Running a business isn't easy, that includes sales, marketing and advertising. So whoever told you that ecommerce and running ads is an easy way to make money lied to you. I hate to break it to you but it is what it is.

Now that I'm already the bringer of bad news I might as well tell you that your first ad campaign, it will probably cost you more money than it will make you. But you'll get something much more valuable than money in return, you'll get experience.

It doesn't matter if you have the best product in the world, if nobody knows about it then how will you sell?

So let me help you guide you through this scary adventure of running your first ad campaign and you might turn out just fine.

A tip I would like to give you, not only for running campaigns but for running a business in general: there is no easy way to success. There will be ups and there will be downs, the difference is how you cope with this and how to go from a down to an up.

So before you start with your very first campaign I want you to write down a goal. Next to it I want you to write down the goal for your tenth campaign. Try to imagine the different impact you'll have with your tenth campaign compared to your first. Now you have these goals, write yourself a general goal of where you'd like to see your business go in 6 months.

By writing this down you visualize your goals and the purpose of why you're running your business. This will help you to stay motivated when times are rough and it will help you to keep your feet on the ground when business is booming.

Running a business is one thing but getting your business out to the world is something else. Running a marketing campaign demands creativity, punctuality plus you have to be able to put yourself in your consumers shoes.

Facebook is the most-used social media platform out there, so you would think it's the perfect platform for you to advertise your goods on? But did you ever go on Facebook with the intention of buying new shoes or clothes? No? Exactly, me neither.

For those reasons Facebook is the perfect channel, yet also the worst!

That is why the ability of placing yourself in the shoes of your customer is essential.

For this, Facebook made the Audience Insights tool. This tool supplies you with all sorts of important information about your audience.

Facebook Audience Insights is one of the most useful tools you'll come across for running your ads on Facebook and Instagram, if not the most useful tool. It's up to you to put all of this data to a good use. You'll be competing on the timelines of your audience with their friends and families cat videos, holiday pictures, new puppy photos, you name it. So the competition is ruthless.

Matter a fact the click-rate of Facebook ads are a measly 1,5 % depending on the industry you're in. That means for every 100 persons that sees your ad only 1 to 2 persons click on it. That's not much, we know.

Take in consideration that when testing your ads you'll probably get even less than that.

But in the ecommerce business: knowledge is power.

It's perfectly fine to sell a lot of products in your webshop but the real question is what products you're going to use to brand, to market yourself.

For example if you're selling jewelry, watches and small accessories, then you won't brand yourself that you sell accessories. You're going to brand your finest jewelry and nicest watches.

What exactly in that category will you use?

For that it is smart to run tests to see what awakens emotions with your audience. You can start of with asking your friends and family which of your products speak to the most of them and use this information to build your tests on. Pick the 3 most loved products, start running a campaign, wait and see what happens.

The cool thing about running ads and testing on Facebook is that with one single click you can turn your ad campaigns into an A/B test.

The next step is setting up your campaigns with the 3 favourite products that got selected earlier and add some creativity to them to spice your ad up.

In case the marketing channel that you're using offers the possibility to target specific audiences, keep these the same too. You'll want to know how one general crowd reacts to the different ads you're running.

Launch your three campaigns and depending on which one of the three scored best will be used in your next test.

Now that you figured out what ad you'll want to further test it's time to dive deeper in the audience.

For example, the jewelry shop, you notice that mostly women and clicking your ad then it might not be a bad idea if you reassign your ad budget to the female crowd.

As you can see from the analyses it's clear that your jewelry speaks more to the female crowd, specifically women between 18 and 24.

Use this information wisely and advert to this audience.

As a business owner/entrepreneur you want to make money and your customers are very well aware of this. There are multiple way of building trust but it all starts with the "about" on you webshop.

Next to the "about" what's also important to update is your contact information. You never know when a customer wants to get in touch with you.

These little texts can make or break your webshop, if these little bits of information are off, than why would the customer have any reason to trust and buy from your webshop?

Transparency is ever important nowadays.

Being active on relevant social media platforms is probably one of the best ways to build trust and create a community surrounding your brand. This strategy however is slow and time-consuming. But it's a good habit to create to whenever you have some spare time, go on relevant groups and share your knowledge.

But overall about how to win trust from your customer: it takes time. Be patient, confident, make sure you background information is up to date, stay relevant on social media.

Running your first ad campaign will be though. The fact that you can't grow trust overnight plays a big role in this.

In the end of the day the goal of every entrepreneur and business owner is to create sales and have a profit. Defining your pricing strategy however isn't guesswork. There's are different strategies available on how to price your products.

You have your original purchase costs, but add to that shipping costs, labour and marketing fees. Add all of these together and you know it how much you'll have to ask for your products just to reach break-even. So in the end you'll have to make an educated guess when it comes to pricing.

Once your customers reach your webshop it's already too late to figure out if you're overpriced or not. It takes time to collect data to know what is the right pricing.

You can go take a look at the competitors and base your pricing on theirs, which works perfectly fine. But you might be able to earn more by proper A/B testing.

The right pricing you will find by collecting data by running ads. Run different prices on different ads to figure out which price is perfect for your products.

For example a test you can run on your prices is to test what works best: giving a percentual discount (40% discount), or a numeral discount (€25 discount).

There is so much interesting information and data to collect from ecommerce. The information you can get from the internet. But for the data you'll have to figure out yourself what works best for you.

So there you have it, for these reasons you'll probably won't make a sale on your first ad campaign. Don't let this discourage you. The world of ecommerce is huge and there is plenty of space for another successful webshop: yours.

Test multiple ways of working, you might get sales but you'll create an insight. It's this insight that is priceless. The more insight you get, the more knowledge you'll be able to put to good use.

No efforts, time or money is ever wasted because you're investing all of it in your webshop. So if it fails, analyse it, learn from it and your next ad campaign might be the one that breaks the bank!

If you're interested to find out what you need to run ads on Facebook and Instagram, take a look at this article. Your webshop is already up and running with you want to know more on how to increase your customers' average spending, then this article is right for you.

If you're looking for a cool stock photo for you ad campaign, you should definitely take a look at my 7 favorite photo platforms where you can find free photos for everybody to use!