Build empathy with your audience by using Amazon.com for market research

YouTube video description: “You can’t go wrong with Jay Abraham and his copywriting tips here couldn’t be more spot-on. Copywriters are always told to give the people what they need and want and this video shows exactly how to get just that.”

First hand research in the [weight loss] market (Atlanta Georgia, here comes a copywriter!)

In relation to a weight loss award for a new natural hunger suppressant (clinically proven to significantly reduce body fat over extended periods of time… without extra exercise or forced dieting)…

I’ll be in-and-around Atlanta Georgia for the month of September conducting field research to build up an audience profile for the product, yet to be released to the public.

Full details forthcoming…

But in essence, this applies from a product launch / marketing perspective to any mass consumer market.

I’ll be:

• Conducting interviews (recorded on the brilliant new Sony ICD SX 1000 voice recorder)
• Building interviewee profiles to capture their unique ‘strategy’ for losing (gaining or keeping) weight
• Forming personas from the similarities and differences that emerge
• Building empathy maps useable for storyboarding ideal product launch programs

Then:

• Compiling product and competitor insight notes
• Producing a storyboard or copy platform
• Writing direct response copy

And handing over the finished copy to my client.

Key here is that I’m not just doing desk research… certainly not just doing some pie in the sky brainstorming as I know many creative ad agencies allow their art directors and copywriters to do.

No, not me.

As a direct response copywriter I get knee deep in the thick of my clients markets to really understand their fears, frustrations and desires.

Why?

So I can actually SELL clients products in the most effective way possible.

…While adding maximum informational value to the customers within the ads themselves.

…Combining salesmanship with value-adding content to build a responsive customer base.

To find out how to conduct this kind of insight research and how to select a good copywriter, explore the site and download a copy of my whitepaper: The crucial link between your marketing success and your copywriter selection process.

Copywriting Sample – Video Sales Letter Lead – Male Health Supplement

As consulting Lead Copywriter for an ad agency, I needed to improve the response from a Video Sales Letter that the agency had paid a top VSL writer to produce.

It wasn’t converting well and I felt the copy overall was strong but the lead (the introductory attention grabber) seemed to lack empathy with the audience.

I completely replaced the lead section.

Here are results of the split test on the Video Sales Letter version using the old copy against my new copy.

(Coloured screenshots come from the video analytics software showing engagement levels of both variants)

Original lead variant: 25% retention past the lead.

 

My new lead variant: 44% retention past the lead.

This meant the new lead increased engagement by… well, a lot depending on which stat you calculate from. ????

Here’s the copy, slightly modified for use as the long-form transcript of the VSL:

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I was offered this report while searching for something more comprehensive and more reliable, than all the popular health supplements that get bandied about online like candy…

You may know the one’s I mean. Maybe you’ve tried them out yourself…

And sure, I got great results in the past from things like Omega-3, CoQ10, Resveratrol… even Algae Powder.

(my wife got me onto that awful stuff after I started suffering with erection problems hoping it would fix me)

…and I was looking for something all-inclusive… something for complete masculine health… and specially designed for men over 40.

Something that could literally be felt in every area of my body, for all areas of my life.

From ‘Balls-to-Bones’, so to speak…

And after days of searching, a trusted health advisor who I interviewed by phone offered to send me a 30-page report chock-full of his research.

And What I Read Changed My Life Forever

“…multi-billion dollar research by the U.S. Army revives the health of our soldiers for peak performance — at any age!”

Dr. Dan Johnson of The Comprehensive Fitness Program of The U.S. Army announced: “The U.S. Military has a strong interest in the potential health benefits of this formula”

“…Restores your ability to carry out complex tasks, both physically and mentally, allowing you to function in all areas of your life with peak performance.”

“What the Army calls Executive Function”

Believe it or not, that was just one of the tips I learned.

The Report Covered Everything I Feared About Aging

I felt like I’d struck oil!

And my wife’s expression was priceless after my bedroom performance just a matter of weeks later.

It all begins with shocking insight about:

[the original script continued from here]

The Causes Of Decline For Civilian Men Age 40 And Over

Video Sales Letter (VSL) Copywriter

In this article:

• My first Video Sales Letter
• Video Conversion Funnels
• Video Sales Letter Length
• Video Engagement
• Video Sales Letter Copywriting
• Multi-Part VSL Launch Sequence

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My first Video Sales Letter…

Converting at a huge 8% back in 2008 it was about 12 minutes long and sold an info product on ‘how to get organized’.

