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Don’t “try” Facebook marketing

The other day, I decided I wanted a six-pack.

(Abs, not beer.)

Maybe it was the movie star Chris Hemsworth film I watched recently, but I just woke up and thought, “yep, I think the time’s right for me to rock some washboard abs.”

So I did what any card-carrying gym newbie would do:

Tried one single workout, expecting to see big results.

I put on my best Under Armour workout gear. Did 200 crunches. And even made an egg white protein smoothie, to really up the ante.

The next day, I pulled up my t-shirt and looked in the mirror, excited and ready to see rippling abs smiling back at me.

So you can imagine my disappointment when all I saw…was my regular stomach.

No six-pack. No Hugh Jackman-level muscles. Not even a golden tan.

So, clearly…going to the gym doesn’t work, right?

Okay, that didn’t actually happen. But it would be pretty silly of me to make that conclusion after trying just one gym session, wouldn’t it?

Yet I see people using that logic all the time to say Facebook marketing doesn’t work.

There’s a reason I tell my clients not to try Facebook marketing.

That’s because “trying” Facebook usually equates to just one gym session. And that spells disaster for your business…

Why dabbling with Facebook hurts more than it helps

A lot of people go into marketing and they dabble. They say, “okay, I like the idea of Facebook marketing. I’ll invest 300 bucks to try it out and let’s see what results I get.”

(If you’re not yet at a place where you can afford to invest $300 in Facebook marketing, don’t worry. I’ve got the right solution for you in just a minute!)

If an average lead costs $10, you’ll get 30 leads for your $300 budget. Not bad, right?

Here’s the problem, though. Because 30 is such a small sample, we have no way of knowing whether any of them will turn into paying clients or not. You could have a situation where, just by chance, 0 of those 30 people turn into clients.

If you walked away from that saying Facebook marketing is ineffective, you’d be making the same mistake I did with my six-pack dreams.

Because we overlooked a crucial piece of the puzzle…

The missing piece of the Facebook puzzle

Here’s another example to show the Facebook Fallacy in action:

Imagine you’re sitting next to a big jar of 1000 Starbursts.

You’ve heard stories from friends and colleagues who have reached into the jar with amazing results. “It’s awesome, I pulled out 100 pink Starbursts last month!” they’ve said. (Naturally, we’re going on the assumption that pink is everybody’s favourite Starburst flavour. Isn’t it?!)

You decide to test it out for yourself. So you close your eyes, fish around in the jar, and pull out a big handful. You open your hand to see 10 Starbursts…

8 lemons and 2 oranges.

No pinks at all. Yuck! No good.

Unbeknownst to you, your fingertips were millimetres from dozens of pink candies. But you look at the results from your one attempt and say, “there are absolutely no pinks in that jar. What a jip!”

But in this case, there were pinks in the jar — just like your potential clients are on Facebook. You just received a false negative — a result that wrongly indicates your desired result isn’t achievable.

Believing false negatives cause you to walk away from big opportunities. And they’re extremely common when you only try Facebook ads one time with a small budget.

False negatives are harmful…but false positives can be even worse.

When getting too many leads is dangerous (seriously)

Imagine you reach into the Starbursts jar and, by chance, five of the ten candies in your hand are pink.

You’d be elated, wouldn’t you? You’d rush to grab another handful. You might even pay big bucks to have another go because your first try worked out so well.

If you only invest $300 to try out Facebook ads, chance might present you with 15 new deals out of your 30 leads.

Those results would lead to a false positive, a belief that the jar is half pink (or that your leads close at a 50% rate.) When in reality, only 4% of the jar might be pink candies — you just got very lucky with your handful.

Businesses lose big money when they rely on false positives. If you plan your future budgets on inflated numbers, you’ll lose money in the long run. That’s the risk you take when you only invest a small budget into trying Facebook.

How to make smart financial decisions by finding your REAL numbers

Okay. So false negatives AND false positives are harmful to your business. How do you make accurate conclusions?

It’s easy.

Use a bigger sample.

