This is perhaps the most heartbreaking thing that can happen to a business owner.
Imagine that you’ve gone through it all:
- You spent tons of money with an agency, and got little to no results…
- You were attracted by the appeal of free templates, and it was just another disappointment…
- You spent a couple grand (and many many hours) trying to make the Marketing Guru old wive’s tale happen to your business, to no success…
- You hired one, two, three freelancers and almost lost your sanity trying to sew everything up into that one Frankenstein-looking campaign…
But you managed to create great content and a promising campaign was born.
You publish it with a smirk. And you feel great.
For about a day or two.
Until you don’t feel that great anymore… because it looks like no one’s giving a fudge about the content you’ve worked so hard (or spent way too much money) to create.
Why is that happening?
Simple. Nobody reacts because nobody sees your content.
Why No One Is Sees Your content
Even if you manage to resurrect Leonardo Da Vinci to create a majestic design…
Even if you convince George R. R. Martin to write the greatest ad ever, with storytelling, dragons, plot twists, and perhaps a dash of lust…
You’d still be ignored. Because Facebook won’t show your content to anyone if you don’t pay them to do it.
Basically, Facebook has gone full Jerry Maguire and saying…
“Help me help you!”
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.
Let me be candid: organic reach on Facebook is so 2012!
All those people claiming it’s possible to get organic results out of Facebook are either lying or still living in 2011, updating their Myspace from a BlackBerry.
And that, on the internet, is old news.
So old, it has achieved fairy tale status.
“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.
Organic Reach: The Modern Day Fairy Tale
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%.
We're even ashamad of calling that an improvement.
It's way too low.
Putting it in numbers, only 10 to 20 of each 1,000 followers will see your new post in their feeds… and less than 3 likes.
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:
- Cost per Click: $1.72
- Cost per Impression: $0,018 (less than 2 cents) or $18,71 per thousand impressions.
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.
It would be like printing 50,000 flyers with an amazing, one-in-a-lifetime-promotion and leaving them all inside your drawer.
Then wonder “Gee, why isn’t anyone calling about the flyers promotion? Is the promotion bad? Is the flyer ugly?”
Nope. You just did an awesome job hiding it from everyone that should’ve seen it when you decided you didn’t want to run an ad campaign.
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.
What If You Try To Run Ad Campaigns By Yourself
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.
You could do it, but it’d take time, money, and resources that would be best spent elsewhere.
Think about this: how do you feel when a total stranger thinks they can do your job better than you?
Someone who has never done it before, trying to beat you in something you’ve been doing every single day for the past decades.
Wouldn’t it be annoying?
That’s what you’d be doing if you tried to do your Facebook ads yourself.
You will probably spend way too much and get way too little results.
Then you’ll be like “hey this ad thingy ain’t working”.
Well, I once tried to fix my car.
I know nothing about mechanics. Ended up making it even worse.
Does that mean this “mechanic thingy" doesn’t work?
It means I’m a bad mechanic, and I shouldn’t try to do something I don’t have the skills to do.
The advice here is to 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
Of course, the more professional, fun, and attention-grabbing your ad is, the better it will perform.
And a skilled media buyer will get a better price on the auction (as each ad goes through an auction where it “bids” for their audience’s attention).
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 to their audience
That means they ain’t seeing it. So they won’t be calling. Or clicking.
To sum it all up, great content alone won’t cut it. You can post a content masterpiece every week. Create fun, engaging posts every day.
You can share the best piece of content ever created. Facebook still won’t show it to your audience unless you throw them some money.
That’s why so many people say “FB ads don’t work for me”.
It’s not because FB ads don’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.
How Much Of Your Budget Should Go To Paid Ads
There is not an exact number. This is not an attempt to provide a strategy that would work for anyone.
We already established it doesn’t work like that.
Nevertheless, from our experience working 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.
This means we’re telling them to spend AT LEAST 30% of their money with another company instead of using it to purchase our services.
Why?
Because we’re in it for the long run. We don’t want to sell you the most expensive package, or make you spend more with us.
We want to build trust by helping you succeed.
This means that for each $1,000 you have on your budget, you should spend AT LEAST $300 with ads.
We would go further and tell you to spend about $500 (or 50% of your budget) with ads. Even if that means less money for groost.
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.
And that’s how ads "go viral" these days.
By spending a bucketload of money on production and distribution.
Do you remember when Van Damme’s Epic Split?
It has had over 113 million views since it was launched in 2013. It’s estimated that it generated $170 million in revenue for Volvo.
But it had a production and distribution cost of about $4 million dollars.
42x ROI. Pretty much the average ROI of a simple email campaign.
The punch line?
You don’t need millions of dollars to launch a great ad campaign.
What Do You Need To Do To Get The Best Bang For Your Marketing Buck
All you need is a sound strategy that takes into account how much budget you have and how much of that budget should be directed towards media purchase.
Then, you use what’s left to hire groost and get the best bang for your marketing buck.
It’s as simple as 1, 2, 3:
- Define your budget;
- Talk to your groost success manager and develop a strategy;
- Create your campaign briefing.
Whatever You Do, Don’t Click The “Boost My Post” Button
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.
You don’t want vanity metrics that won’t bring you sales, do you?
You want to bring home the bacon.
We can help you do that. But our work ethic doesn't allow us to guarantee results.
There is no such thing as guaranteed results when it comes to digital marketing.
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 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.
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.