ATTENTION BUSINESS OWNER
If you:
Then you’ll find plenty of valuable information here.
On the other hand, if you:
Then you should spend your time somewhere else.
If you’re still reading this, I’ll assume that you’re in the first group. All righty then!
Before you spend another dime on Facebook ads, you’ll want to read this. It’s the kind of stuff agency owners would DIE before telling you.
When you don't mind spoilers... Or simply like to know what's in it for you. Without further ado, we’ll show you the biggest mistakes business owners make when they’re starting their Facebook advertising efforts. Have fun!
Before you jump on a costly agency contract, hear us out.
The main reason why hiring an agency is a bad move is that your hard-earned marketing budget (about $1k a month) is pocket change for them.
They charge from $100 to $200 per hour. If you want to get all technical and stuff, the average hourly rate is $136
Believe when we tell you that $1k a month won’t even get them started.
Here is how long each activity takes, on average:
Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and be optimistic…
Imagine everything worked like a charm, and you got some results in the first month already.
You will still be tied to that agency for about a whole year. Because they will only onboard you after you sign a 12-months contract and pay a retainer fee.
Don’t fool yourself that they will be optimizing your campaign every month. They’ll be focusing their attention on their $10k, $20k, $50k accounts.
If you want a realistic scenario, this is what’s probably going to happen…
You will have one piece of content every other week, with hopefully a hundred bucks budget for advertising (if there is any budget left for paid media).
In other words, a total waste of your budget. Can’t hope for much revenue coming from that.
That’s an expensive mistake. One that cost you about $14k a year, and brought you about zero sales.
Even if they offer a couple of posts a week for half that money, leaving half your budget for ads, trust us when we tell you that the quality will leave much to desire.
We’ve been there, hired that.
And it was never as good as they promised.
At the end of the day, you’ll just be another small account they will do their best to ignore without breaking the contract and keep collecting your monthly fee for as long as possible.
That’s why they have a fancy (and useless) monthly report. To throw some numbers at your face, like click-through rates and impressions that don’t really mean anything to you.
Trust your bottom line. It will always tell you the truth.
And the truth is that 9 out of 10 agencies will make you lose money. And that other one didn’t answer back when you asked for a quote because they don’t even get out of bed for less than $5k a month.
That’s why we founded groost. Because pretty much no other company cares for accounts with marketing budgets of $1k and under as groost does.
“Before groost, I had so many bad experiences with digital agencies that I was convinced anyone offering digital marketing was just trying to get money out of my pocket. But as soon as I created my groost account, I noticed they were different. Instead of trying to push the most expensive services, they helped me understand my own marketing needs and then provided a strategy that was not only within my budget but also with optimal ad spend.” Kyle, restaurant owner
Are these your only options? Fortunately not!
If you’re of the adventurous kind, you might also fall prey to another common trap that lies amidst these two paths.
Instead of picking the nice, paved, fun, and lit groost road, you’ve seen a sign on top of a mischievous-looking patch of road that says...
FREE TEMPLATES - GET YOURS NOW
Now you might be thinking…
“Well, then, if it’s free, how much harm could it make”?
It’s just as granpa used to say…
“There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”.
Free stuff will end up making you spend more than you had planned.
If you don’t pay it with money, you’ll end up paying with your time, or even worse, with your reputation.
Sure, creating a quick post on Canva ain’t no rocket science.
But think about it for a minute.
Why is it free?
Because:
Doesn’t matter why it’s free… it’s not worth it.
Businesses shouldn’t rely on free solutions. That would be like relying on free samples to feed your family.
If you still want to work with free templates, here's what is probably going to happen.
You start working on your post using that free template.
In a few minutes, you have a post and you publish it.
The whole venture takes about an hour, and you feel great.
And then you do that again. And again. But now it’s getting harder and harder to find some decent templates. Why?
Because the next step is forcing you to buy a “premium pack” with all the pretty images and stickers and whatnots that aren’t available for freeloaders.
What once took you an hour and made you feel great, now takes two hours and you feel miserable.
MAYBE one or two likes. No shares. No comments. No leads. No conversions.
