Facebook ads are exciting but they can be a huge waste of money if you’re not doing them the right way. You should not run Facebook ads just because you’ve heard they can get you leads. Yes, they can but you have to know what you’re doing first. I’m a big fan of Facebook ads and I teach wedding professionals how to use them inside The Wedding Business Collective but there are instances when you should definitely not be using Facebook ads.

1. You don’t have an email list

Facebook ads and email marketing go together like you and your absolute best clients. They’re fine on their own, but together they’re really amazing. Let’s say you set up a Facebook ad and you’re sending people to your site. Maybe they like you, but they’re not ready to have a sales conversation yet so they leave and you lose them. You’re paying for people to go to your site and leave. That sucks.

Sure you could pay to run a Facebook ad retargeting them but if they’re not ready, they’re not ready. After all, people don’t tend to get married on the first date.

That means that first you develop your sales funnel, the way you capture leads from your website and nurture them first before you go paying to send people to your site.

You need a clear path for people take from landing on your website to becoming a client and the first step is getting them onto your email list. From there your email marketing will nurture them and educate them and move them along the sales process. If you have consultations in your business, that would be the next step and then making the sale.

That is what you have to have in place before paying to send a bunch of people to a website that just doesn’t generate leads for you.

What good are those people if they just land on your website and then leave?

Inside The Wedding Business Collective there is a course on Selling With Email Marketing where I take members through the entire process of setting up this lead generation system and calculating the math that helps you make advertising decisions.

2. You’re planning to send people to your home page

Some well-meaning wedding pros will advertise their business saying something to the effect of “Book me” and send people to their homepage. This isn’t effective because these people have no idea who you are and don’t trust you yet. Why would they trust you with their wedding and give you money at this point? Sales is like dating and this is date 1. People just don’t get married on the first date.

Think of it this way. Marketing is the engine in your car. Sure you can have a nice looking car without an engine, but it’s not going anywhere. The same applies to your business.

Advertising on the other hand, is the sassy flame paint job on the side of the car to really draw attention to it. But here’s the thing, if you have flames painted on a car with no engine, it’s still not going anywhere.

Your advertising can supercharge your marketing efforts but it is not a replacement for them. You can’t be all flames and no engine if you want to get anywhere.

So what are you supposed to do?

Well there’s an order to these things. First you put the engine in the car and THEN you paint on those sick flames. Not the other way around.

That means that first you develop your sales funnel, the way you capture leads from your website and nurture them, and then you paint flames all over that bad boy.

If you advertise your business and just direct people onto your homepage they will almost always leave because they don’t know you, what you’re offering and why they should care. The best thing to do is to lead people to a page where they can sign up for a free offer.

This is a big part of a killer marketing strategy so if you want to learn how to create a free offer and convert those email subscribers into customers check out the Selling With Email Marketing course inside The Wedding Business Collective. This ensures you’re generating leads with your ads instead of hoping and praying for sales.

3. You’re not using the Facebook pixel

The Facebook pixel is a powerful thing and it can do a lot for you. It can track who comes to your site so you can target them in your ads.

It can track how successful your ads are by tracking how many people signed up to your email list or purchased from you.

It can allow you to get really specific about retargeting. For example, if someone was on a specific product page on your site, you can show them an ad specifically about that product. This is where you can generate sales from Facebook ads because it’s not their first encounter with you.

Most people don’t use the pixel because it seems daunting but it’s literally just copying and pasting. It’s something I have a walkthrough on inside Generating Leads With Facebook Ads because I don’t want to hear that any of the members of The Wedding Business Collective aren’t using it. It’s like throwing money away and you only have to set it up once!

4. You don’t understand Facebook ad targeting

Facebook has some seriously amazing targeting capabilities and if you’re not using them, you’re spending money showing ads to people who will likely never buy from you. Stop wasting your money on that!

You can target people on your email list (or exclude them from an email opt in ad) or target people within a certain distance from you, who got engaged less than a year ago (or even less than 3 months ago), between certain ages that like certain pages (this could be wedding blogs you know your ideal client reads, competitors, even things unrelated to the wedding industry that you know your ideal client loves).

That means you could run an ad to women who have been engaged for less than 3 months within 30 miles of your zip code who like Offbeat Bride. This way you’re only spending your money reaching the people who are most likely to work with you instead of paying to reach everyone and their mom.

Don’t be afraid to get specific! The more specific you get, the more highly qualified your leads will be and if I’m paying to get leads, I want them to be the best damn leads there are.

5. You don’t know how to tell if you’re getting a return on your investment

I’ve talked to plenty of wedding professionals who have run Facebook ads but can’t say for certain if they got a return on their investment. Facebook Ads actually makes this pretty simple to track but you have to know what to look for and if you’re not using the pixel, you’re going to make it harder than it needs to be.

Reports inside of Facebook ads can tell you exactly how much you’re paying per lead or per sale for any given audience that you’ve targeted. That data tells you what to do more of, what to do less of and if it’s worth spending more money on a specific ad so that you can generate even more leads.

If you want to make this REALLY easy for yourself, join The Wedding Business Collective and go through the Facebook ads course which walks you step by step through reading these reports and what to look for so that you know for sure if you’re getting a good return on your investment or not (and what to do if you’re not).

If you don’t know if you’re getting a return on your investment with your Facebook ads, stop. It’s not worth it if you don’t know if it’s working or not and either way, you’re missing out. If it is working really well and you don’t know that then you’re missing an opportunity to double down on what’s working and get even more leads and sales. If it’s not working so well, you don’t know that there is even a problem that needs fixing so you can’t fix it.

If you’re spending money on advertising, you need to be able to tell if it’s worth it or if you should do something different. If you don’t do that, you’re probably wasting a lot of money.

6. You don’t know how to tweak & improve your ads

So you run a Facebook ad but how do you improve it so that you can get more leads at a cheaper price? If you don’t know how and what to tweak, you’re going to be stuck spending more money than you need to and they’re not going to generate as many leads for you as they could.

I promise you, tweaking your ads to improve them is not difficult at all but you have to approach it with an eye on your return on investment and if it’s driving prices up or down for you. It’s crazy how much little changes can impact your ad results. If you don’t know what to change, how often and when to change it, you’re left in the dark.

Facebook ads can be an amazing way to turbocharge your marketing and bring in high-quality leads or it can be a money pit that sucks your wallet dry and gives you nothing but frustration in return. The choice is yours.

If turbocharging your marketing sounds more like your thing, then I’ve got some good news for you. I will walk you through using Facebook ads for your business, step-by-step, inside Generating Leads With Facebook Ads. It’s part of The Wedding Business Collective so that means you can ask any questions at all, get support from me and the other members (who are all very smart people) and get access to all of the other courses.

If that wasn’t enough, you can take The Wedding Business Collective for a test drive with the free 10 day trial.