep their dog occupied for hours, something we believe they call an enrichment toy.

They want something that’s going to keep the dog from getting into mischief and tearing up other things while they’re away from home.

Market research is crucial when creating your Facebook ads.

That’s because, at the end of the day, everything you do from the creation of the product or service to the marketing of it should be audience-oriented.