When you thought things couldn’t be worse, you can expect your feed to look like everyone else’s and their dogs with posts like these…
We’re not saying stock photos are bad.
We use plenty of stock photos ourselves. Well, not these.
Our skilled designers are very picky and they only use images that make sense with the topic, that isn’t overused, and the end result is always a branded, unique artwork that won’t dilute your message.
All we’re saying is that, if you fall into the “free template” trap, sooner or later, you’ll run out of ideas.
The chances of posting something bad, bland, or both will only grow.
Those free templates that looked like a solution were just a palliative for the same symptoms you had before and still do: the lack of a reliable and affordable resource for professional marketing campaigns.
After a couple of weeks or months into free templates, what will you have?
Many wasted hours, weak results, and a watered-down feed that makes your brand look like a thousand other brands.
And your problem is still there.
Now, let’s think about another marketing sci-fi scenario. In the unlikely case you’ve become the Lord of the Templates in a fortnight, and your templated posts got some decent numbers.
If that ever happens, we have three recommendations:
If you’re immune to sarcasm, recommendations #1 and #2 are jokes.
And recommendation #3 is about an enemy all-time marketers’ enemy we’re always looking to avoid.
We call it “creative fatigue”.
Creative fatigue is a phenomenon that happens the more a stock photo or template is used by different advertisers.
The more an image is used, the faster people blatantly ignore ads using that image.
Maybe your dentist or your gardener uses that very same “shaking hand” template you did. And so did hundreds of other businesses. And their dogs. And their brothers.
Everyone seeing an image many times will cause ad fatigue, and that means no one will really see it anymore. As in, they will see it, but it won’t spark interest. Or joy. Or any other reaction.
That image will be unconsciously registered by people’s brains as just another piece of spam.
Do you know how spam emails go to your spam box? That’s how it works for creative fatigue.
Your brain has a spam box for overused photos and templates, so it can ignore and direct your attention to something relevant, like a video of a cute cat or a groost-made ad.
“I thought free templates would help me ramp up my marketing. Instead, I ended up spending more and more hours trying to make it happen. I even upgraded my account to Premium because the free options were just painful. I was six weeks and countless hours into it when I saw two different ads from my competition using the same images I used for my own ad. It made me realize that not only I wouldn’t ever get good results from that, but I was also harming my brand” Gabriel, Personal Trainer
You’ll come to understand that professional graphic design is essential to get people’s attention and spark feelings.
As is compelling copywriting. Templates without great copy are just bland, generic images that will be ignored by your audience.
If you still want to give it a go, burn away your time and money on ads you made using free templates as creatives.
You’ll see what should be a “free” solution becoming an expensive problem. Though it’s not even free anymore because you had to upgrade your account to “premium”. And still do all the work by yourself.
To beat ad fatigue, you need to understand the anatomy of a successful ad. That way, you can make sure that it won’t happen to your campaigns:
If you can do all that by yourself... perhaps you should consider digital marketing as a career.
If not, be ready to see your audience cold-shouldering your content and scrolling away without even spending 3 seconds looking at your ad.
Because that’s how much time you have to lure them in.
The first seconds people see your content are so important that Facebook considers a video view when people stay at least 3 seconds.
“If you have stayed on a video for at least three seconds, it signals to us that you are not simply scrolling through feed and you’ve shown intent to watch that video.” Matt Pakes, Facebook Product Manager
Needless to say - if a static image can hold your audience’s attention for 3 seconds or more, that’s a clear sign of success.
Thus, we would like you to take a glance at the ad below.
This is a real ad. That really sucked. So much it made into a post listing 5 examples of bad ads.
Be honest: if you saw that ad while scrolling through your feed, would you stop to see what it was?
Do you really think that this kind of post will make anyone want to look at it for more than a few fractions of seconds?
Why would you launch a campaign for your brand with a free template that looks just like that?
Even if you had the greatest template ever, it would flunk without all the other parts that constitute a great ad.
If all that isn’t enough to stop you from using templates, here is the biggest problem you might have from it.
