Getting Meta (Facebook) Ads to work
Driving growth for a new brand is tricky - Low revenue but high marketing cost. Google ads is expensive. Tiktok ads is useless. Meta ads is possibly the one option left.
👋 Ola! Welcome to Out of Singapore. I am Shantanu, writing about building businesses from scratch every week. Right now I am building a supplements brand in Singapore and US. We are in our fourth month since we launched in the end of April 2023. It has been a bittersweet journey. I am proud of what we have achieved and I am anxious of all that needs to be done. We are trying to increase our revenues by 2-3x every month. That’s a tough goal given so many parts are broken. One of them is online advertising. But before we dive in, let’s wind down a bit.
I wrote some goals on a sticky note in 2021. Here is where I am after 2 years.
Lose weight ✅ - In 2021, I lost 12 kgs and have maintained the weight since.
Learn Tennis ✅ - A kind soul taught me in 2021. I don’t know how to service yet.
Run 5 KM ✅- Achieved this on Wednesday, 9th Aug 2023.
Run 10 KM ✅- Achieve this today, 19th Aug 2023.
Live in Japan - I am hopeful 2023 or 2024 would be good year for this.
I have been reeling from the after effects of running 10 km and haven’t been able to focus on writing today (now yesterday). I am targeting Singapore Marathon in Dec’23 (half marathon, 21 km). So I need to keep increasing my run distance and speed over next 3 months.
It has been sometime since I checked on you guys. So tell me this before we start today.
I have been overthinking and anxious. Ask me for a coffee and I will tell you more. 🍵
Now let’s jump back into the main topic for today - Paid ads to drive growth. We will go through these sections today.
What are the options for a consumer brand?
Why Meta Ads?
Key elements of a Meta Ad?
How is it working for us?
Let’s start.
#1 You can go bankrupt on ad channel spending
You can start advertising your brand on Google ads, Meta ads, Tiktok ads, Bing ads, Taboola, StackAdapt, Outbrain, Paid PR, Influencer posts and potentially any large publishing platform.
Take this example - Morning Brew is a widely read newsletter in the US. They quoted USD 50K from various placements on its ONE daily email! 🤯 They have 15+ publications and they generated 50 Mn in advertising revenue in 2021. I never knew publications can mint so much money.
Point is, there are many channels and each channel is going to cost you money. For a new brand, imagine USD 5K a month on each channel. If you want to win 3 channels, that’s USD 15K and I will tell you now that it’s not enough. Omnichannel advertising is a great concept, but it doesn’t fit a new brand’s P&L.
Like we think of target audience for a brand, each ad channel is strong with a specific niche of audience. Your brand and message has to fit in this puzzle. Otherwise you can spend millions of ad dollars with paltry returns (imagine 0.1 to 0.2x)
#2 Meta is best place to find new customers
Meta’s ecosystem of Facebook and Instagram has well over 3 Bn users. Combined with a sophisticated advertising solution, it works the best. The number of experienced marketeers on Meta is large as well. Try finding a Tiktok marketing expert and you will hit a wall.
There are some new forms of selling, one being stores on social media (Instagram stores and Tiktok stores) and livestreams. For any channel to succeed, you will need to get enough traffic to convert. Access to this traffic is well solved by Meta’s ecosystem.
Meta ads provides you access to three platforms - Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. You can discover and reach new audiences on Facebook and Instagram and then retarget them on all the three mediums.
Audience engagement is possible with posts and stories. Both of which can be converted into an ad. So if you want to build engaging and valuable content for your audience, you can drive both organic traffic and ad-driven traffic to your products.
Mind you, the costs of advertising on Meta is going up. However, it is one platform where you can do multitude of things from discovering new audiences, to driving organic conversions.
It is important to note that content is becoming the most important driver of marketing. Right content, which says want audiences want and in forms they consume, is the secret sauce for good performance on any marketing platform.
#3 Creatives, copy and call to action are the fundamentals of Meta ad
Let me illustrate with an example of a recent ad we are running.
I would like to say that creative does 90% of the job of an ad. But then I would be wrong. The creative is supposed to capture your attention and introduce the product. The headline and the description are supposed to convince you. The CTA button will finally drive the result you intend to achieve.
Selecting audiences is another key fundamental but now with "broad” targeting, this depends on Meta and it’s algo.
Every ad platform has a different ad anatomy. I like Meta’s anatomy the most since it captures attention and convinces a new user to take a action.
#4 We have achieved initial success with Meta ads
Our initial hypothesis was Google will be our best partner and Meta will be supporting. We have come to a realisation that it is the opposite. We have seen two stages of paid marketing.
Stage 1: Completely internal from copy, creative to execution and optimisation.
Stage 2: Mostly external from copy, creative to execution and optimisation.
Our first stage didn’t work very well. We aren’t a marketing company at heart. We are great at coming up with products. Marketing them requires resources and experience which we lacked.
The second stage took some time to scale, however, we noticed clear winners in terms of creatives. The outsourced resources created content that was high quality and captured audience attention. We had started to believe that DTC won’t work in Singapore and marketplaces are the only places to grow. Over the last 1.5 months, we have proved that DTC works as good or better than Shopee/Lazada.
Insider info - Lazada is crap. Shopee is gold.
The key question with any ad spend is the ROI or ROAS. That is a answer we are still struggling with. I am working on a framework called AWO (ad - website - offer). This loosely translates to
Capture attention with ad
Have an engaging, trust worthy, and fast website
Help a customer make the decision with a good offer
We are strong with Ad and Offer. However, our website is not perfect yet. We have designed tons of landing page internally, but there is lot to do.
Our experiments with Tiktok ads and Bing ads has been poor. Google is catching up slowly. We are starting to create content on Reddit. Excited about how these will work out. I will keep you guys updated.
Thank you so much for reading today💖 The newsletter is evolving on a weekly basis. I would like to expand and scale (that’s my nature, else I get very anxious). Please comment or write to me on things you would like to read or understand.
If you would like to see what else I do or think - you can follow me on Instagram @shan.kr or read my fitness journey plus impromptu thoughts on Twitter @with_shan. LinkedIn is my best place. I am working on sharing content consistently on LinkedIn. So expect to see new things coming up in next few weeks.
Writing this newsletter every weekend is a therapeutic experience. It forces me to sit down and focus on very specific topic. And it allows me to rummage through Jisoo’s GIFs. Isn’t she the best?
Hahaha, yes I love Jisoo. Not like crazy but more like affectionate. 🤭
Okay bye! Have a great week ahead. Power to you💪