The Story of a Dog That Couldn't Stop Barking (...And how it applies to Facebook ads)

Have you ever tried spending more and more money on Facebook ads thinking "big brands are doing it so I'll do that too" or have you ever thought, "If only I had a big marketing budget, all of my marketing problems would be solved?"

A few years ago, I remember going to my cousins house and they have this cute little dog that gets super excited every single time someone new comes to their house. The little guy (or girl I think) starts barking, wagging it's tail like crazy and it sometimes pees itself when there are a lot of new people over out of excitement.

Anyway, the last time I was over I can remember this little pooch just starts barking while my cousin and I were talking about something. It just kept barking and barking over nothing (at least that's what it seemed) every couple of seconds.

"Shutup!" my cousins yelled at the dog.

The dog stopped and then he starts talking again.

Within a few minutes, the dogs started barking again. We couldn't take it anymore and just go to another room - away from the dog.

I'm sure you probably had a similar experience somewhere else in your life.

You're probably thinking how does this apply to Facebook ads?

Well, actually a lot of people that are advertising on Facebook try to "bark louder" or "shout louder." (basically in the form of spending more and more money on Facebook ads.)

Unfortunately, this is the state of most small business owners. Most small business owners are focused on the wrong things in their business. They think that spending a lot of money on advertising will save them. They think that by shouting their name louder will get them more customer or clients.

But the sad reality is that it NEVER does.

Just like with my cousin's dog, people will tune your message out if they don't care about your business or what it has to offer them. If your ads just say something like "schedule a consultation, schedule a consultation, schedule a consultation" but the majority of people don't even know what you or how you can help them, you'll only just end up losing money and you won't be able to pay for those expensive ads.

There were even times business owners told me something along the line of "If only I had $10,000 a month for an advertising budget, acquiring new customers would be a lot easier" … as if that was the magic solution to build a thriving business.

Sadly this kind of thinking is flawed logic.

So the main point of this email is to put out relevant messages out to the marketplace that the market will resonate with. You don't have to have a massive budget to make this work and you certainly don't need to "shout louder." What you DO need to do is make offers that your market wants.

Is it simple? Yes.

Is this strategy more effective than what most small businesses are doing on Facebook? Yep.

Will most people do it? No.

Most advertisers prefer to shout louder even though it's been proven time and time again that it's better to market more effective than my marketing by shouting your message as loudly as possible. People will tune out your message if they don't understand what you have, don't think that it's valuable, or just don't trust you.

If you've been trying to spend a lot of money on Facebook ads and thought that it would work but it ended up not and your marketing campaign just flopped, send me a message on LinkedIn. We'll have a quick chat to see if you're a good fit to work with.