Tag Archives: facebook pages

The Magic and Alchemy of a Successful Facebook Ad

Your Facebook Ad Material

There are a number of things you can experiment with to improve your Facebook ad results, though these feature most prominently:

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Ad Image (Highly Important)
Ad Copy
User demographics
- Age groups
- Sex
- Geographic location
- User Interests
Bid Price

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[box type="note"]Note: Facebook seems to be in the process of making refinements on their ad creation features, so there may be some differences in your experience by the time you put your ad together. Don’t be afraid to dive in and experiment with different settings by creating multiple Facebook ads… You can always turns ads off that aren’t working.[/box]

Overall Strategy for Your Facebook Ad Campaign

You want to start out by planning a strategy for your ad campaign. Think about groups of people that are most inclined to be interested in your product. As an example, these are some groupings that I came up with when trying to find people who might be interested in our film and Kickstarter campaign (which was getting funding for a trip to Mexico to begin our filming):

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Women 18-44, interested in roller derby
All sexes, 18-44 from Mexico, interested in roller derby
All sexes,13-64, interested in roller derby and documentaries

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This wasn’t the absolute data-set I used throughout the campaign… I experimented all throughout with tweaks and changes.

If you need help figuring out some basic demographic info for your audience to start building from, then think of similar sites that you believe your audience would visit and try to get demographic info for those sites from Google’s DoubleClick Ad Planner. Some sites are not in their database, but just having a few to look at can give you a good starting point. Then suss out the specific qualities of your audience from there.

Think about practical things, like the types of people who are most inclined to shell out money for your product or endeavor. We targeted some younger age groups for our Facebook page, but some ads specifically targeted the age groups that would be more likely to contribute to our Kickstarter campaign.

[box type="note"]Tip: Check out Kickstarter.com on the Ad Planner tool and see where the crossover is for your audience, if you are trying to promote a Kickstarter project with your ad.[/box]

A/B Testing

You want to do multiple variations on an ad to test different images and ad copy. If you’re running a Kickstarter, you are probably on a tight timeline, so a day should be enough time to see how well one is performing and can it if it isn’t as strong as another ad.

As a note, you can simply pause a low-functioning ad. If you delete it, then it will make it difficult to refer to it later if you need to compare what you wrote to a new ad you are working on.

Ad Image

Don’t just plop any old image in there and be done with it. Come up with something compelling. Human faces are going to attract the most attention, since Facebook images are primarily geared towards users, and we are so wired to be interested in faces. Think about bright colors, visually compelling graphics, clever imagery, or anything that might create a sense of delightful surprise. You have a very small size to work with, so be careful that what you include isn’t difficult to understand at a small size.

Ad Copy

Keep this short and sweet. Again, try to think of something that will engage a user’s curiosity. Ask an intriguing question that can only be answered by clicking the ad. Facebook ads with shorter copy perform better than ads with longer copy. Don’t try to say too much with the copy… Just get to the core of your offering. Remember, this is marketing, and your product or service needs to solve a problem for a potential customer. Make sure you get your solution across in this short snippet.

If you’re advertising a Kickstarter, you need to think of it like a product and make sure it’s grabbing your audience in a solution-based way. If you’re offering a groundbreaking product in your rewards, then don’t be shy about presenting it as a product promotion. Think like a marketer. Your chances of getting support will be less if you focus on the money/support ask, as a random stranger who isn’t hunting your project down on Kickstarter already isn’t going to be as likely to even consider a contribution. Whatever you are promoting, find some way to “sell” it by making the person on the other end realize that it’s something they need. If you target your demographics well, you are more likely to catch someone who truly does want what you’re offering.

User Demographics

You should have already put together some target audiences before you started, so you can use that info to generate things like appropriate age groups, interests, locations, and the like.

Some things I learned while running our Kickstarter ad is that including multiple interests simply enlarges the pool of people receiving the ad, which seems to be the opposite of what is needed to create successful results. Keep your interest lists trim and focused and it will do better.

For us, having an ad that targeted a specific country worked really well for getting clicks, and also helped us to get a ton of likes through our Facebook ad that was page-focused. It seemed like there was less competition in a non-US area for our subject matter, and more of a hunger for content on our topic in other geographic areas. I would recommend really considering which geographic areas would be most interested in your topic and coming up with ad copy that targets them in some way.

