When To Run Facebook Ads: Are Facebook Ads Still Even Necessary In 2022
- Matthew K.
- Nov 24, 2022
- 4 min read
Updated: Dec 1, 2022
Do you need to run Facebook ads to drive visitors and sales from your site in 2022?
The short answer to this question is it depends.
It depends on where your business is in its growth cycle.
In this post, I will cover when to use Facebook ads for your business and how you should be measuring the growth of your business (KPIs).
3 Stages Of Growth For A Small To Medium Sized Business
There are three stages for any SMB that is getting off the ground.
Message discovery (No Facebook ads)
Testing the waters (Test Facebook ads, limited budget)
Growth and scaling (Scale Facebook ad spend)
Stage 1: Message Discovery
During message discovery, the focus should be on connecting with your target audience and not scaling your revenue.
The whole point of this stage is to validate your potential Facebook offer and message for your target market.
This can be done through things like content marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), and of course organic Facebook and Instagram posts.
You should not be running Facebook ads for your business if this is the stage you are in.
Without nailing down your messaging you can run into problems with your Facebook ads.
Did the ad not work because of your targeting, messaging, image/video ad, or product? Nailing down your messaging eliminates one variable in why your Facebook ad was unsuccessful.
If your organic messaging is successful, why was it successful? Is it successful, because you wrote it, did an influencer make it, or did your copywriter? Finding a message that connects and that an influencer or a copywriter wrote will take this off your plate and allow you to scale faster.
What Facebook ad format did you use? Was it a video ad, an image ad, or a slideshow? Does your messaging work with all ad formats?
These are some of the key reasons you should nail down your messaging before you start running Facebook ads.
Eventually, you will discover the messaging that connects with your audience.
The metrics that you should be focused on in this stage, are engagement and visitors. We will cover these more below.
Stage 2: Testing The Waters
In this stage, you have connected with your target audience and know what message generally will drive engagement as well as clicks to your site.
If you are in this stage of growth. You should have a message that resonates with your target audience and be confident that you can convey that message to them organically.
You should also feel confident that the product or service you are selling can be delivered.
And that the sales funnel you will use for this has been built out and tested. If you are an eCom business in this stage and are looking for a sales funnel to build out here are 3 you can use.
With these items in place, you can begin to test out Facebook ads for your business.
Here are a few reasons why Facebook ads can help a small business at this stage.
Facebook Has The Largest Social Media Reach
Facebook still has one of the largest audiences of any social media platform.
When you combine this with the fact that you can run ads through the ads manager on Instagram, Facebook, audience network, and messenger you'll find you have a lot of reach to see if your message can scale.
Facebook Ads Allow You To Test Variations of Your Ad Quicker
You can use Facebook ads to test variations of your messages quickly.
Since you have already found a message that generally works you can start testing out small changes to your messaging to improve it.
For example, you could tweak your message for your Facebook ad but use the same ad image/video, product, and targeting.
You can use Facebook ads to make small changes to your successful organic post to scale faster with more traffic.
The key metric for this stage of your business is conversion rate.
The assumption is that your messaging is connecting and still driving the visitors you need to the site.
Again will cover these metrics more below.
Stage 3: Scale And Grow Your Facebook Ads
At this stage, you have found a message that connects with your target audience and drives them to take an action on your site.
You also should have tested out different ad formats and know which ones work best for your message.
Now it is time to start scaling up the visitors coming from your Facebook ads.
This will be done by increasing your ad spend and adding backend offer to increase the lifetime value of each customer.
The key metrics that should be focused on during this stage are Revenue and LTV.
Revenue will give you an idea of how much money you are making from your ads. And LTV (customer lifetime value) will show you how much each customer is worth to your business over a set period.
The Ultimate Formula For Scaling Your Business
When it comes to growing your business there are a lot of metrics you can use to track your performance.
In my opinion, there are only 3 metrics that impact revenue.
Visitors, Average Order Value (AOV), and Conversion Rate (CR).
Put into a formula they look like this.
During stage one of your business, you won't be running Facebook ads, as your primary goal is visitors to your site.
You will be asking questions like.....
What message connects with my customers from an engagement and traffic perspective?
What marketing channel are my potential customers located on?
Once you start seeing visitors come in you can begin to scale with Facebook ads in stage 2 and look toward your conversion rate.
Is the message you are testing something that can be scaled?
Once your visitors start converting you can move into stage 3 which is your scale and growth stage.
During this stage, you can begin to ramp up your successful Facebook ad campaigns. And look to increase both the AOV of your orders and the LTV of your existing customers.
If you would like more help developing the marketing strategy that is right for your business feel free to book a call with me.
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