You can watch the entire thing if you’d like, right here:

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 VSL Conversion Funnels

The most successful VSLs I’ve been involved with or know about are very simple in appearance, on a very plain webpage, typically with no navigation on the page.

However, sending traffic straight to that VSL page may give you a lower conversion rate than if you send them initially to what’s known as a pre-sell page.

A pre-sell is an article that positions the video to help ensure the visitor has anticipation for the value they are going to receive by watching the video. This often involves highlighting pain points around the topic, such as health problems, or lack of success in the relevant area of life that an information product relates to, such as relationship problems.

‘Top 5 Reasons Why Men Pull Away During Early Stage Relationships”

“5 Causes Of Weight Gain That You Can Avoid Starting Today”

These headline examples suggest the person learning a solution to a problem that is causing them pain.

The pre-sell article then links in multiple places over to the video.

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Video Sales Letter Length

Over the past few years the length of VSLs has stretched to 45 minutes or more, particularly for consumer products including information products and health supplements. My approach with VSL length is to consider:

• The placement of the video (whether it accompanies a full sales later or is part of a piecemeal launch sequence),
• The sophistication of the market (is it a commodity product in a sea of competition or something unique and special) and
• Desire of the audience for that particular type of product when they land on the page (why go into extensive background detail and personal story building credibility and riling up their emotions if they are already super keen to buy a product of that type).

Case in point:

The 12 minute VSL for the ‘get organized’ product above. Back in 2008 there was less competition for such information, and my traffic came from people who had searched for terms like ‘how to get organized’. So the product was desired and competition was low. The price difference compared to the alternative of hiring a professional organizer was clear, reasonable and compelling. So 12 minutes was plenty of time to make the sales presentation to a relatively low buyer resistance.

However, if the product is new and unfamiliar with a potentially high perceived price, a full length VSL will generally help maximize sales to the widest possible market.

Here is the introduction script for a full length VSL I wrote promoting an innovative training system for American Football Quarterbacks. If you are familiar with the QB position, you will see how well this matches the dreams and frustrations of a QB, ensuring that they’ll stick around for the rest of the VSL.

(click to open the script)

But how do we maintain engagement through a full 45 minutes..?

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 VSL Engagement

It’s generally true that ‘the more you tell the more you sell’.

So… as long as the sales copy is RELEVANT to the audience, then providing you can make it sufficiently entertaining andfast flowing, the VSL can be ‘long’ (45+ minutes) and you’ll hold the attention of your audience and thus maximise conversions.

8% is a very high conversion rate. You may be looking for 2% to make a Video Sales Letter a big success and very profitable. Think about it. That’s just 2 to 8 people out of every 100. So you don’t need ‘everyone’ to want to watch a long VSL. Just a relative few.

The trick to keeping those few engaged is to craft a compelling message.

Here’s an example of an introduction to a full length VSL I wrote for the weight loss market (a massively sophisticated market given the history and level of competition). In this introduction I am to grab viewers attention by immediately calling out the ‘fads’ being marketed in the industry at the time, thereby differentiating this video and increasing engagement.

I’ll get into that a little lower down, but first we need to touch on…

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Video Sales Letter Copywriting

So how do I do it?

My process involves [with more detail coming soon]:

• Gathering Insight – Take a detailed brief from the client to understand the product and the audience (including where the traffic will be coming from). Watch competition VSLs for related product.
• Developing a persona or avatar (an ideal customer description) including their major pain points as relates to the product and then write a bunch of potential positioning statements, headlines, and bullet points that speak to the audiences major pains with the promise of the product as a solution to their problem(s)
• Writing a number of possible creative connections between the product features, the product background (how it came to be), the pain points (this is a copywriters secret sauce)
• Using a series of best practice points from a template I have pieced together over the years to help ensure I hit all relevant selling points throughout the script
• Leaving it for a day or so and then starting a ruthless editing process of removing sections that are clunky, boring, confusing, or lack credibility. All the while strengthening what remains by making it conversational, succinct and emotionally gripping

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Multi-Part VSL Launch Sequence

A very significant approach to the use of a VSL is to break it down into sections and deliver them throughout a gated sales funnel. The gates may be actions the visitor must take, such as opting in by email to gain access to another segment of the video, or gated by time, as in a drip-campaign via email.

