The Top 5 Facebook Marketing Mistakes Your E-commerce business Should Never Make

Facebook tries hard to make its platform as easy and intuitive as possible.

But when you’re dealing with any complex and evolving system, you’re bound to make mistakes eventually. 

Heck, even we’re constantly finding new problems and we do this for a living.

That’s why in this article we’re going to go over 5 common Facebook marketing mistakes you may be making without even realising it. 

If you are guilty of any of these, don’t feel bad.

Learn from it and move on, because before you realise it there’s a new best practice you’re not following. 

The crux of a great digital marketer is being able to adapt to ever-changing circumstances.

So let’s get started. 

Mistake No. 1: Not Setting Up Target Audiences Properly

We can’t stress enough how important it is to make sure your ads are reaching the right audience. 

They can be the best ads in the world but if your target audience isn’t seeing them they’re worthless. 

Now there are two main mistakes people make in this area.

First, making your target audiences too broad.

You may be tempted to try to reach as many people as humanly possible, but that’s seldom a good idea. 

Every person seeing your ads that’s not even a potential conversion is just a waste of money. 

Facebook has a deep array of targeting tools to reach people based demographics like their interests, location, favourite topics and more. 

Use them. They’re the main strength of the platform. 

The second mistake is not knowing who you’re targeting.

You may have a precise target market in mind, but if they’re not your real customers it’s still not going to work.

What do we mean by that? Simply the people who are most likely to buy your product or become a client. 

It’s easy to think we know who our customer is, but data speaks louder than words. 

The good news is you can use Facebook to find out who your real customers are.

Target a few different groups and see who performs the best.

Then hone in on those golden groups with the best conversion rates.

They’re your (real) ideal customers.

Mistake No. 2 – Selling Too Hard

This goes for all social content media marketing. 

“Hard sells” just don’t work. 

People go to social media to engage with their friends and digital content. 

They don’t generally go looking to purchase things.

So if your brand is seen as trying to just flog your latest products, it will instantly annoy people and turn them off. 

Focus your content around creating value and engagement instead, and the sales will come. 

People want to reciprocate, it’s built into our DNA.

So if you give someone something, without asking for anything in return, they’re more likely to give you what you want in turn. 

This is less applicable to direct social media advertising, but you still want to keep this principle in mind. 

Show don’t tell. Make them want to purchase your product because it looks good in their feed, not because you’re telling them to. 

You want your social media presence to be part of your consumer’s feed, not an annoyance breaking it up.

So remember: fit in and add value. Don’t sell too hard. 

Mistake No. 3 – Unscientific A/B Testing

A/B testing, also sometimes called split tests, is an invaluable tool for any digital marketer.

Essentially they involve creating two versions of a piece of content or advertising material (A and B) and comparing which performs better.

The mistake people often make is changing too many aspects of the pieces and making the test invalid.

To be a proper A/B test, you can only change one element of the ad at a time. Whether it be the copy, image or CTA. 

Changing more than one element makes the test unscientific and ruins any data you get from it. 

Like any scientific experiment, you need a hypothesis (what you think is the problem, e.g. bad copy) an independent variable (A, your baseline comparison) and a dependent variable that you change to measure the result (B, with only a single element changed).

So don’t change more than one element of your A/B test, or it’s impossible to say which element resulted in the better or worse performance. 

You may also be tempted to modify or optimise your A/B tests on the fly.

This is also a bad idea. Instead, run your tests for shorter durations but keep them consistent once they’re live. 

The goal isn’t to create conversions per se, it’s to find out what works best for doing that. 

Mistake No. 4 – Failing to Match Facebook Objectives With Your Goals

A mistake people often make is to start advertising on Facebook with only a vague goal like “I want more likes and shares”.

Unless you’re an e-commerce giant with a budget to spare on luxuries like brand awareness campaigns or generating likes, you always want a concrete goal for your Facebook marketing campaigns.

The simplest, and the one you’ll probably want to go for, is just creating more sales.

For this, you want to choose a relevant objective under “Conversions” when setting up your Facebook campaign.

That’s not to say the other objectives can’t be useful for driving up sales, but you need to have a clear idea of what your end goal is and then match that to the right Facebook objective. 

For example, you could select video views as your objective because you have a compelling piece of video content you think will drive consumers to purchase your product.

The important part is to know exactly what you want to achieve, and how you intend to do it. Don’t ever start a Facebook ad campaign without a crystal clear idea of what success looks like. 

Mistake No. 5 – Giving Up Too Soon 

Despite being number 5 on this list, this is one of the biggest Facebook marketing mistakes you could make. 

We’ve all seen them, the abandoned Facebook business pages floating on the web like so many derelict ships on the sea. 

Personally, it’s sad to think of all the lost potential.

That’s not to say Facebook marketing is for every business, but we do think every business should try Facebook marketing and give it a fair shot.

If you’re not, your competition probably is. And that means they have an edge over you.

If you instantly abandon your Facebook marketing strategy after it fails to yield results, you miss out on all of the future sales you could’ve made if you just stuck with it.

It often takes time to get right. 

You have to experiment and fail a lot before you find that “magical formula” that turns Facebook into a money-making machine for your business. 

So the advice on this point is simple. Don’t give up until you’re certain Facebook marketing isn’t for you and your business.

As ice-hockey star Wayne Gretzky once said: “You miss one hundred percent of the shots you don’t take.”

Conclusion

Facebook marketing can be a tough environment to get into, but it can also be an invaluable tool for growing your business when you get it right.

So if you want to get it right, remember: 

• Make sure your ads are reaching the right people.
• Don’t sell too hard.
• Use the scientific method on your A/B tests.
• Have a goal and match your Facebook objectives to it.
• And don’t give up. 

We hope this helped you avoid some of the common Facebook marketing mistakes we see online. 

We’re a direct value digital marketing agency specialised in boosting your bottom line sales and leads and we’d love to help you further. 

If you’d like to find out how we can help you, get in touch with the form below.