When promoting my primary business, I do most prospecting offline or over the phone. I use the Internet primarily to establish connections, credibility and keep in touch with folks and trends. In the past, I’ve done some Facebook PPC campaigns for network marketing opportunities without any problems, but saw traditional and mobile PPC as more logical investments in terms of paid lead generation strategy.
Recently, I’d studied Facebook PPC training courses in MLSP‘s back office. If you don’t know MLSP, it’s sort of like lynda.com for marketing your business online. The new lead generation approaches were clever and had me intrigued.
I setup a new campaign and a few ad variations based on what I’d learned, but the ads got rejected almost immediately. Unfortunately I wasn’t provided a reason, but directed to a generic link to ad guidelines.
I proceeded to contact Facebook ad support, requesting specific information about what policy had been violated. The first two sentences were typical form responses, but then I read the following line:
“We do not allow ads for MLM or personal business opportunities”
But wait… there’s more. The next line read, “I suggest trying to focus more on the product rather than the business opportunity.”
Now I know our product is pretty great and all but I actually wanted to highlight the business opportunity because it has recently been sweetened and that seemed like a good angle.
I checked the guidelines again but couldn’t find anything specifically referring to MLM being a violation. Could this be the work of a disgruntled support tech whose Mom had been burned in Mary Kay?
The prohibited content guidelines vaguely state: “Facebook reserves the right to determine what advertising we accept, and we choose not to accept ads for products and business models which we have determined run contrary to our advertising philosophy.”
Aha.. It’s a zen thing. Got it.
So… Is Facebook PPC dead for network marketing? Sort of. It’s always been a bit of a crap shoot to advertise your network marketing business as the primary offer with Facebook PPC, but receiving such a definitive statement from the Online Sales Operations team makes this much clear to me anyway – this aggression will not stand, man! What we need here is a workaround.
So What Can You Do?
A Perry Marshall quote from Magnetic Sponsoring comes to mind.
“Anyone who ever bought a drill didn’t want a drill, they wanted a hole. Therefore, if you want to sell drills, you should advertise information about making holes – NOT information about drills!”
Marketers need to get creative with things like ad copy, images, fan pages and squeeze pages in order to engage the prospect while not actually promoting the business on the front end.
There’s no doubt Facebook is exploding as an advertising platform and savvy marketers need to learn to adapt to the system instead of shrugging it off as an impassable roadblock to their online marketing success. You can do that, right?
This is great information Shaun as I am looking into paid Facebook advertising. I finally got good at social media, love it, and thought I could step my game up on the paid side as well. Thank you for the information and God bless you.
Glad you liked it Justin, and thanks for the kind comment. It sounds like you’re on a good track. If you haven’t checked out MLSP already watch my short video here, it’s been my go-to training/toolkit/community for learning social media and internet marketing profitably and could be useful for ya. http://shaunmackey.com/articles/welcome/ Have a great day!