Here’s the homepage video (just 2 minutes in length) to introduce a relationship advice membership program:

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Hiring A VSL Writer

A VSL Copywriter charges anywhere from ~$3,000 to ~$25,000 for a full VSL script plus royalties.

In a VSL split-test with a $25k copywriter’s original intro against a new intro that I wrote, my version increased engagement by 3 times. But don’t worry, I won’t charge you 3 times his fee ????

You can see the new copy here plus the split test result. And see below for details on hiring me as your next VSL writer.

Strategic phases for product launches (Q&A)

Q1. The emails were originally designed for an evergreen product. Once-off launches are so tedious and takes so much energy and then its difficult to relaunch soon after. What’s your take?

An evergreen launch is only possible once the funnel is optimized for conversions of established traffic sources. You’re not at the stage to be thinking evergreen yet until you validate with cold traffic and make all of the necessary adjustments. Like I said, I believe properly scripted launch videos are needed for cold traffic campaigns to maximize conversions. Launches are not easy projects and need a big commitment.

Q2. The price of $495 dollars – its pricey in South African terms or I suppose hits the spot with ALL the bonuses im offering. I was thinking that Im probably selling myself (and you) short. Should I not do it at $995 and offer a 20% coupon if they buy today in a time frame? My auto resonder allows for this? I know empirically coupons work in some cases but apparently – “the cart is closing” works better. But can I use both? Or am I complicating issues? Just need you input on a. scarcity offer if evergreen, b. scarcity offer if once off launch? I suppose test and measure works but need to take a stance on this one. Whats your view?

If $495 is pricey they $900 would be doubly pricey. Bottom line from strategic marketing there’s no shortage of traffic online once you get a converting funnel, so pricing strategy for a new launch should focus on getting the most amount of sales while tracking the conversion rates throughout the funnel. That allows you to identify the weakest links in the change with more data in your analytics report. Then you can test price points with additional traffic campaigns to maximize EPC (earnings per click), or ‘ROI’. Yes you could do a 20% or 45% coupon discount. The video sales letter should show the price reduction from say $10,000 down to $2,000 down to the real price.

Launches need scarcity. In this case you can simply provide all customers with full access so you don’t need to worry about bonus fulfillment. Just send everyone an email saying ‘to heck with it I’m giving you everything’. The reason for building scarcity in the launch is to push them over the edge so you make the sales. But you can still give them all the bonuses if you want to.

Q3. Affiliates. My system easily allows for tracking and a portal and it would be a great way to boost emails. I guess I can approach one or two but maybe is should attempt an internal launch first. All this uncertainty drives me nuts

Yes the uncertainty with launches is solved by the phased launch approach. First do a real internal launch, which means no autoresponder email sequences, it’s a conversation with your list to add value and build anticipation. Second is to then do a cold traffic launch to validate conversions on cold traffic. Third launch can then be a JV launch given that you now have a proven conversion funnel.

Good luck with the first internal test launch.

Key To Maximum Influence Through Content Marketing and/or Coaching

‘Emotive Compulsion’

Your customers inner-drive to make a change, to try something new… built on a bed of motivations including background beliefs, future desires, and current frustration.

THESE are the reasons why customers buy new products… or coaching clients try new approaches to life.

In marketing just as in coaching:

We know the basis of choice is a balancing act between the risk-reward-cost ratio of change.

But how do we best influence thought and emotion most effectively at the same time to wield maximum influence on our audience or facilitate exponential change in coaching/consulting client results.

Maria Veloso describes the key as the ‘trifecta neuro-affective principle’.

A giddy phrase that simply means that stimulating emotions can alter the pattern of thoughts that a person, a customer or a client experiences; thereby influencing their behavior.

The mind is pliable after all.

We CAN turn a lost sale into giant lifetime customer value.

We CAN revolutionize our behavioral habits in ways that massively support our outward success and our inner sense of empowerment and fulfillment.

We just have to get the engagement sequence right. We need a narrative that reaches a psychological core.

You may call it ‘the brand story’ as marketers do, or the ‘hero’s journey’ as I do in Depth Coaching.

For marketing, Maria translates this to a 5 step buyer process that can be applied to campaigns:

1. What’s the problem?
2. Why hasn’t the problem been solved?
3. What is possible?
4. What’s different now?
5. What should you do now?

