Facebook Ads are Wasting Entertainment Budgets!

My adblocker on Facebook is not working anymore, so I’m seeing a disturbing trend in bad FB ads from entertainment companies. They’re bad because.

  1. I am not a good target of most of them
  2. The content is not compelling
  3. The content sometimes doesn’t even make sense
  4. There is no target audience
  5. There is no value shown

Most of the ads I’m seeing are from small businesses.

When I talk to entertainment people about how they’re making ads, most are just shooting in the dark.

What I’m hypothesizing is that facebook is seeing big profits from small businesses who can put in $3000 a few times a year without any expectation of results.

The crazy thing is that FB ads can be great for a small budget project.

Unfortunately, the promise of FB ads is that it’s a few clicks and we have money. This is usually not the case. Studying how it works, trying a lot of things with small amounts of money, and really knowing our customers takes work. If we do it the easy way, we will probably be wasting cash.

Ads are not for every business

If we don’t know who our customer is, or we can’t target them thru an ad, or we can’t track the response, our low-budget project will probably not benefit us.

Targeting

Targeting and tracking are the two most potent parts of online ads.

Our success is not a few clicks away. It starts with knowing our potential customer. We gotta know what our brand is and what our USP is. Getting a lot of eyes on our stuff is not great. It spreads us thin. The ultimate is when we need 100 customers and those 100 customers see our ad(s) enough to trust us and buy.

Facebook ads can target weirdly specific people around the world. Use this super power or piss away money. Get very specific. Laser focus.

Trust

A single ad view does not sell a Ford truck. For any major purchase, major trust needs to be built. Most of us in entertainment are not trying to sell a new truck. We’re trying to sell an album ($9.99) or something, so we don’t need a lifetime of brand building to get there, but we still need to build some trust. If we’re advertising to someone who’s never heard of us, that means what I call “saturation” — repeated attention.

Value

Our customers need to understand the value of what we’re offering (greater than the price) and they need to trust that we can deliver it. This value / trust relationship is what we’re doing with advertising and all other outreach.

Arm & Hammer baking soda made their ads all about the multiple uses. Every new use is more value. Sure, every baking soda can be used like this probably… but are you sure?

60 Uses for Arm & Hammer Baking Soda (Enter to Win a $25 Visa Gift Card!)

Track

Because of great tracking in online ads, we can see how much money we spent per successful customer. This is called “cost of acquisition.” That means we can find a formula for how much to spend and what to expect. For our formula, we also need to know how much the customer will bring us over their lifetime (“lifetime value”) because they might buy from us more than once. The simple version of the formula is…

lifetime value – (cost of acquisition + product cost) = profit

When we don’t

When we just boost a post or throw up some short sighted ad, I’m assuming Facebook is gonna try its best to make the ad work, but it doesn’t have a fighting chance.

I would prefer if to spend advertising dollars buying dinners for friends. Those are people who already trust us and understand our value.

Written for folks who want to attract and energize groups

Scot Nery is an emcee who has helped some of the biggest companies in the world achieve entertainment success. He's on an infinite misson to figure out what draws people in and engages them with powerful moments.

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