Why Are Your Meta Ads Not Converting? Fix These 3 Things First

Have you ever wondered why some businesses seem to scale effortlessly while others hit a wall, even after investing more money into marketing?

In this episode of Imperfect Marketing, Kendra Corman welcomes growth strategist Kathie Feng to discuss one of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make: trying to scale before they've truly validated their product, audience, and pricing.

Kathie shares her Winning Triangle framework, a simple but powerful way to evaluate whether your business is actually ready for growth. Drawing from her experience implementing Fortune 500 growth strategies for small and medium-sized businesses, she explains why product-market fit is only one piece of the puzzle and how pricing and customer feedback often determine whether a business thrives or stalls.

The conversation also dives into the realities of paid advertising. If you've ever felt frustrated after spending money on Meta ads that didn't produce results, you'll appreciate Kathie's practical approach to diagnosing what's really happening inside your marketing funnel. From creative strategy and audience targeting to A/B testing and conversion optimization, she shares actionable insights that help business owners make smarter marketing decisions based on data instead of assumptions.

In this episode, you'll learn:

✔️ Why businesses plateau even after increasing their marketing budget

✔️ The three elements of the Winning Triangle and why they matter

✔️ How to tell whether your product, audience, or pricing is holding your business back

✔️ Common mistakes entrepreneurs make with Meta advertising

✔️ How A/B testing helps improve marketing performance

✔️ Why customer feedback should guide your marketing strategy

✔️ The balance between creativity and data in successful marketing

About Kathie Feng

Kathie Feng is the Founder and Growth Architect of Signal Growth, where she helps entrepreneurs and small to mid-sized businesses build scalable growth using AI-powered systems and proven Fortune 500 frameworks. 

Connect with Kathie:

Website: https://signalgrowth.webflow.io/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kathiefeng/

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with another entrepreneur who is ready to grow their business with greater confidence and clarity.

Connect with Kendra Corman for more practical marketing strategies and conversations with industry experts who believe progress beats perfection every time.

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Transcript

Welcome To Imperfect Marketing

SPEAKER_01 0:27

Hi, I'm Kendrick Corman. If you're a coach, consultant, or marketer, you know marketing is far from a perfect science. And that's why this show is called Imperfect Marketing. Join me and my guests as we explore how to grow your business with marketing tips and, of course, lessons learned along the way. Hello and welcome back to another episode of Imperfect Marketing. I'm your host, Kendra Corman, and I'm excited to be talking about some of my most favorite things, right? Which is growth and really processes and systems to make that happen. And so I'm really happy to welcome Kathy Feng. Kathy, welcome. Hi. Thank you for having me. So let's just jump right into it. You help

Meet Kathy Feng And Signo Growth

SPEAKER_01 1:20

people grow, right? You find those problems. Can you talk to me a little bit more about the company that you have and like what made you start it?

SPEAKER_00 1:29

Yeah, absolutely. So I'm the founder and the girls architect behind Signo Growth, where we utilize the AI automatic systems and the Fortune 500 company frameworks to help entrepreneurs at SMB grow. So my backgrounds coming from the Fortune 500 company, where I start as kind of like a junior level and then starting learning things along the way. Then I realized that there are some patents behind all the growth systems where those uh big giants um, you know, helping build. And then now I uh basically distill all the knowledge and also the framework from those Fortune 500 giants to really help the small business grow. So all the mistakes I've made in the past decades, you don't need to make again.

SPEAKER_01 2:13

That's awesome. I love that. And it's just so great to learn from the problems that we've had, right? With especially when it comes to growth. And I love that you take something of a systematic approach to it. So you have a winning triangle framework, right? That takes in product, market, and then pricing or offer um into account. Can you tell me more about this and what it is?

