Why aren't you using Facebook ads?

Here's why:

software products => software people => adblocker => don't see ads => ads target the wrong people => wasted money

I run FB Ads for a living. I'm more focused on E-commerce and B2C products, so I don't have a lot of experience in software or B2B advertising.

However, also if you don't run ads, I suggest you to install the FB Pixel. It will get data anyway and you can create targeted audiences.

So you could create an audience of people who visited your pricing page, or people who visited your blog, or also people who visited your thank-you page.

This way when you'll feel ready to run some ads, you'll have better audiences to target and you'll be able to create lookalike audiences and be more effective with your ads.

As for the creativity, consider recording some videos to show your product in action.

A good example is Great Simple Studio (https://greatsimple.io/) [I'm not associated with this site]. Just browse this site and then open FB to watch some of their retargeting videos.

If you have any questions, feel free to ping me ;)

I think folks don't use it as much because they haven't seen much success with it. But I honestly think it's because they don't know how to use a proper marketing funnel.

I actually want to start now, but haven’t so far, because I think that ads in general aren’t as effective when you still don’t have product market fit, which most people here don’t.

Create a great product first, grow second

Facebook adv is a great way of getting leads but from recent experience We find that you might get fake or not useful signups..So mostly you would waste money. Better go for organic seo and get signups who actually want to buy your service or product

Maybe one of the reaons is, that you have to build up a facebook page to run ads.

It does not to have content, though. but then on the other side, you waste some of the side effects of running facebook ads on a facebook page.

The targeting on the other side is incredible good. For example for one project I just targetet to "admins of sports pages", because I guessed, that hey are the one doing the purchase decisions for their teams.

but it is right, that it is more like a lean back medium. Hard to "push" / sell something to people, when they do not have the imediate need.

unlike google, which is "learn forward", because customers are "pulling" and have an urgent need.

From my experience, you can't just throw money at it and hope it works. You still need to learn, research, devote time and energy...

I already do that by trying to do marketing organically. Spending a few extra months and a few extra hundred/thousand $$$ is something I don't consider to be the right move for me now.

Some people have great success with it apparently. I always wonder how big is the portion of people who haven't seen a cent of ROI from fb ads and just don't post anything online. The general opinion is that they are effective though, so anyone with some spare cash and time should learn about it and test that hypothesis on their own.

FB ads only seem to make sense if you are selling a physical consumer product, or a product/service that shows budding entrepreneurs how to make money themselves.

I used FBs to announce information for a non-profit to raise awareness. The response was meh. I used it ONCE of business purposes and the first comment I got was a comment with foul language. It's just me and I don't have time to moderate comments. I'll take a look at FB ads again when I can afford a professional social media manager.

Getting Facebook ads to be ROI-positive can be a serious challenge even with a great product. You have to get 1) targeting, 2) your ad copy, and 3) your landing page all to work well enough that your CAC is acceptable. This can be way harder than it seems, especially with competition for ad inventory pushing prices higher than they were in Facebook's early days.

This means that some business models and products simply can't be marketed on Facebook, just as how some keywords on google are so expensive that it doesn't make sense to use that.

In my experience, social media ads don't drive sales. I also can't find any data that suggests otherwise - despite looking.

I won't spend money on ads if I don't think they will drive sales.

A lot of what I've seen suggests that it's valuable for building brand awareness, but people are plenty aware of a brand when they spend money on it.

I've never bought a product I found through Facebook, don't have any friends who have either.

I believe that until Facebook figures out how to make their platform safer for their users I won't pay them money. They just recently removed the ability for advertisers to discriminate their customers. Honestly, why was that ability their in the first place?

I've also come across about 3 different scams being advertised to me and other people. Facebook needs to do a better job at vetting the companies that pay for ads on their network 🤷‍♂️

With Google Ads you can target high intent searches, e.g. "buy green sneakers". The person already wants to buy and tells you what they want to buy. However, bidding causes high ad costs. I think it's only for higher priced products with enough margin, else you'll need deep pockets (in the short term the advertising doesn't pay for itself). You can get away with paying less if your ad/site combo has a high quality score, but that is another topic.

With FB ads you can advertise to large groups of people more inexpensively, but you have to create a catchy ad because the users are not actively searching for what you are selling. You can build brand awareness even if you are not converting.

If you try to narrow down the demographics and interests in the audience then the ad cost goes up. I tried a narrow audience of people in EU countries where English is spoken by more than 38% of the people, who are university graduates, interested in personal finance - investment, and interested in various stocks related things. The audience size was 260,000 people. My FB ad was costing 1 cent per impression. Again, if you product has a high enough price and has enough margin, you can try this.

I think it has to do with the mindframe switch when targeting people on Facebook, and the change in funnel it requires.

It requires a a much different type of ad to appeal to someone scrolling past dog pictures of their friends VS. something like adwords where you can specifically target people actively looking for your product. Sure FB gives a good way to drill down to specific demographics, but that means nothing if your funnel/ad isn't setup to convert the people looking at it.

I think this mindset shift is hard to get around, and in turn leads to poor results with the channel and less people using it.

Never had a stable FB account, tried to Create a Campaign today and it prompted me to create an account. The moment you do tons of friends request pour in, probably from phone contacts, email or some algorithm they have..in any case sounds like too much hassle.

People spend a lot of time on Facebook these days. It's a good way to promote your product to a vast audience and it's easy to target.

Probably a good way to build traffic for a blog. Find a group of people and keep advertising to them with new blog articles around an interest. might filter by geography(as well) so your hitting the same people over and over again and you start to get name recognition.