Facebook ads for an industrial supply business

A bandsaw blade manufacturer was spending real money on Facebook with no clear return. The previous agency had been posting content; the fix was ads that sell.

Andy, Industrial bandsaw blades. Recorded December 2020.

Andy sells custom-welded bandsaw blades through an ecommerce model — welded on demand and shipped the same day to small businesses, factories and hobbyists across the country. It is about as unglamorous and as real as a business gets.

They came in with a failing Facebook campaign. Money was going out and nobody could say what was coming back, which is the position that makes owners give up on the channel entirely.

The diagnosis was straightforward once the account was open. Their previous agency believed in posts — informational content, brand presence, engagement. That produces activity that is genuinely difficult to connect to revenue, and in this case largely was not connected to it.

The account was rebuilt around point-of-sale advertising and audience segmentation instead: ads aimed at people ready to buy blades, split by who they were. It became profitable in a short period, with reporting simple enough for Andy to verify himself.

That last point matters more than it sounds. Metrics you cannot interpret are indistinguishable from metrics that say nothing. Being shown plainly which ads made money is what lets an owner stop worrying about the channel.

Industrial and B2B businesses are often told social media is not for them. It usually is. The mistake is running a content strategy when what the business needs is a sales channel.

In Andy’s words