SPEAKER_00 2:41

Yeah, so this is more kind of for entrepreneurs that are at the beginning of the stage before you uh start officially scale. You want to make sure that you are um kind of exam your winning triangle, meaning that the product

The Winning Triangle Framework

SPEAKER_00 2:56

market and the pricing fit um to make sure that you find so from product market perspective, this is not something you like ACC has been talking about this for all the entrepreneurs to find the product market fit. So it's basically kind of like the North Star's everybody wants to hit. So um essentially the product market fit is you have a product, an MVP that you are super passionate about, and then you're solving some sort of problem you do believe uh that your product can help. And then from the market perspective, you need to find someone, a group of people that truly loves your product, not just like your product, and then definitely not someone that's your friend or your family, right? Like there are a segment of people out there that actually truly love your product and believe your product can solve their problems. So that's the initial stage of the product market fit. And then once you understand that your product has been able to solve the problems, what are the willingness to pay of those group of people essentially determine your profit of the business. So, right, so um, there are a lot of times that entrepreneurs start with the free me and like you want to get as many people as possible the tractions to get your product. And once you do have that sizable market of your user base, then you start rolling up at the kind of subscription model or different pricing model. So this basically into some sort of science in terms of what the pricing needs to have based on the willingness to pay of your audiences, right? So each dollar uh matters a lot, right? Like $6.99 versus $7.99 sounds like just one dollar difference, but when you scale to a million dollars, that's a million dollar difference in your business profit. So being able to master this uh winning triangle between product market and your pricing fit is essentially a good determination of how your uh business is going to success um before you start scaling. So that's just a framework in terms of how the product market and the pricing should be looking at for all the entrepreneurs or early stage of the SMBs to really kind of gauge a sense of where you should be fixing in terms of your growth levels.

SPEAKER_01 5:09

So, how does it feel to this entrepreneur if it's not all working, right? Before we get into figuring out which one is wrong, right? Um are there are there signs that tell them that they don't have their winning triangle put together yet?

SPEAKER_00 5:25

That's a great uh question. So a lot of entrepreneurs or SMBs have been working with is essentially you found some initial traction of your product market fit and your

Signs You Are Not Ready To Scale

SPEAKER_00 5:37

your product is selling off the shelf and then you're getting some initial revenue. So you're aesthetically very excited about that, but then later on you realize that the growth has still, like it's not going, like your product is not going up. And then usually when people do the first immediate reaction is pumping more ads into meta, right? Or Google platforms, and then you're seeing that because each platform also has its best practices, so a lot of blind spots for the entrepreneur is like as long as I start pumping ads, the revenue will come as it is. But then this is where the stage you realize that you are not anticipating the result that you get, even if you spend more money on the platform. So they think the platform is eating up the you know, profit, eating up money, but they're not giving you return. So this is a very clear indicator in terms of you have not found like the audiences that truly love your product before you can scale. So during this time is definitely a good kind of like a taking a step back to really revisit your product market fit in this case by building more customer feedback loop, understand who are the audiences that really loves your product, and if there's any feedback from them to continuously invent your product to really fit the audience needs before you're starting to segment out more of the audiences and understand each of the behaviors. So that's just kind of one example of the product market fit. And then of course, the pricing is another factor, is the so for some other product, for example, taking iPhone as an example. If iPhone is, you know, $1,200, there could be a segment of people that were willing to buy the $1,200 iPhone, but not everyone. But when you increase the price to $2,000, of course, the people are willing to pay that $2,000 for the same iPhone decrease will be like will be decreased significantly. And vice versa, if you decrease the pricing, there will be more people willing to buy. So how to navigate this kind of like balance in between uh the maximum revenue versus the customer segment is another art in terms of your pricing fit to your consumers. So, long story short, to your questions, when you are observing some of the growth sales or like you are doing more things with less of the returns, that's where you should be looking at where the three winning triangle, if there's anything that needs to be fixing.

SPEAKER_01 8:08

How do you quickly diagnose which one is broken? How do you know that it's pricing and not the product market fix, right? Or fit, because maybe it's just again, like you were talking about that iPhone, right? The willingness to pay is lower than what you were pricing it at. It's not that people don't want it, it's that they don't want it at that price.