It reminds me of Gene Schwartz stunning classic Breakthrough Advertizing where he explains the powerful concept of ‘market sophistication’ in comparing the ‘naive consumer’ and the ‘educated consumer’ (see 5 Degrees of Consumer Sophistication)

Advertizing to the Educated Consumer

Today’s educated consumer is compelled by demonstration, evidence, and insight into the mechanism of how and why your product or service can reliably solve their problem and lead them to fulfillment.

Whether it be a takeaway, a car, or a new life direction.

Tesla uses emotive triggers such as ‘bioweapon defence mode’ to describe its state-of-the-art air filtration system, while demonstrating the thickness of the filter and other details that prove the quality of the mechanism. This is good advertising. No, this is GREAT advertising.

Maria Veloso reveals 3 triggers of the trifecta neuro-affective principle as Identification, Redefinition and Resistance.

This applies in marketing just as it does in my coaching practice.

First I must find the narrative that my coaching client identifies with.

Then we begin to redefine their outward experience via changing their internal focus.

And yes, we come into various forms of resistance, from the ‘dragons’ that stand before each client on the journey oftransformation.

The mind wants to grow, to learn anew, to adapt and create and contribute.

By combining emotive narrative along with credible logic, we can literally change the neurological processes of the mind to:

• produce entirely new life results through coaching, or
• win and retain customer-fans through empathic customer-oriented content marketing.

For Example

As one demonstrative example of the trifecta neuro-affective principle of emotive logic, check out my article The Key To Authentic Intimacy published by Elephant Journal which had 10k+ views in 2 days earning it a promotion onto their homepage. (current view count will show at the bottom of the article near my bio).

This beat out other articles published the same day in the ‘love’ category which had 156 views, 543 views, and so on.

This is the power of crafting a compelling emotive message, that interweaves solid logical principles with emotional dreams, hopes and desires.

And that’s how to achieve maximum influence in content marketing or in coaching.

6-Part Kickstarter Marketing Strategy (100% Fail-Proof)

Here’s the 6-part fail-proof strategic outline for kickstarter marketing. If you are in the market for kickstarter campaign management or marketing services, let me know as I’m fully immersed in the details.

These notes are drawn from best-practice as taught in various courses that I’ve taken along with my own 15-years experience in web marketing.

1. Preparation

• Brainstorm the big picture (in line with this outline)
• Build your core team (designer, developer, marketing jedi, PR or social media wizz, spokesperson(s)
• Set a launch schedule (based on the outline below)

2. Research

• What similar product campaigns have been successful and unsuccessful. How can we understand why they worked or didn’t. Speak to the team involved to get the inside scoop.
• What influencer community is there related to the product area? Use BuzzSumo, EpicBeat and so on to find Influencers (including popular related blogs and bloggers, product advocates with large social following, journalists / media people, celebrities related to your product area who may endorse the product, and so on)

3. Design & Development

• Video is one area for crowdfunding campaigns that should not be done off-the-cuff. It needs to be fully storyboarded — taking the viewer on a compelling journey in ~3 minutes. What gap in people’s life does your product fill? Demonstrate that experience!
• Product images: again, tell the story; show prototyping, let funders experience the backstory, and feel like they’re part of the innovations involved.

4. Conversion

Incentives

• Incentives should seem generous but not consume must of the funding. Anything of nostalgic value to the target audience can be good.
• Higher donation incentives should of course receive the product itself once produced, and even special local events.
• If you’re launching equipment of some sort that has social benefits, consider offering a US-wide tour to each major city over the coming 12 months with free entry to the highest backers. This lends itself to ongoing marketing opportunities post-launch.
• If the item is not particularly ‘social, incentives could include live online Google Hangouts or teleconference calls for community sharing, presentation, training, coaching, etc.

Copy

• Make sure you have a copywriter to do your launch copy, including funding page itself, press releases, outreach email campaigns, social media updates, launch blog updates, etc. Funders/advocates will not support a campaign if the copy is not highly persuasive and engaging. If you’re not a designer you would never think of designing the logo yourself. Well, copy is far more important than the logo!
• Storyboard your entire launch process. Reveal the ups and downs. Identify your key customer profiles (personas or Avatars) and speak to their specific interests.

Updates

• Offer updates via different popular channels as per your target audience, typically including: email, blog, Facebook, Twitter, possibly Pinterest, LinkedIn, and so on.
• The more you share the higher the engagement. Share the story of the product and the launch, don’t just share ‘features and benefits’ of the product. That’s boring.
• Have a schedule. Know the best times to post social media content based on engagement analytics.