It will make your brand look “meh” - a big no-no as 81% of consumers revealed that brand trust is a deal-breaker when they consider a purchase (resource: Edelman Trust Barometer)
Brands that maintain consistency significantly increase their trustworthiness.
GOOD consistency, though. Not bad, watered-down consistency.
Consistently using templates will just make your brand boring and uninteresting.
We hope you’ve got the point. Because our spider-sense has just noticed another threat around the corner.
It’s a dangerous menace that will sneak up on the unsuspecting business owner along the road towards great marketing and knock them down from their righteous path…
The Marketing Guru Old Wive’s Tale.
Ok, we understand. After wasting $14k and a full year on a marketing agency without results…
After falling in love with free templates, having a heartbreak, and starting hating them as much as you once loved them…
Upon the horizon, you see what looks like a knight in shining armor, ready to rescue you from sharing bad content and save the day.
Your expectations grow, and you stand in awe at the sight of what looks like the answer to all your problems.
But as soon as it gets closer and closer to you…
It’s just a fool wrapped in tin foil.
Looks like a farfetched example, though this is exactly what you can expect from 99% of the marketing gurus out there.
Let me explain.
Of course, there are plenty of great marketers providing awesome content for those who really want to learn.
If anyone promises you guaranteed results without even talking to you to get to know your brand and your business…
You run. Because that is the best way to recognize an old wive’s tale.
Marketers with your best interest at heart will make sure you understand there are NO GUARANTEED RESULTS and especially not a single strategy that would work for EVERYBODY.
I repeat.
THERE 👏 CAN’T 👏 BE 👏 GUARANTEED 👏 RESULTS 👏 FROM 👏 A 👏 SINGLE 👏 STRATEGY 👏 THAT 👏 WORKS 👏 FOR 👏 EVERYBODY 👏
All promises of guaranteed results are just another old wive’s tale: a shadow of something that might or might not have worked in the past, and that people are still repeating to this day in a forlorn attempt to milk business owners dry.
Why?
Because each business is different.
They might share the same audience, the same niche, but what works for others might not work for you.
So no one can guarantee any kind of results without taking a deep look into your business, your audience, and your goals.
The only way to know what works and what doesn’t work is by putting some elbow grease, researching about your audience to get the creative juices flowing, coming up with a tailored strategy, and running some A/B tests.
There is no magic marketing pill that can bring guaranteed results.
Marketing is an ever-changing landscape, and what works today might not work tomorrow. And vice-versa. It’s also all about finding what works for your individual needs.
"If you’ve ever read a sales page, you’ve heard of the great results a product or service can provide. But many marketers imply that you’re definitely going to get the best possible results no matter how unlikely it actually is. How much you benefit from a product or service depends almost entirely on you—the time and effort you put into making the most of it and how well it fits your individual situation." Peter Sandeen in 7 Common Marketing Lies And How To Spot Lying Marketers
So if they’re promising you a guaranteed marketing strategy for a couple hundred dollars (or worse, many thousands)... please don’t fall for that old wive’s tale.
We strongly advise you to save your time and money.
There are tons of great quality content available FOR FREE that you can watch to improve your marketing game.
Notice that we never promised guaranteed results. And we never will.
Because that’s impossible to deliver.
But we will never guarantee you’ll get a certain amount of leads, or worse, that the same strategy will work for everyone.
That’s just not how it works.
Believing in a Marketing Guru old wive’s tale is much like getting a prescription from a doctor that hasn't even laid their eyes on you, and can’t possibly know what is your issue.
There are proven marketing and sales principles that can help your campaigns succeed.
They work now and they have worked ever since the dawn of marketing, and they will still work for a long time because they’re rooted in the psychological and emotional principles that run human minds and hearts.
It should always be a tailored strategy that suits your goals, your challenges, and your budget right now.
That’s why each groost customer gets a Success Manager.
A Success Manager is a seasoned marketing professional that sees the bigger picture and works alongside the copywriter, designer, and media buyer to ensure each piece of content created will be part of a bullet-proof strategy.
We won’t guarantee results. But we’ll guarantee to follow the best marketing practices and strategies.
And that’s as honest as it gets.
