Look, is Facebook advertising really worth it in 2019. A lot has changed in the last 12 months. While traditionally Facebook advertising spend has been some of the lowest forms of advertising bang for your buck that you can do things are slowly changing. In 2019 Facebook advertising still really is worth it but you have to be careful where you spending your budget.

There are two frames of mind when it comes to advertising on Facebook and Instagram and growing your business. Of course there’s the organic nature of doing things posting daily, building a following and hopefully getting a following of higher intent people who are actually interested in your services or products.

The old saying is that at any given time there is 3% of people who want what you’ve got.

That’s fantastic when you’re posting organically on your Facebook or Instagram feeds to people who actively follow you because you know 3% of those people are actually going to want what you’ve got.

The bad part about that is that the Facebook algorithm now squash is organic posting to only show your posts to maybe 2% of your total audience. You don’t get a say if they were going to let that post be seen by that 3% of people who are actually ready to buy or if it’s going to get shown to the small percentage of your following (like your mum and strange aunty) that have zero intent on actually buying.

This Is where advertising comes in.

Facebook advertising in 2019 has the best bang for buck and one of the best CPM’s (which is cost-per-thousand) than any other form of advertising around.

The beauty about Facebook advertising is that it is geared around interest and behaviour based reach with 273,000 touch points to build an audience on. This form of advertising circumnavigates the hassle of finding a new and untapped audience by letting you target a laser-pointed strategy to show them an ad before they are even aware of you. If there are 3% of people who want what you’ve got right now, there’s essentially 97% of people who don’t know about you but could be warmed up to want what you are selling.

The hardest thing in 2019 that’s happening in Facebook advertising is the fact that people are getting Adblock.

Now Adblock isn’t a platform, it isn’t something that you can plug into your Chrome browser either.

Adblock it is the fact the people are scrolling through their phones at exponential speed and they’re just ignoring ads as they flick by. There are on average 5,000 ads shown to every consumer every single day. Consumers are hand on heart living on their phone from the moment they wake up to the moment they go to bed and they are subconsciencly repressing advertising to the back of their brain and ignoring everything that is not remarkable.

This is where you need to get smart about what you’re doing.

Let me go through the top five things you need to consider in 2019 to make sure you’re getting the cut through and your advertising dollar is actually making you money.

One. Know what you are prepared to spend

Number 1 on the list of what you need to do in 2019 to be successful in Facebook and Instagram advertising is know how much you want to spend to get a result.

You need to know what you’re prepared to pay to land a customer whether you’re selling a pair of socks, a $3.5 million luxury home or lead generating for your financial planning business.

Any good agency that your partner up to work with will be able to take you through this process to ensure whatever you’re spending and whatever return you’re going to get, is going to mean that you remain profitable or even better wildly successful.

We run clients through a return on ad spend calculator to make sure they actually understand their budgets and to make sure they’ve got enough profit margin in their product or service to be successful.

You need to make sure that the acquisition costs in 2019 for Facebook and Instagram advertising is actually going to make sure you profit. Once we know that is the case, we work out the bare minimum you need to get in a return to make money. If we can’t get that return for you, we need to look at some other aspects of your business first.

Once we know that we can be profitable we’re going to get there as quick as we can and then were going to scale scale scale.

Who doesn’t want to be running successful ad campaigns and to be able to flick the switch and the more money you put into the machine the more money you get out in the form of revenue.

Two. Copywriting is not Buy, Buy, Buy but instead Value Based

This should be a given when it comes to advertising. Find out your clients desires and write accordingly. Sadly, we see so often that people are splashing poor copywriting out there the only serves the purpose of self promotion.

Write your copywriting to suit the audience that you are targeting. Here and BidPixel, we’re finding that you really have to call out your audience first. If you’re target audience is single mums, make sure that you are calling them out in the first paragraph or the first sentence of your ad copy.

Then you have solve the problem for your target audience. Advertising cannot be “Buy, Buy, Buy”, or “I’ve got something on sale”, or “Our products are amazing, buy them”.

Advertising has to have a “what’s in it for them” mentality. The second thing you need to be doing in your copywriting is answering those hair on fire questions that your potential market has.

The hair on fire questions that your potential customer has needs to be answered in the form of what their outcomes are going to be. In three dot points or two paragraphs or even a simple as one sentence how can you answer that single burning question that they want answered before they engage you. This might come as long form in a few sentences or can come in short form in your copywriting via simple dot points –  you should be testing both every time you activate a new campaign.

The last thing you need to do is have a strong call-to-action. If you aren’t convincing enough to garner a click through, all you’ve done is paid money to get them to see an ad.

Your call-to-action needs to be strong and include a benefit that once again provides immense value to the potential customer.

This leads us on to number 3

Three. How succinct is your landing page or product page or even bot experience?