5. Traffic

Now we come down to the crunch.

• Have an influencer outreach program. Begin it as soon as possible. As in, right now! (or as soon as you have some decent copy to introduce the campaign). Buzzstream is perfect for managing influencer communications.
• Start with small fish, illicit their verbal support to share your campaign progress with their audience. Then leverage that exposure through the food chain up to the big fish (whichever popular blogs/news sites are relevant to your product category) such a TechCrunch, Huffington Post, etc.
• Use a launch sequence of updates that builds interest and anticipation. Make it fun. Including ‘shareable journeys’, i.e. make it about people (experience) not products.
• Involve your audience in decisions or surveys where possible. Let them choose or vote on aspects of product/packaging design or even vote on their favorite messaging/graphics/product photos. (Social marketing is about personality and conversation, not about slick anonymous branding. Show your humanity, share the journey, involve your audience.)
• One counterintuitive source of traffic is from your wallet-share competitor communities. If you are promoting an innovative fun scooter for example, give it to skateboarders and snowboarders to try. Capture their impression on video. Publish the best and share it with their respective established communities. This can greatly increase the reachable and receptive audience.
• Agree with media publishers on the days they will receive and publish your press releases or story updates. Be everywhere and watch Facebook newsfeeds flood with your content for leveraged social sharing.

6. Performance

• Make sure you have verbal commitment for a quarter of your funding goal BEFORE you actually start the funding countdown (typically 30 days). As soon as you launch, announce and prey you’ve done the necessary work to actually receive those donation commitments within the first couple days. That provides huge leverage to extend the campaign for greater exposure and bring in the remaining 75% funding goal over the remaining 28 days!
• Use analytical tools such as hotjar.com on your company blog to measure real human engagement. See how far down your blog update pages they actually read, etc.
• Add email opt-in features as per current best-practice (content upgrades, scroll mats, etc) split test them, and monitor the opt-in rates
• Monitor email campaign open-rates, click-rates, and site re-engagement (use Active Campaign for email marketing, marketing automation, it gives full visibility of what your visitors do on your site)

Happy Endings

There’s a ton more nuance in my Evernote ????

Unfortunately for me, my Kickstarter Project in 2014 got cancelled due to investor withdrawal from the business entirely.

My campaign was going to be for a hardcover book by an ex-high fashion super model now in her 80s! with tips on longevity and beauty care.

So my kick-ass Kickstarter marketing plan has collected dust since then… (sniffle, sniffle)…

…only now being revived for a crowdfunding campaign now in planning on behalf of the consortium of life / dating / relationship coaches involved with www.onintimacy.com (my role includes Chief Curator, Marketing Lead and Podcast interviewer).

I’m excited to gear up for this kickstarter launch (finally) and may be able to support your kickstarter funding campaign at this time, given the high-degree of cross-over from one campaign to another. As a direct response copywriter and strategic marketer I have the right mix of experience and talent for small teams to succeed at crowdfunding.

Get in touch today about your dream campaign and I’ll be happy to brainstorm ideas with you to put a clear proposal together.

3 Email Copywriting Principles Of An Email Marketing Pro

With these 3 components, you can more fully optimize email marketing for long-term success without eroding your subscriber base.

1. Relevance
2. Cliff-hangers
3. Automation

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Email Relevance

Try selling pink crocodile handbags to a male nature conservationist and he’ll drop you like a lead weight in a swimming pool.

…but promote your handbag as a Western fashion-icon to high-fashion female chuppies (Chines young urban professionals) in Shanghai and even if they don’t buy, they’ll keenly stay subscribed to your list.

Put another way…

Our first step in crafting winning email copy is to identify the most relevant copy-platform based on the target audience and product.

We need to pinpoint your audiences biggest emotional need (as relevant to the product) and thereby identify the biggest appeal we can use to get and keep his or her attention.

Your subscribers will forgive receiving a lot of email from you as long as they perceive your email topics as relevant to their needs and interests.

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Email Cliff-Hangers

Relevance alone is far from sufficient…

Bland straight-benefit copy does not maintain readership in email over time. If your emails become predictable (10% discount off said pink handbag), they’ll soon stop reading, even if they stay subscribed.

We need to make use of story, anecdotes, relatable news items, and so on, to fully captivate the reader so they are entertained even if they’re not yet ready to buy.