The best part? It’s 100% done for you. You needn’t worry about anything other than providing us with enough information about your business and your goals. You needn’t spend hours and hours, or attend boring, repetitive meetings.
All for a fraction of the price you’d have to pay if you either hired an agency or hired people to do all that in-house.
Now that we’re talking about hiring, here’s another pitfall you might find yourself in if you don’t believe this guide…
Hiring freelancers yourself.
And managing them.
Oh, boy. You’re in for quite some trouble.
First things first, we need to make something clear:
WE LOVE FREELANCERS.
Totally head over hills.
Freelancers are the base of our whole business.
Without freelancers, there wouldn’t be:
But the thing about freelancers is that…
They’re people.
At least we haven’t heard about robot freelancers. Yet. Worry not, though, that day will come.
Until then, we’ll stick to human freelancers.
With all their human dramas.
You see, the greatest challenge about working with freelancers is not hiring them.
Hiring is easy, you find a freelancer, you check if you like their face, describe what you need, give them money, and they deliver what you asked for.
Hopefully.
I said hopefully because it will depend on your capacity to describe what you need, find the proper freelancer to deliver that, but first and foremost, to deal with this awesome, yet wild workforce.
Don’t fool yourself. Freelancers aren’t cute puppies.
They’re wild. Awesome and wild.
The first thing you need to understand is that being a freelancer is not easy.
They don’t have health insurance or other benefits. Most of them don’t have long-term contracts with their clients.
But they do have freedom. And that’s usually what motivates them to become a freelancer.
Freedom.
They’re not like employees, who are used to abiding by almost anything their employers say.
Of course, great freelancers are willing to learn and will hear you.
But if they don’t like the direction the project is taking, or even if they don’t like a subtle thing like how you’re providing feedback or if you’re bossing them around too much, they’ll run.
Great freelancers are very busy and sought after because they deliver.
And it means that you must know how to deal with them, how to communicate, how to organize briefings, tasks, and deliveries, and especially how to keep them motivated to work with your brand.
Or else, they’ll work for someone who does.
And make no mistake. Hiring ONE freelancer to help you with ONE thing is easy. Hiring many freelancers to take care of all your marketing needs? That's the opposite of easy.
If you eventually find a copywriter/designer/media buyer who does all the work of a full team, they’ll also probably charge the fees of a full team and an extra because they are rare. Unicorn-like rare.
But if you need to hire three or four freelancers (which you'll probably end up doing), it's a whole different world.
If you don’t have the time, AND the patience, AND the required managing skills, AND experience working with freelancers, it soon might become a tiresome routine.
Before hiring all those people, you need a strategy.
If you don’t have a strategy before hiring a freelancer, you’ll have an awesome copy, an awesome design, and/or an awesome PPC campaign… but the end result will probably look like a Frankenstein because each piece was created separately.
So now you need either to come up with a winning strategy (which will probably be very hard because you’re not a marketing strategist) or hire a strategist even before you hire any of those freelancers.
Last but not least, you need to manage them all so that their work is done according to that strategy.
See how that can easily go out of hand?
You thought you would hire one freelancer, and now you basically hired a team you have to manage yourself. Or hire another freelancer to manage them for you.
Good luck doing that. Probably you won’t have much time left to work on your business, but hey, at least you’ve solved your problem by hiring all those nice freelancers!
You’re set for some time, right?
Right?!
Nope. Bad news. When everything starts running smoothly, the copywriter gets sick and can’t work for a couple of weeks.
Or something good happens - their first child is born! Yay for them. Boohoo for you.
So there you go finding another wild copywriter to fill in their shoes. And onboarding that copywriter to the team.
When you finally find a new copywriter, the designer decides to follow their passion and become a coffee roaster.
Goodbye designer, goodbye another week’s night’s sleep. Hello, another week of hiring and onboarding.
Long story short…
Although you can achieve great things with freelancers, you’ll also need to put a lot of time and effort to manage them.
This is our expertise here at groost - finding, managing, and motivating the best freelancers around the world, with the best rates, who are willing to deliver small businesses the content they need for successful marketing campaigns.
