Hey Ben, I am director of growth for a
fast growing startup based in DC, so I have worked with Facebook and AdWords ads before. I've also run my own AdWords campaigns for affiliate marketing in the education space for several months last year.
Search advertising (AdWords and Bing) is much much easier, especially if you've never done online advertising. The catch is whatever you're selling must be something people are looking to buy immediately. For example, if you're selling vintage Nike Air Jordans, people searching for the term "buy vintage nike jordans" are very likely to buy. If that's the kind of thing you're selling, I would start there with online ads.
But if you are selling something people aren't searching for (like the Handstand Book I wrote several years ago), AdWords won't work.
That's where Facebook is a better place to start. But it's still hard.
The reason it's so much harder has to do with user intentions. If the user is searching for "buy vintage nike jordans" then their intention is to find and buy that product. It's pretty cut and dry. That's why search marketing is considered "intention" marketing.
But Facebook is considered "interruption" marketing. You are interrupting someone's day, and your offer needs to be so good (read: in line with their needs), so compelling and so easy to act upon that they completely change the course of their day to learn about what you're offering and act.
For this reason, Facebook ads perform better when do at least some of the following:
- Target a warm list of leads (e.g. use the FB pixel to track people who have visited your site, then target them; upload your email list to FB to create a custom audience)
- Make the offer easier to act upon (e.g. a free e-book giveaway [lead magnet] rather than a $15 purchase; a $15 purchase rather than a $300 purchase)
- Promote a piece of content that references your product (e.g. an article that features you, a podcast appearance), rather than a landing page. Articles are perceived to be consumed rather than perused quickly while making a buying decision, so you can use it to educate your audience.
With all advertising, you will lose some money as you get started. In the industry, we don't call this "losing money", but rather "buying data". The less targeted you are, and the less warm your traffic, the more data you will need to buy to learn about the audience.
If you have a budget of 10-15k to lose, you can learn a lot about your audience.
No matter what you do, make sure your tracking is set up. That means using FB conversion pixels, and a tool like CPVLab and/or Mixpanel to track how people are progressing through your funnel.
You can get away with shitty tracking on "free" traffic like SEO, referral traffic,
email marketing, etc...but the costs go up quickly with a bad funnel in PPC, particularly Facebook ads...and that pain can build quickly.
I am happy to hop on a call and help you figure out online ads. Send me a PM.
Paid traffic is VERY tough, and if you're not prepared to go full-time with it I would outsource it. It's just my personal experience as a person who has grown to hate paid traffic because I could never make it work by myself.
I agree and disagree. It is very tough. You can lose some money while you learn things. But most companies, even those who have been in business for a while, really suck at paid ads. Their clients just don't know better.
If your company has $1M-$5M in annual profits without paid ads, certainly hire someone to do it for you who has a track record you respect. That usually means they ran their own traffic in the past, where the food on their table was tied to their ad performance. Avoid people who only play with other people's money.
If this is a side project you're getting off the ground or trying to scale, and PPC will be a cornerstone channel upon which you will build your empire, you better be doing it yourself. Then, outsource it or transition to an employee once you know it, dominated it, and have well defined processes around it. A consultant will piss your money away and not even think about it. They aren't tied nearly as much to the outcome.