With a small size, we can’t really control what we get. We might get 100% pink Starbursts and we might get 0, depending on where your hand happens to fall in the jar.

But…

When you use a larger sample, when you pull more handfuls out of the candy jar, the numbers tell a clearer story.

One handful might have 0 pinks. The second might have 6. The third might have 3. The fourth might have 1. The fifth might have 5.

Over time, the numbers will smooth out the curve to give you an accurate look at the jar’s contents. You’ll have numbers you can rely on, because they come from a representative sample — rather than one random handful from the candy jar.

In addition to learning your true numbers to make smart investments, a large Facebook budget also allows you to test different ads in the early stages — which is incredibly important.

Testing allows you to zero in on the ad and audience that result in the largest number of deals for your business. Not theory, but RESULTS guide your strategy going forward.

You can pour your remaining budget into the ad that’s the proven winner, instead of wasting money on ads that don’t work for your audience.

You can’t run test campaigns if you’re only “trying” Facebook marketing. You need to commit resources upfront to fuel the testing phase.

Hit this one benchmark to make solid conclusions

I hope the penny’s dropped and you’re starting to understand that profitable Facebook marketing is always, always, always a numbers game. You might get lucky once or twice. But long-term success depends on knowing your true numbers and testing.

Here’s the benchmark I want you to aim for before you generalise your results from Facebook:

Commit to getting 1000 new leads.

1000 is a large enough number that its representative of the population. Because of its size, you can start to rely on the trends you see.

I know that probably sounds like a lot. Don’t worry, you don’t have to get 1000 new leads in one month! You can make that your yearly marketing goal.

Plus, remember all you have to gain:

Let's use a mortgage broker as our example... If you’re paying $10/lead, 1000 leads will cost you $10,000 over one year. Even if only 4% convert (which is a good benchmark to use,) that’s 40 new deals. At a $3K commission for each new client, that’s $120,000 in commissions for a $10,000 price — a $110K profit!

Not ready to commit to Facebook marketing? Here’s what to do instead.

I know not everyone is ready to invest $10K into Facebook marketing. Wherever you are in your business-building journey, I want to help you get to the next level.

Here’s a great example one of my mentors shared with me that really helped me grow my business before I was able to invest…

Every business owner has two main resources: time and money.

In the beginning (or during a dry spell) you don’t have many clients coming in, which means you have a lot of time and little money. When you’re in that situation, don’t invest in paid marketing.

Yep, you heard me: DON’T invest in paid marketing.

Instead, lean on the resource you have plenty of: time. Network. Speak. Try and get referrals. Aim to spend 50-80% of your time on getting new business in. That’s the most important thing you can do at this stage to grow.

When that strategy pays off with new deals, your resources flip around.

You don’t have any extra time because you’re so busy working with your new clients. But your cash flow allows you to invest in paid marketing to keep your pipeline full of qualified prospects all year long.

That’s when you’re ready to start Facebook marketing.

The right Facebook strategy can turn your $10K investment into $120K. Easy. You’d make that trade all day, right?

But remember, this is a success strategy that only works at a certain level of play. A large budget allows us to play the numbers game and use the law of averages to make smart conclusions. To test different ads and see which your audience responds best to. To optimise our strategy based on real-time results to reduce your costs.

Expecting similar results with a $300 ads budget is like expecting a six-pack after one day at the gym. It’s just not possible. And I don’t want you to waste your money!

Facebook is a massive opportunity that can really explode your business. But it will only work if you play the numbers game.

When I say don’t “try” Facebook marketing, the operative word is “try”.

Don’t TRY.

Don’t take only one handful from the candy jar and assume you’ve got the lay of the land. Don’t invest $300 just once and let that be your final decision.

When the time is right, COMMIT. Find a Facebook ads professional who’s proven to get results and earmark a healthy budget to let the law of averages work for you.

When you do that, when you go all-in, you’ll be swimming in pink Starbursts before you know it.

Ready to take Facebook seriously? Smart Marketing Success can help with that!

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