“I’ve been a full-time freelancer for over 5 years. And I’ve never worked with a company so organized and transparent as groost. I know exactly what is expected of me, and I can not only feel but also see the good impact my work is having. Knowing that my work is helping entrepreneurs all across the globe achieve their goals is highly motivating.” Caio, copywriter at groost
Now that you understand how difficult it is to hire, manage, and keep freelancers motivated, I would like to ask you one simple question.
Why bother?
I mean, why should you put yourself in that position if you can just login to your groost account, order your content, and get top-notch campaigns delivered to you in a couple of days without all the drama?
It’s the best of all the worlds:
With groost, you can literally have your cake and eat it too.
And it’s your favorite cake, but without any calories, and it’s free, and it’s more nutritious than kale.
Don’t like cake?
Give groost a chance, and you’ll see that groost is the best thing since sliced bread. If bread was social media marketing and slices were on-demand campaigns
If you’re still here with us, it means you’ve been heeding our advice. Good for you!
Looks like you’re going to make it unscathed through the thorny path towards marketing awesomeness.
But at the end of the road lies a silent menace. One that can easily knock out those who aren’t paying attention to its threat.
It’s a true silent killer (of business growth).
You have probably already faced that threat unknowingly.
Have you ever worked hard to create a great piece of content just so you could publish it and no one would give a fudge about it?
That's not because your content was bad. The truth is that nobody reacts because nobody sees your content.
It's simple:
Facebook won’t show your content to anyone if you don’t pay them to do it.
Believing in organic reach is a common mistake made by non-marketers. They’ve heard some fairy tales about some people who got amazing organic results and figured out it was worth trying themselves.
Here are the numbers: FB organic reach dropped to 0,5% in 2017.
Some sources say that in 2021, the average organic reach got a small improvement from 2017 and was between 1.1% and 2.2%, depending on the brand. The engagement rate is even worse: it averages around 0.27%.
That’s low.
“The first changes you’ll see will be in News Feed, where you can expect to see more from your friends, family and groups. As we roll this out, you’ll see less public content like posts from businesses, brands, and media.” Mark Zuckerberg himself said this in 2018.
All that effort. All that time and money. And yet, almost no one will see your content.
Imagine you have a whopping 5,000 followers (which is not easy nor cheap to achieve).
Each post you publish will be seen by 50-100 people, and you’ll score about... 13 likes.
Not much if you ask me - especially when you compare it with ads.
Here is the average PPC benchmark:
If you wanted a thousand people seeing your organic post, you’d need something between 50,000 and 100,000 followers.
Not an option for 99,9% of small businesses I know of.
Now, imagine your total cost for creating a piece of content was $500.
And you simply publish it on your page that has 5,000 followers (which is well above the average).
With a 1% organic impression rate, we're talking about 50 impressions. Or $10 for each impression.
555x more than you’d spend if you created an ad.
With a 0,27% impression rate, that would mean around $37 bucks per like, or 231x more expensive than the average cost per engagement in ad campaigns ($0,16)
In a nutshell, creating good content and posting it organically is one of the fastest ways to burn your money online.
Fortunately, there is a simple solution for this. All you need is a professional media buyer.
You might think: “OK, so I’ll create a few ad campaigns by myself.”
Sure, go on, here’s what will probably happen.
Could you run Facebook Ad campaigns by yourself? Yes, if you’re willing to put in the hours to become a professional media buyer.
If not, you’ll probably end up clicking on “boost my post” or whatever.
Spoiler alert? Another couple hundred bucks down the toilet.
Stick to doing what you’re good at - running your business. All the rest, you should delegate. That’s how you can grow and scale.
If you think about it, these are awesome times we’re living in with great opportunities, if you’re willing to hire the right people to help you out.
Let’s say you wanted your audience to see a video ad of your company about 20 years ago. You’d have to spend thousands of dollars on a local TV ad, or worse, millions of dollars for a national TV ad.
Now you can do it with a couple hundred, and have your audience see your ads in their “prime time”, which is when they’re scrolling through their feeds.
