Paid advertising can be a sea of confusion when you’re just getting started.
Sometimes it’s best to learn what NOT to do first.
After doing paid advertising for many years I can tell you a lot of people make the same mistakes in the early stages that they could avoid simply by following these tips.
Let’s jump into 5 mistakes that I see experts, coaches, and consultants make when they get started with advertising so you can avoid those beginner pitfalls and grow your business faster.
Table of Contents
Having A Short Term Strategy
One of the biggest mistakes I see people make right out of the gate is trying to convert all their customers with one click.
They plan to run only one campaign to one funnel and think that’s going to do all the work for them to get sales rolling in.
Unfortunately, the internet just doesn’t work that way anymore.
It’s rare that you can launch only one campaign and start seeing sales roll in unless you have created an incredibly irresistible offer.
When you’re in a competitive marketplace (like most of us are), it’s essential to be ready to play the long game.
A lot of things that experts used as a competitive edge just a few years ago like funnels and evergreen webinars are commonplace now.
People have so many choices on the internet, they’re more aware about marketing tactics, and they know how all this stuff works.
So what really matters is having a long-term strategy – one that includes plans for paid content, organic content, email, and nurturing people for long periods of time creating trust online.
Because the truth is a lot of people will follow you for a very long time before they decide to make a buying decision.
Let’s Break It Down With This Study
This is a cool study where they looked at the effects of multiple exposures to a brand over time.
In the very beginning they found rational messaging is what generated sales, and it’s a big part of what affects people’s decision making process.
As people spend more time with you, have more touchpoints with your brand, see you more often in their feed, hear you on another podcast, come to your website, and read your email nurture sequence, you’re providing them with value and fewer reasons to turn down an offer from you.
As their relationship with you progresses (and it will), they will grow a stronger emotional connection to your brand which decreases price sensitivity and helps build long term volume of sales.
THIS is what you want to be doing – taking a long term approach to your marketing and overall strategy that pays off in the end.
Not Having a Tracking System In Place
The old adage “you can’t manage what you don’t measure” couldn’t be more accurate when it comes to your ad campaigns.
It’s the next big issue that I see a ton of brands run into – not tracking or not tracking correctly.
It’s super important to make sure you have a measurement system and infrastructure in place before you throw your first dollar at ads.
This is everything from setting up the Facebook pixel and Facebook conversion API tracking to using other tracking platforms like Google Analytics or Wicked Reports that can give you deeper insights.
By building a tracking infrastructure, you’ll have something to look back to so you can measure the success of your campaigns and see how people are engaging with your funnel over time.
Not Having A Testing Strategy
One of the most common things that can derail successful ad campaigns is not having a testing strategy.
Often people will launch campaigns, get some initial results out of the gate, and then results fizzle out prematurely leaving them with no idea of what to do next because there’s no plan in place.
You want to be constantly testing new things, looking for new audiences, angles, creatives, offers, and finding ways of improving the performance over time and potential growth opportunities.
That’s why we make sure to dedicate a portion of our budget towards testing so that we can always keep improving our campaigns.
Depending on your budget for the month you could expect 20-30% of your budget to be allocated to looking for new audiences, working on new creatives and how you’ll improve results.
Everything works great for a while but eventually those results will start to fade out and you want to make sure that when that happens you’ve already got the next thing ready to go.
This really comes down to having a process and a mindset of always testing.
Testing The Wrong Things
So maybe you are tracking, testing, and you even have a strategy in place, but testing the wrong things or testing a lot of things that won’t move the needle can become a big problem.
For example, testing three different background colors on ads is probably not going to change your results much unless you’re spending millions on your campaigns.
You want to make sure you’re testing big levers. Test what’s going to make a big impact on the overall performance of your marketing campaigns.
What could some of those big levers be? New offers, new angles, completely fresh ad copy, videos, audiences, lookalike audiences and so on.
Those can make a big impact.
Don’t get caught up testing so many little things, instead take big swings with your campaigns.
Especially if you’re like a lot of small businesses you don’t have this massive ad budget so if you’re not spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a month getting a red image to perform better than blue – it’s not worth testing.
Copying Others
The last thing I see a lot of people doing is just copying other people’s ads and strategies.
You can absolutely spend time getting inspired by other people and it’s a great idea to create a swipe file with what others are doing in the market, what your competitors are doing, and people in other industries.
But you’ve got to have your own style. You don’t want to be straight-up copying what other people are doing.
You want to use that as inspiration and go put your own voice behind it.
When you’re taking the long-term approach of having your own content, community, and building a tribe online all these things will help you discover what voice best represents yourself.
Keep testing new styles to find which one is uniquely yours! Being unique and an individual couldn’t be more valuable these days online.
Wrap Up
When you get started with advertising, it can be easy to make mistakes.
I know because I’ve made these years ago and many of my clients have too.
If you avoid these most common ones above, knowing what NOT to do, you’re sure to be on the right track to successful campaigns that make money for your business over time.
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