SPEAKER_00 8:29

Their willingness to pay is lower. I love it. That's a great question. Um, I can answer this in 500 different ways. Um, but then essentially, if it's based on the industry and the verticals

Diagnosing Market Message And Pricing

SPEAKER_00 8:39

that this product is in. If it's a consumer product, it's usually I'm a strong believer of the consumer first approach. So if you want to sell the product to the consumer first, you need to understand who are you selling to, right? So when how we diagnose things is usually based on the product and the growth stage. So for example, if the CPG product, who are the target consumers that you're currently targeting? And is it making sense based on the past behaviors that the consumer has demonstrating? So, for example, if I am targeting um a hand cream, right? So I probably want to target somebody who is more, you know, like have more kind of like love skincare, and then they love to, you know, have extra protection for their hand for like different reasons. So versus uh targeting somebody that would never use a hamkring or like maybe guys, mostly not necessarily saying guys not using hamkring, but just kind of like easy example of who are the target audiences who we should be talking to. At the initial stage when uh the product led grows, we always want to make sure that we have a consumer feedback loop, that we understand consumer behaviors and can continuously get feedback from our consumers to re-examine if those are who are target consumers or are they the right consumers that will actually pay for our products when they're ready? So um that will be the first way of examining if your product is selling to the right audiences. And then once you understand the potential way, so let's say if you confirm this is the right audience you want to target to, is your message the one, the right message that will trigger their action? So there will be like more um ways to understand different ways of A-B testing to understand if this is the right message that would trigger your consumer's action. So there's a different system we were starting building up based off once we come from this consumers, what are the activation strategies? And um, I'm a strong believer of A B testing as well, to continuously getting that winning humble of like message, creative audience strategy. So uh long story short, so those are different ways to kind of exam like how which in which part of funnel does this fall apart and should we fix it?

SPEAKER_01 11:04

Yeah, I think I like how you have the systematic approach, right? Because it does come down to the product, does it solve a problem for your market, right? And then is it at the right price that they're willing to pay? And it's that simple, right? But it's also that complicated. And I think that it's important to note that yes, it sounds easy, but these are basics that a lot of people skip over because they're so passionate about what they do. And I think that it's that it's great that you break it down this way. So one of the things that you talked about was growing with meta-ads and Google AdWords and and them not necessarily bringing in everything that the founder or the SMB, the small medium-sized business thought it was going to be bringing in, and they're sort of throwing good money after bad. What are the first three things that you check? Is it the creative, is it the audience, is it the offer, the funnel? Like what are you recommending people check? And what is what do you believe is the right cadence to be testing and experimenting and and working to get growth here?

SPEAKER_00 12:20

Yeah, great question. So to your to your

Why Meta Ads Fail For Founders

SPEAKER_00 12:23

question, I would say, like, first of all, you you would need to check a lot of things, right? So when you're at campaign, it's not performing. First thing first, I would check, you know, past campaign performance to see how is the CTR looking, like how is how much are we spending and how much conversion it's generating based on those spending? And how does the CAG look like? And then who are the target audiences we are actually targeting? And then more of that, how are the creatives performing? So are they aligning on the best practices of a meta platform? So all of the things are the things we need to check based on the past campaign performance and then identify what are the things that look unusual. Um, this will be based on the kind of like the experience of running meta campaigns, right? So you wouldn't be able to just tell right off the bat if you don't have experience running different campaigns at the same all the different campaign patents. So I would say working with a senior marketer or somebody has been in this playing this game for a while would definitely help you supercharge it and they find the blind spot much faster than just kind of trying to do everything your own. Um, but long story short, is um first is definitely looking at campaign performance, see wherever is off. And then at this stage of the game, usually Meta is the platform, basically the content is the key. Attention is the key on this platform. It's the scrolling behavior has so severe, everybody on average spend less than one second in one creative, right? So how do you really catch attention within the first second? Is usually the key driver of stop stopping the scrolling behavior is how you win at the first place. So usually from creative perspective, usually you have a very strong hook, either by sound or either by you know some sort of sentence to catch people's attention within the first two, three seconds, uh, is it the first winning card you should be playing? And the second is when the attention span is so short, how do you continuously create the engaging storyline and then really driving, maintain um audiences' attention throughout this 15 or 30 second spots? And then one finally with a very strong call to action to make sure people actually click on the buttons or driving take actions based on what you need to. So a lot of the blind spot of the entrepreneur is they think they just put a creative out, then meta will serve the creative to somebody and someone will cover. But this