"We’re still in the process of picking ourselves up off the floor after witnessing firsthand the fact that a 18 year-old Youtuber can deliver us three times the traffic in a couple of days that some excellent traditional media coverage had over five months." Michael Fox, founder of Shoes of Pray
That’s why we see so many frustrated business owners sitting on great content, waiting for a miracle that is not going to happen. Because even though their content is great, they are not distributing it properly.
That’s why so many people say “FB ads don’t work for me”.
It’s not because FB ads doesn’t work. It’s because they didn’t paid for their content to be distributed.
Spending almost your whole budget on creatives and forgetting to leave enough for media buying is one of the most heartbreaking mistakes you can make.
There is not an exact number. This is not an attempt to provide a strategy that would work for anyone. Because we already established that it doesn’t work like that.
Nevertheless, from our experience with hundreds of businesses, we can give you a safe benchmark.
We always advise our clients to save AT LEAST 30% of their budget for media buying.
The ideal would be 40% or even 50%. And after you get results and reinvest, that percentage will grow even more.
We’ve created successful campaigns at groost using only 20% of the budget for the creatives, leaving 80% of it for media buying. And it was a huge hit.
That’s right: we’re advising our customers to spend more with another company than with our own services.
That's how much we care about your success.
Successful ad campaigns should be created on the ads manager, where you can choose campaign type, audience, and other optimization factors.
Clicking “boost my post” will only get you a bump on your likes. And you want to see revenue.
We can help you do that. But our work ethic doesn't allow us to guarantee results.
But what we can guarantee is that you’ll have the best marketing team your budget could afford and that we’ll make sure we help you define the best budget for your ad spend so we can achieve those results together.
We can guarantee that we’ll work tirelessly with you until you are satisfied with your campaigns.
Because if we don’t, you’ll just get your money back.
We want to help you multiply your budget. And revenue. And happiness.
All while you get more free time to enjoy with your family, friends, or do whatever you want with it.
I know, I know. Reading all these common mistakes might be a little off-putting. That’s understandable.
But what would you think about a doctor who doesn’t tell you what’s wrong?
You need to understand the issue before you can fix it.
Facebook advertising is not a hobby, but a professional endeavor that needs professional attention and skillsets.
You wouldn’t trust your healthcare to your nephew who’s been playing around with a stethoscope for a couple of weeks, would you?
If you want to grow your business, it is paramount that you have a reliable resource to help you do that properly.
There are more than 3,5 billion users on Facebook worldwide. One out of each two human beings is there. This means a professional campaign can help you reach pretty much any audience on Facebook.
Not tapping into that massive source means potentially missing out on a big chunk of your market share and thousands of dollars in potential revenue.
You’ll also be making your competition’s life easier as you won’t be bidding for the audience, making their ads even cheaper.
Facebook enables small businesses to reach their audience as if they were the big hotshots. Imagine if you’re a burger joint - your ad could be shown to your audience instead of an ad from a giant like Burger King or McDonald’s.
Something like that would be unachievable in the TV/Newspaper/Radio era. You simply wouldn’t have enough resources to compete…
Now you do. So why shouldn’t you?
That’s why we’ve built groost - we want to give small and medium businesses not only a fighting chance but a winning chance.
We want to give you that edge you need, even if your monthly budget is under $1k.
For a fraction of the costs you’d have with an agency, an in-house team, or even a team of freelancers, you will have a professional team that will help you get the best bang for your marketing buck.
And that’s guaranteed.
This is why groost is different from any other marketing service.
We’re not an agency. We don’t provide free templates. We’re not marketing gurus.
We’re creative, yet down-to-earth marketers who love to help small and medium businesses achieve their goals.
And now...
Each groost customer gets:
This means your budget will be enough to create awesome content and make sure your target audience sees and engages with it.
Your success is what motivates us to get up in the morning and create awesome campaigns every single day.
So much we we'd love you to try the full tailored groost experience with an expresisve discount, and zero risk thanks to the iron-clad money back guarantee.
That’s why we’re giving you a FULL ad campaign with $20 discount.
All you need to do is click the button below, create your account, redeem your credits, and create your first campaign.