Facebook Advertising is an incredibly powerful tool.
If you are reading this I assume it’s because either you are already aware of that, or the headline caught you’re attention and now you are a little curious.
Either way, great!
For the record, I’m James and I’m a direct response marketer and copywriter based in Sydney.
In the last 12 months, I have invested LOTS of resources into Facebook Advertising.
By that, I mean time and money. Unfortunately at the start, it cost me a lot of both.
But here’s the thing:
I’m not only going to share with you what I’ve learnt below, but I’m also going to reveal to you how I generated $70,000 of enquiries in 48 hours by spending only $90.
Now I want to start by addressing one thing – YES – its enquiries.
So far this has led to $10,000 in sales with the remaining leads still to be followed up as the product has a longer than average buying cycle – and – the campaign was run 11 days ago. So stand by for an update!
Now, let me begin with my story on Facebook Advertising.
Initially, I started using Facebook a few years ago when it became the hot go-to advertising method for marketers and small business owners.
Naturally, like most things, I had to adjust to the learning curve.
As most experts will tell you, Facebook is the most advanced and precise advertising targeting platform ever.
And this is why we love it!
I started out testing and running a variety of campaigns.
This included campaigns for likes, promoted posts as well as ads to generate leads. I was initially struggling to get any sort of decent ROI and couldn’t understand the hype of the platform and the success that so many of my peers seemed to be getting.
After studying and testing the Facebook ad platform for a long time, I finally mastered the process of generating leads and turning them into customers. Not long after this, I managed to find myself in a very interesting predicament.
And this is where the story REALLY begins:
Just to back track for a second, my mother owns a dance school in Canberra – and has done for the past 10 years.
Without trying to bore you, jazz and ballet dancers actually dance on a very specific vinyl floor covering that is actually incredibly expensive in Australia. This vinyl flooring is unaffordable for most small dance school owners like my mother, who still want the best dance floors for their dancers and students.
And it just so happens that before I really got into Marketing, I ran a business in Sydney that imported different apparel and merchandise from China.
When my mother came to me complaining about the situation with her expensive flooring, I took a sample of what she needed to China with me on one of my trips, and through a business contact I had there, I was able to go to the factory that supplied the Beijing Olympics Gymnasium & Weightlifting Floors and get them to produce me a dance floor of the same standard, for a much lower price.
You may be wondering why I’m telling you all of this? Just hang with me, I promise it’ll be worth it.
Once the floor was installed in my mothers’ studio, she got all of her experienced dancing friends and students to check it out.
The decision was unanimous.
The floor was fantastic, and the price was too good to be true.
It was at this point that I was at a crossroads. I had a product that solved a problem I had been aware existed for the last ten years. Mum had regularly talked about this flooring, but for whatever reason, both my agenda and her own never totally aligned, so we only recently got around to doing this.
What this also told me, that there were other studio owners out there in the same boat, and I needed to test this concept further before I went and invested any more $$$ into it.
Which brings me right back around to the whole subject of this post:
FACEBOOK ADVERTISING
Right away I knew this was the best platform to test out this idea and see if there was a spot in the market for it.
So here’s what I did.
I wanted it to be quick and easy and not detract from the other businesses I was involved in.
had no interest in collecting any details or educating potential prospects at this stage, I purely just wanted to see if there was interest in the market place.
So I wrote a long blog post, very similar to this, explaining the problem, the solution, how I developed it – AND – how you could get in touch with me to get some of the flooring.
Now all I had to do to test this was get my message in front of my audience, perfect for Facebook.
If you are reading this and you have used Facebook ads, or even if you haven’t, here is a tip I have had great success with.
It does depend on the industry and the product, but almost always I will use Promoted Posts over Sponsored Ads on Facebook.
Here’s the difference:
A promoted post has no length limit, so you can fit a lot more valuable content into it. Here is an ad that I wrote for a client in the finance industry.
We tested this offer as both a promoted post and an ad for a webinar that this client was running.
The reason the promoted post gets a higher level of engagement is that there is more information attached to the offer, and it looks like less of an ad than the specific ads do. The ads are limited in the amount of text that can accompany them, which can make it harder to get your offer across in some cases.
Here is the promoted post:
Here is the Sponsored Ad:
Results:
To show some numbers that prove this point, I have compiled the following stats.
Over the life of running these campaigns so far, I have found that for $1 in ad spend, the promoted post reached an audience of 185 whilst the sponsored ad reached only 113 people.
Not only this, but the promoted post got more than 500% more clicks than the Facebook Ad, leading to a lower cost per lead from the promoted post.
Anyway, let me know how you go testing that method, time to move on.
Once I had written the blog post about the dance floor, I knew that a promoted post would be the way to go.