Creative Hooks That Stop The Scroll

SPEAKER_00 14:52

is not the case because if the creative is not produced at the level that was stop scrolling or attain people's attention, nobody's gonna take action, right? If they they don't stop at the first place. So being able to align with the best practices of meta to make sure you have a very strong hook within the first two to three seconds, not four, not eight, um, but first two to three seconds is very critical. And then also having you know sound environments that's you know driving attention with the captions, with all the different things that can continue to enhance that this viewing behavior is also something that's really important uh when considered producing that. And the second is definitely let the market response tell you what is right versus your intuition, right? So being able to create this A-B testing based on your audience segments is another winning cards I would recommend people to play is to create three to five iterations of the creatives and let it run its own against your target audiences to see whichever performs the best, right? So usually you will be able to see um very quick responses within a couple of days, right? So uh for one of my clients before I working with her, her CTR is about 2%. But once I start into reshuffling and creating new stories, her CTR increased 5x to 10%, right? So I would say that there are certain benchmarks in terms of um kind of like the fast metrics to tell if your creative hitting versus NAR is to looking at the view rates and also clip-through rates, right? So if people don't even click on your ads, you'll probably know the reason why. And then by structuring a where thoughtful, thought through A B testing strategies, you will be able to know like this creative ABC performs well with my audiences versus D and E are not really performing. So this is a good way to start optimizing based on the best performance and in-market responses from your audiences to know what should be the one directions or even hooks that you've been hitting. Um, and then once you master that, then I will look at the whole funnel of you know, from generating attention, clicks to conversion, right? So sometimes the ads, even they when they start to generate more attention, people are clicking through, but they are not converting. So there will be other problems to diagnose in terms of the full funnel perspective. So it could be something on your page or your website, and then so continuous doing A B testing

A B Testing Across The Funnel

SPEAKER_00 17:32

on your landing pages on your funnel could be the fastest and the most solid way of understanding consumer behaviors per the e-market responses. So uh simpler put, just constructing different A B testing throughout different stages of the funnel to continuous diagnose what is right and what is wrong.

SPEAKER_01 17:53

I love how detailed you got in about all the different things that could go wrong, right? Because this isn't about boosting a post, right? I always tell clients, like, don't boost a post unless like there's a real reason for it. But for the most part, it's like, no, you need to create an ad. And there's a lot that goes into it. It's not just posting a picture, a headline, and some content, right? I mean, it's the whole journey for that prospect. Is it stopping the scroll, like you said, right? Is there a hook? Is it getting them to read more and look and then click? And then once they do click, are they converting, right? Is are they taking the actions on your landing page or um taking the actions in the emails that you send them to follow up with after whatever it is? I mean, there's just so much that goes on, right?