The landing page experience whether it’s to an e-commerce product page, a messenger bot sequence, a free download or a sign up form on your website needs to continue the outcomes you called out in the ad copy and provide enough value to get a commitment from the prospect.

This landing page experience needs to mimic exactly what that ad copy was doing. What is in it for your potential customer when they click through and are they going to get the same experience from your ad copy as they are in your landing page copy.

Are you going to highlight the benefits. Are you going to keep a succinct. And are you going to make sure that they learn something or get some form of value about going to your landing page.

Even more important in 2019 is what are Facebook’s own bots going to find out about your landing page when it crawls it. That’s right, shortly after your ad goes live, a Facebook bot will automagically crawl your landing page and ensure that it not only needs Facebook’s terms of service but also will grade your content on its relevance. If you over step the mark, you’ll get your ads disapproved, if you nail the experience, you’ll be rewarded with lower acquisition costs and ads that reach more of your market.

Four. Check ALL of your internal influences

Number 4 on the list of things that you need to be doing in 2019 for your Facebook and Instagram advertising is make sure you’ve got all of your internal influences in check.

What is an internal influence?

Internal influences are making sure everything that you can do on the advertising platform is in line with the outcome that you need to achieve as an advertiser. You need to be making sure that your ad experience, your detailed targeting, your budgeting, geography and every other little nuance of using Facebook to do business is in line and is tested and is going to garner you the greatest result possible.

If you haven’t split tested, optimised and let your ads run for long enough time to make sure that they are actually working how you’d like them to be working, you don’t stand a chance buying advertising space in the sharkfest that is 2019.

There’s a movement created by W. Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne (get their book about it) that we like to adhere to in BidPixel and it is to maintain a “blue ocean”.

The thing is with Facebook and Instagram advertising in 2019 you are in a red ocean. There is a feeding frenzy of advertisers trying to take the same share of market that you trying to get to.

You need to swim out a little bit deeper, find some blue ocean, get away from those sharks and make sure that your message is unique and valuable.  Once you’ve swam out far enough and found a niche of your market that isn’t in the bloodshed waters, create your own piece of blue ocean to fish in.

If you aren’t remarkable you are not marketable.

Five. External influences are the hardest but most rewarding part of Facebook Advertising in 2019

Number five on the experiences that you need to have for 2019 when using Facebook and Instagram advertising just happens to be external influences.

Just like I mentioned in number four, it’s a feeding frenzy in the shallows for sharks right now and there’s blood in the water. If you’re going to be successful with your Facebook advertising in 2019, you need to make sure that once your internal influences are dialed in, that you are then looking at your external influences.

What is an external influence. External influences are the deciding factors that others place on the success of your ads.

How many people are targeting the same audience? What is their budget? Facebook ads, although many don’t see of them this way, is one big auction. You are bidding for your ads to be shown to your select market and if someone has a bigger budget or designs a better user experience or relevance, you are going to burn through cash faster than a millenial with their first credit card.

This is where advertising on Facebook is a make or break platform. If you are not immersed in the platform day in and day out, you’ll get beaten every single time. What worked last month, will be a total train wreck this month.

There’s things like manually bidding out your competitors; creating rules that surf your budget based on acquisition costs as well as the time of day; being able to stop an ad set or ad if it’s not performing but automatically start it back up if the attribution windows are favorable for you.

It’s this kind of stuff that if you don’t know what you’re doing in 2019 you should be finding someone who knows how to do it.

The attribution window alone of ads tricks many new (and successful) to Facebook’s ad platform. An ad that was turned off after three days of mediocre results could then become wildly successful (while still turned off) based on Facebook’s 20-day attribution window. That’s right. Facebook’s tracking code (pixel) is going to keep on reporting the results of any given ad click or impression for a full 28 days.

These kinds of things that the average person doesn’t have a clue about is what going to make or break your advertising budget in 2019 when you’ve got every single one of your competition following suit and spending money to get their share.

We hand on heart have seen Mum and Dad businesses absolutely smashing multibillion-dollar international entities at Facebook advertising because they are using the smarts behind the platform to its full extent, making sure all of the hard-to-tame external influences are strategically minimised to mere blips in the radar.

Conclusion. Don’t be scared by Facebook advertising in 2019

There is a lot of money to be had for successful ad campaigns but it honestly isn’t as easy as it was a few years ago. Go ahead and dip your toes into the water and test out Facebook advertising for yourself but understand that to get the best results, sometimes you are going to need to pay someone who is immersed in the platform all day, everyday.

We’d love to talk to you about this. It’s a crazy crazy platform to get your head around and if you’re not in the game daily, you can blow hundreds of thousands of dollars with no results.

So in conclusion: is Facebook and Instagram advertising worth it in 2019. Of course it is. Just don’t do it wrong.