With so much on your plate as an ecommerce entrepreneur, it’s common to resort to outsourcing to lighten your load.
Customer support, social media, copywriting… These are areas that business owners often seek external help with.
What about Facebook ads?
Because it has a more direct impact on sales and business growth, many entrepreneurs are often reluctant to let anyone else handle it.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t.
In this post, we’ll look at whether or not it’s a good idea to outsource Facebook ads and what you need to consider when weighing your options.
What Aspects of It Can You Outsource?
From planning your strategy and managing the ads to designing the creative, writing the copy, and beyond, simply understanding the different pieces that make up Facebook ads is a challenge in and of itself.
But it is a necessary first step.
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Breaking down the different parts of it helps you decide what you can and should or should not outsource. Because while some may require you to have recurring, high-volume help, others may be minimal or even one-off.
“Maybe you could hire one person who is really good at the strategy to only do about an hour’s work a week,” says Paul Cochran. “And then maybe you’ll hire someone else to manage the hands-on day-to-day stuff, and that might be 10 to 15 hours a week.”
After you’ve broken it down, apply the following three questions to each of them:
- Are you willing to learn it?
- Are you good at it?
- Do you enjoy doing it?
Let’s dive into how each of these can help you with your decision by looking at how they’ve helped successful entrepreneurs.
Are You Willing To Learn It?
We’re not here to sugarcoat. Facebook ads is hard.
There’s a steep learning curve involved in it and getting it to mastery level is not gonna be a walk in the park.
So one big question you have to ask yourself is whether you’re willing to commit the time and energy needed to grasp everything there is to know about it, or if that effort better spent elsewhere.
For serial entrepreneur Ovidiu Sofron, the decision was obvious.
Armed with a certified accounting qualification and an MBA, he chose to dedicate his time to areas where he could provide significantly more value: operations and accounting.
The rest of his business – including Facebook ads – is outsourced.
“While I don’t understand how to put an ad together, I understand what products can be successful. So I work with a team that knows how to do the ads,” he says.
Are You Good at It?
If you’ve answered “yes” to the previous question, then consider the following: Are you good at Facebook ads?
It may look like a simple question on the surface. But it’s a factor that can make or break the bank – something entrepreneur Cole Turner learned the hard way… twice.
Cole started out handling Facebook ads himself before deciding to partner up with an agency. When the three-month collaboration ended up leaving him in the red, he decided to switch to another agency, with hopes of things improving.
This time, it was a six-month contract, and it didn’t go anywhere near as well as he’d expected.
“I paid them $20,000 and they lost me $10,000 in ad spend, so I lost $30,000 with them,” says Cole.
What Cole then realized from these two failed partnerships was that he’d reach a level of expertise with Facebook ads that no other agency out there could beat.
The moral of the story?
If you can get good enough at Facebook ads yourself, any agency is not gonna be able to run ads as well as you. – Cole Turner
Do You Enjoy Doing It?
The last question to ask yourself is whether or not running Facebook ads gives you pleasure.
Important as it is for any ecommerce business and as much as you want to hold the reins, doing something you don’t enjoy can very quickly cause you to lose motivation and burnout.
For pro dropshipper Ryan Carroll, it’s precisely the joy he gets from it that drives him to continue managing his own ads – despite having the financial capabilities to outsource it.
While he hires virtual assistants for time-consuming and tedious pieces of his business like customer support and order fulfillment, Facebook ads is something he says he would never think about delegating.
“I’ve always stuck with that ’cause that’s kind of my thing that I’ve just been really good at,” says Ryan.
In fact, he enjoys it so much that even with the possibility of having entire days off to enjoy his globe-trotting, entrepreneurial life, he’d still much rather spend a couple of hours a day managing his ads just to make sure the engines are oiled.
“I would look at Facebook ads, I would kinda see what’s working, I would tweak some things, and that was really it for the day.”
Conclusion
Should you or should you not outsource Facebook ads?
There really is no one-size-fits-all answer.
As we’ve seen from the experiences of these entrepreneurs, there are both pros and cons of outsourcing.
Whether or not it’s a logical move for your business will depend on your personal drive, abilities, and interests.
If you find yourself on the fence about whether to outsource Facebook ads, run through these four questions. Having clarity will help to set your priorities and guide your decision.
