I recently received a question in the Facebook group…
Facebook states that you can’t mention someone’s financial status in your advertising. If I’m marketing to people with IRS tax problems or tax debt problems, how do I get around this? Even if we market a cheat sheet, video or post, we need to mention tax problems. Will that be disallowed?
What you cannot do…
Well, the answer is pretty simple. You don’t specify that you “do have tax problems?” or “do you have this issue?”
This is something that we deal with in personal injury cases as well. For example, in personal injury cases, you cannot say, “Have you been in a car accident?” In ads for family law, you cannot say, “Are you getting divorced?”
What you CAN do
But here’s what you can do: You can talk about people that are getting divorced or people that have been in car accidents. You can also talk about ways that the IRS is taxing people or penalizing people or different things like that.
Don’t mention someone’s financial challenges or their tax problems. Instead of saying, “Do you have tax problems?” you can say, “We help our clients who have tax problems. We tell them how they can stop the IRS calls using three specific strategies,” for example.
We can also advise how anyone who’s getting phone calls from the IRS can use certain strategies to make them stop or to do whatever it is that you’re trying to get them to do. For personal injury cases involving car accidents, we will often say, “Anyone who’s been in a car accident needs to talk to an attorney.”
Finding the right wording to get around Facebook’s rules
This isn’t something you would normally say, but in a Facebook ad, you can say that anyone who has been in a car accident needs to know these three things before talking to the car insurance company.
This means, you don’t necessarily call somebody out, but you can still address it. It’s kind of nitpicky on Facebook’s side, but you can’t make it seem like you’re targeting somebody based on their actual demographics. You can’t say, “Are you getting divorced?” But, you can say, “Everyone who’s getting divorced in Orange County, California, needs to know these three things.”
That’s how you get around Facebook’s rules. It’s pretty simple, and it has the same effect. I don’t find that there’s any kind of drop whatsoever in effectiveness when we are using a strategy like this.
This is a good question because if you’re not careful about how you word your ads, you will have your ads rejected, and if too many ads are not approved, your ad account will get shut down.