Here is the ad that I ran:
To run this Promoted Post, I had to create a Facebook Page, so I just stuck with the “Ivy League” name to keep things simple.
I posted and ran this ad off a Facebook page with 0 followers, which is also a cool side note.
It just goes to show that if you have a great product and great marketing, anything is possible, and you don’t need a large following to get a great result.
The Ad linked to the blog post, which you can read here.
Targeting:
The market for this flooring is predominately female dance school owners in the ages of 25-55. That being said, I left the age gap open, as I was purely testing to see what the interest was.
With the Targeting that I have demonstrated below, I was able to narrow down an audience of 210,000 women in which my target market would be contained.
So with everything set up, let’s see the results of this campaign.
Firstly, I ran 2 campaigns, one spending $60 and one spending $30. Realistically, I could have spent a lot more and generated a lot more enquiries. But given that this was more successful than I first thought it would be, I have stopped running the ads and am nurturing the leads I currently have. Once I have finalised the initial sales, I will run the ads again.
Campaign #1 – Promoted Post:
With this campaign, I was able to get 170 engagements, a 4% CTR and 9/10 relevance score, which shows that the targeting for the ad accurately fitted the relevant market. $0.35 cost per engagement was significantly lower than the cost per engagement I achieved for the previous campaign I showed above.
Campaign #2 – Sponsored Ad:
As you can see, I didn’t run this for too long as the ad underperformed when compared with the promoted post. I also had different targeting on this ad, running it to a wider audience that was less relevant. To compare it more accurately to the performance of the promoted post, I would have to make the audiences the same. But for now, you can understand the difference between the two.
Sponsored Ad:
At this point you are probably thinking “Cool. But what about the results that actually matter? Leads? Sales?”
From this $90 ad spend alone, I generated 13 sales enquiries valued at over $70,000. As I said above, I have already made some sales and am still in the sales cycle with almost 10 of these.
This campaign was so successful that almost two weeks after I stopped running the ads I was getting emails from interested parties who had heard about the flooring. It certainly was a cool experience.
So let’s break it down, why was this so successful?
In my opinion, it comes down to 3 simple, but core principles.
- Have a Great Product
This is something that I think is majorly overlooked in the marketing field. Whilst the latest marketing strategies are certainly important, a great product marketed poorly will always perform far better than the reverse. The product was simply a great offer at an awesome price that the market wanted.
In all of your offers, regardless of the industry, you should always be looking to give the market what they truly want. Start here and almost all of your marketing campaigns will be a raging success.
- Great Marketing & Copywriting
Whilst a great product that the market wants will always be the most important part of an campaign, the ability to write compelling sales copy and market brilliantly will have a huge factor on the success of the campaign.
If you go and read the whole blog post that I attached above, you will notice that it is written in a slightly controversial tone. This is exactly the vibe I was going for, as I wanted to drum up some controversy and discussion in the industry.
I have spent thousands of dollars and hours studying copywriting. Knowing how to use it will have a huge impact on the outcome of your marketing campaigns. I truly believe that this campaign would not have been nearly as successful without a well written and well marketed promotion strategy.
- The Advertising / Targeting Platform
10 years ago, being able to produce, test and promote this sort of strategy would have been near on impossible for the cost I was able to do it for. Not only that, but ensuring that when you are running these sort of test campaigns that they are on the media / platform that your market is hanging out on is vitally important. By selecting the right targeting as I showed above, I was able to reach my market in a simple, yet cost effective way.
The truth is there are many more details to running these campaigns. I have outlined the most important here so that you will be able to hopefully take some and apply it to your product / service and campaign.
If you would like to learn more about how to run a campaign like this in your business, come along to the Free Marketing Event I am running in Sydney on Thursday, April 30.
At the event, I will be breaking down this campaign in far more detail, as well as going through:
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- The 5 Step Formula To Getting A New Customer In Less Than 60 Minutes Regardless Of The Industry You Are In
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- The Email Marketing Campaign That Revives Dead Leads From Your Email List And Is Responsible For An Email Response Rate Of 25%
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- The #1 Wickedly Effective Skill You Must Master To Explode Your Business Growth
And, to prove this is not just another marketing event full of hype with no real world application, I will be doing something you will rarely ever see live at an event.
And that is:
- Giving One Lucky Attendee A Marketing Makeover Valued At $2,997, Where They Will Get Their Marketing Redone Live At The Event!
That’s right. I put my reputation on the line and show that the methods that I use to grow mine and my clients businesses do actually work.
Live. No gimmicks. Just simple strategies that actually work.
If you are interested in coming along, register here for your free spot. Don’t delay as it is a small room with only 25 seats.