SPEAKER_00 18:47

That it's so hard. Like you mentioned, even boosting, I would definitely not recommending that's going to be the best way of doing things, right? Because organic and paint media have completely two different playbooks, right? So from paint media perspective, we recommending meta ads to be around 15 to 30 seconds because our average review time is six to eight seconds, right? So anything beyond that, nobody's actually watching that. So you're producing the ads that are not, nobody's watching it. So essentially being I would encourage the entrepreneurs to be like smarter

Paid Ads Versus Organic Growth

SPEAKER_00 19:23

about the resources that you're actually spending by knowing the platform best practices. So if the meta average view time is less than one second, the video watch time is like six to eight seconds. That essentially you want to control your pay as within thirty uh 15 seconds and normal, no more than 30 seconds, right? So, and then within that 15 seconds, you also need to make sure you have a very strong hook in the beginning to make sure that people stop scrolling, something that's interesting to catch their attention so they can have patience to continuously watching the rest of the video and get the message you want to say, and then also say one thing at a time. A lot of times, like entrepreneurs they want to be, I'm on sale this time, you need to buy my product because XYZ and all the different things to pack within that video. That's definitely another the fastest way for you to fail on your ads because nobody will remember what actually being said in that time. So essentially waste your money, waste your impressions. Those are just a couple things to put it out there. Uh, that noticeably a lot of blind spots for entrepreneurs or you know, uh SMBs in terms of how they run meta ads. And then secondly, from organic perspective, um, I will still continue posting on organic perspective, but in order to go viral on organic, which is a completely different game, right? So not every viral creator is doing the same way of what the ads is doing, right? So viral creators, they they have a you know catching storyline, they're talking about specific things that is generating people's attention, and then they they forward that. So it I have a lot of creator friends in terms of how do they go viral? They have to cycle analyzing every single thing they they post, they have to have a different viral format, and then within each viral format, creating different content to post in every day until they hit right. So like it's just another different playbook in terms of a driving organic viability versus your ads. So um just to kind of laying out there and knowing that a lot of things are not as simple as people would imagine. So again, definitely work with someone, um, you know, like and you can do everything yourself, work with your team that, or work with somebody that's well versed into what the best practices would be, it would definitely help you supercharge and shorten your kind of like, you know, learning path along the way.

SPEAKER_01 21:49

Meta's made it really easy to purchase ads, to do ads, to boost posts and all the things. And if it's super easy for you, then it's probably not leveraging everything it's supposed to be. So um, at least that's usually what I find, right? Because we spend hours and hours and hours and hours learning and keeping up with all of the changes and how it is and how people are changing. Like it used to be that, you know, Meta was recommending videos over five minutes because people were engaging with video content long. Now you're looking at ads and you're talking 15 seconds, right? Because they're watching for six. Um, so things change over time, and what worked doesn't always continue to work. And I think that there's there's a lot there. So that's awesome. Well, thank you so much. I love the winning triangle, the product, the market, and the pricing or offer, and then a little bit into the insight on meta ads, right? Because I know that a lot of people are using those, including myself. And it's not magic, right? There's a lot that goes into that. But before I let you go, I do have to ask you the question that I ask all of my guests. And that is that this show is called Imperfect Marketing. Marketing is anything but a perfect science. What has been your biggest marketing lesson learned along the way?

SPEAKER_00 23:15

Yeah, that's a great question. I would say my biggest learning from marketing is your intuition is not everything, right? So a lot of times marketers are very kind of subjective in the way of thinking like, oh, this is something that I want to do with a more data-driven approach. So even though

Biggest Lesson Art Meets Data

SPEAKER_00 23:34

marketing sounds like an art, but it's actually a balance of the art and science. So always taking consumer first and a data first approach to continuous validate your theory. I think that's the biggest lesson, one of the biggest lessons I learned along the way.

SPEAKER_01 23:49

Oh, I love that. Yes, I love the part art, part science. That's part of it, it's imperfection, right? Is the the art piece of it. But yeah, data is important. Data is extremely important. Information about your target audience is so important. I mean, it's part of your winning triangle, right? It's it's really what you need to know to be able to scale and grow. And I think that that is so helpful. Well, thank you so much, Kathy, for all of your time. I appreciate it. I know I learned some things, and I hope that all of you listening and watching did too. If you did learn something, it would really help me out if you would rate and subscribe wherever you're listening or watching. Until next time, have a great rest of your day.