In a series of emails or an extended campaign, each email can help build anticipation for subsequent email, by tying in with previous email and alluding to what’s coming next, so tension, anticipation and curiosity is built up like a soap opera TV show.

(if you ever watched the series called ’24’ you’ll know EXACTLY what I mean).

 

Your subscribers then emotionally bond with your brand and ‘need to know what’s going to happen next’. They develop such an emotional response of excitement as soon as they see email from you that they’ll open it even before they read email from their own dear Grandmother.

And yes, the same principles apply in both B2C and B2B. We’re all human. Although the emotional triggers of people in terms of personal life vs professional life are often different.

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Email Automation

One of the best methods of maintaining relevance through the use of targeted cliff-hangers, story and updates, is through behavioural based automation.

As Head of Marketing for an Email Service Provider in 2008/9 (DBGi as per my LinkedIn profile), I saw literally hundreds of email campaigns produced and tracked, including data-driven segmentation, with creative cells selected based on the individual contacts profile.

Then InfusionSoft, Sales Genius, MailChimp and other small-to-large business email service providers included various automation elements…

Despite being clunky in some ways they provide email marketers with a means of becoming more relevant as well as timely through segmented automation.

At present I’m working on behavioural triggered automation using the Active Campaign platform  (which I absolutely love) with multiple workflows throughout the customer nurture process, from initial opt-in through to sale and on to customer retention and growth.

Besides evergreen automation workflows, the very best approach is to have email campaigns tied in with relevant current events sent ad hoc when the opportunity arises.

For both ad hoc campaign email copy and evergreen automation series copy, you’ll find a number of email copy samples via my copywriting portfolio page.

What is Marketing Funnel Automation? – and How Can I Conquire it?!

In its simplest form, Marketing Automation is when a visitor requests information and receives it automatically by email.

Today, visitors request can lead into behavior-triggered email follow-up and off-site ad re-targeting that delivers specific content based on the visitors exact behavior (i.e. which pages he visited revealing both his interests and stage of the buying process).

Example Automation Workflows

This small piece of an automation workflow gives a glimpse into the possibilities with automation.

Or how about this more detailed example showing a number of conditional triggers in part of an automation workflow:

 

At first glance that may seem utterly confusing.

Yet, Marketing Funnel Automation is now vital to compete with the degree of personalization and the varied campaign approaches used by large businesses and increasingly by SMEs.

If you’ve previously been scared off by high fees for Marketing Automation projects you’ll be pleasantly surprised by what ITVibe can offer for optimizing contact frequency and message relevance for a better customer experience that brings the greatest ROI.

Here’s a basic customer journey example:

1. Mary sees one of your ads and lands on your ecommerce page for handbags but does not buy.
2. Later that day she accesses her Facebook account and low-and-behold sees a nice photo of several gorgeous handbags similar to the one she was looking at earlier.
3. The advert gives her a compelling reason to click and she visits your page a 2nd time (at a cost to you of just a few cents).
4. She sees an offer for interesting information about your handbag selection and decides to opt-in with her email address.
5. This begins an automated process of nurture and offer emails that are scheduled based on whether she actually opens the emails, clicks particular and browses specific pages of the site.
6. If she adds a handbag to the cart by way of ‘window shopping’, we can then automatically send her information about that particular handbag, nurturing her trust in the brand, keeping front-of-mind, and helping to close the sale.

It’s amazing what can be done with Automation

Marketing Automation acts as a filter for multiple conversion funnels that converge and diverge into various segmentations based on each contacts behavior.

Sometimes customers just need a gentle reminder or two before they buy, along with a little extra information that endears them to your brand, and overcomes their hesitation to buy from you.

But delivering that ‘little extra info’ at the right time is a science and art.

Marketing Automation provides the tools to make that happen completely hands-free once we’ve set it all up. And it doesn’t have to be a major project to get things started and see a clear and positive ROI.

41.94% Result Rate for Pennies using Video Ads on Facebook!

Normally I can’t share fresh campaign data due to client NDAs — however, in this case I’m partners in a project and showing you our metrics is fair game!

So here’s a demonstration of how you can use micro-budget campaigns to test new marketing concepts before rolling out into broader ad spend…

The Channel of Choice

One of the most powerful methods for testing new campaign ideas, creative concepts, headlines and audience demographics is through the Facebook Advertising platform.

See the screenshot below showing results for 7 video adverts run for just a few days.

