Using social media adverts to find out why people are not buying your product

You can also use social media to find out what people really think about your product.  Have you ever seen a Facebook advert in your timeline and it’s just full of people slating-off the advert or the product?  I love reading through these.  You might ask, why doesn’t the company just disable comments?  Or, why are they keeping the advert running when it has so much negativity on it?  But this negativity is really great feedback on both your product and message.  There’s an invisible barrier on social media that people think they are hiding behind, so people really let rip with what they think!  There is an assumption that no-one at the company reads the comments, or if they do it’s a robot or someone working at a marketing agency so it’s fine to have a free-for-all!  But as someone who has run many paid Facebook advertising campaigns – for my own businesses and for other people’s – let me tell you that real people read and agonise over every comment that is left.  I tell companies that they should be prepared for push-back on paid Facebook adverts especially, because you are paying to appear uninvited on someone’s social timeline.  It’s like walking into someone’s living room with a megaphone.  But I also tell them that they should embrace the push-back because each negative comment is telling them why their message has not worked and how they can change it for the next time.  Even if you get a stream of anti-vegan comments, that means you now know that you haven’t got your targeting right yet and you are hitting too many non-vegans. 

Going back to the Vegan Cleaning Products company, when they ran their Facebook campaign they targeted people who were interested in veganism and they led with a vegan and cruelty-free message on their advert.  They received two main types of comments posted on the advert:
1. Why would I buy this when ‘supermarket product X’ is half the price?
2. You say you are ethical but look at how much plastic packaging you are using. 

This was really eye-opening to them.  The answer to question 1 on price was ‘because supermarket product X is made from chemicals, ours is made from plant oils, which is better but costs more to produce’.  They realised that they had not communicated that message in any of their marketing, and they had gone for the cruelty-free angle instead.  This was something they could change by just re-writing their message. 

The answer to question 2 about their packaging was to actually ask themselves, ‘why are we using all this plastic packaging?’.  This is not something they could change straight away, but once they realised how much their target customer cared, they could set themselves on a new direction and let people know about their mission to reduce the plastic in their packaging.  And in the meantime, what could they do to make their packaging easier to recycle while they researched other containers?  So you can see why the negative feedback can be just as valuable as the positive.