The goal is to determine the best cost/engagement ratio for video views. The column most noteworthy is for ‘Relevancy’ on the far right showing the numbers, 6, 7, 8.

Relevancy is Facebooks assessment of how engaging each advert is for the targeted audience out of a maximum possible score of 10.

Facebook’s algorithm calculates the Relevancy Score once an advert has received 500 impressions, or ‘Reach’.

This means we can run simultaneous test ads with 500 impressions each to gauge how well the ad would perform on a larger budget to the same audience profile.

Cherry-Pick The Sweetspot Of Your Audience

If you’re unfamiliar with how granular Facebook audience targeting can be, here’s an example:

That’s 150k women age 40-50 living in one of those 5 major US cities who are interested in dating and also interested in romance novels…

Keeping It Relevant Reduces Ad Costs

Achieving a high relevancy score also means that Facebook will, over time, charge you less per view or click as they reward you with lower ad costs the more you support a positive user experience for Facebook members. Think about it.

Keep It Simple

I didn’t run all 7 ads at once. That would be overkill. Best to test 2 or 3 concepts at a time and then refine and advance based on results.

The first adverts I ran hit a 6 and a 7 for Relevancy. That gave me direction for the next mini-test (each taking less than a day to run) and so I hit another 6 plus two 8’s.

The next test will focus on the similarities and differences between those adverts to help identify new ideas to test and increase the Relevancy score as much as possible for this particular campaign and audience.

How well does this correlate with click-through rate?

Just 0.5% CTR on one of the original concepts with a massive increase hitting 4% CTR for the best performing ad.

I’m not saying you need to get a Relevancy Score of 8 or that you’ll then see a 4% average CTR. Just that the correlation of Relevancy with CTR is demonstrably evident. My goal for this campaign is Relevance Score 9 with 8% CTR.

Such metrics are always useful for presenting to budget approvers, in team meetings and end of month results meetings. Especially when you show highly cost-efficient due diligence of innovative new marketing concepts to build support for bigger budget approvals.

In this way we can validate ideas for new marketing campaigns. And while it’s still early days on this particular campaign, it’s gratifying to see CTR go up 706% within just a few days, 2 test iterations and pocket change.

Facebook Is The Perfect Channel For Testing

Below includes a column for ‘Result Rate’ which in this case is the percentage of people who watch at least 10 seconds of the video advert once it shows up on their Facebook News Feed.

+40% of people watching more than 10 seconds of an ad that is costing pennies to deliver shows the incredible opportunity of Video Advertising on Facebook today.

And here shows the reduction in overall Cost Per Click with increase in Relevancy, CTR and Result Rate.

From £1.62 CPC down to £0.10 CPC. A 93.8% reduction!

Could that difference turn a highly unprofitable campaign into a profitable one? Of course…

Next steps for this campaign is to start tracking it from the click through to confirmed lead generation (and therefore measure Cost Per Lead). Brand engagement can be tracked in various ways although I prefer measuring opt-in rate as a KPI for brand engagement for trackable campaign funnels.

From there I can track individual ads through to sales and thereby calculate ROI down to the penny.

But where to focus?

If you’ve ever seen a car mechanic tighten the bolts on a wheel you’ll see he rotates around them, tightening them a little each time.

Why? Because if he tightened one of the bolts fully without ensuring the others are aligned, he might actually get the bolt stuck rather than securely fastening the wheel.

And it’s the same with campaign testing.

With the above results I can introduce elements from winning ads into the landing page and subsequent email nurture campaigns leading to sales.

However: We don’t want to invest lots of time and effort across all parts of a conversion funnel while still establishing what works best for a particular campaign (including segmentation, offer, headlines, etc).

Update: On the next round of micro-tests the campaign has achieved Facebook’s highly coveted maximum Relevancy score of 10, with a 8.59% click-through-rate at just 0.13 average cost per click! Time to optimize the next step in this sales funnel.

Your Next Steps

It’s so easy to start testing concepts and exploring ideas, hunting for the next blockbuster winner that could become key to your growth strategy in the year ahead.

If you don’t have the expertise or capacity in-house for this type of project, and would like to get the ball rolling with minimal effort, I can create campaigns that meet your brand guidelines and get them running for you very fast. Most likely for far less investment in resource or ad spend than you would get in-house or with a traditional agency.

Send an enquiry today and let’s find a few winning concepts that you can roll-out across your marketing.