I can’t tell you what the perfect number of people will be as an audience for your ad. As you play with the various settings, you will see it will decrease or increase the number of people viewing your ad. Too small, and you barely get seen. Too large, and you’re competing against too many other advertisers. Experimentation is your friend.

Bid Price

As to ad payment, I recommend choosing Pay Per Click over Pay Per Impression. Facebook will recommend an average bid price for your ad, once you have entered all of your details. You will likely pay much less for clicks on an ad that links to your Facebook page than one that links to an outside site. For us, getting a bunch of new people in our Facebook page audience was a big achievement and has really helped us to reach a lot more people about our project. Over the long term, fan engagement will be a huge boost to all of our goals, so it was worth it to focus on that at the expense of putting all of our eggs into the Kickstarter basket.

I would say, don’t be shy about being willing to spend a goodly sum on getting clicks, especially for the ads that target your key audience. You want to make sure your price is competitive enough to get prominence over other ads. After a little while you will get a sense of how often your ad is getting clicked and if you need to drop down the price to keep being able to afford it. Besides, a bid price is not actually the amount you will have to pay, in many cases you will end up paying lower than a high-target bid price. You are basically just setting the maximum you are willing to spend.

If you’re not doing a Kickstarter ad or a Facebook page ad, where do you send your audience?

If you are selling a product on your site, I highly recommend creating an alternate version of the page with a unique url to send your ad folks to. If you can target the copy on that page to your audience, even better. As long as you have Google Analytics on your site (a must have if you are going to run ads), then you can get a sense of what your ROI (return on investment) is for your ad.

Compare number of ad clicks to number of sales generated from that page, and you can see just how successful your campaign was. Compare your profit to the amount you spent and see if Facebook ads are a winning marketing medium for you or not. If they aren’t, you can try a bit more ad experimentation. Sometimes the trick is just finding the right combo of ad content and demographic info, and switching things out regularly to keep people from falling prey to ad blindness.

And sometimes it just doesn’t pay. Don’t be afraid to cut your losses if you can’t seem to get it to work for you. People seem to get mixed results on Facebook ads, and it’s a difficult medium to master. You might find that your product does better on Google AdSense.

Experimentation is Key

Facebook ads are time-intensive and you’ll want to make sure you have the time in your schedule to keep an eye on how well your campaign is performing so you can improve it. Things can change drastically within a matter of days, so regular check-ins are important. While you don’t want to change things too often, you still want to be ready to try something new when one ad no longer seems to be performing.

Just be sure to select an ad approach that makes the most sense for your project.

If you want to read more about our own strategic thinking around our ads and get a more bird’s eye view of how we used ads, check out my previous article.

You might also be interested in reading my other articles about how we used social media to market our Kickstarter campaign:

Using Storify to Market a Kickstarter Campaign
Considering Kickstarter for Funding (and Using Social Media for Promotion)
Successful Kickstarter Campaigns and Marketing Strategy

Please feel free to share your questions or experiences in the comments below.

Using Facebook Ads (for Marketing a Kickstarter Campaign)

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Now that the Kickstarter dust has settled, I wanted to get back around to discussing the remaining topics I had slated for marketing a Kickstarter project, specifically Facebook ads.

Just for the record, we did indeed succeed in funding our Kickstarter, with 108% funding. For my own part, after it was all done I had a heck of a time relaxing and getting out of Kickstarter mode. It’s quite a rush!

Today I wanted to talk a bit about our use of Facebook Ads. Facebook ads have definitely gotten a bad rap lately, and I can’t yet fully speak to their effectiveness in promoting a product. Honestly, I am not able to speak with absolute authority on their effectiveness in helping get Kickstarter money, as there is no way to really track where exactly the Kickstarter funders are coming from. But I can tell you the methods we did try, and the discernable results we did receive in marketing a kickstarter campaign. And they were significant, so hold tight! Maybe if you play your cards right, using Facebook can bring you some success, as well.

In short, I believe using Facebook ads to create an audience before a Kickstarter and to have one to speak to after the fact is the best use of it, and you can get a fairly large return for little investment. (Though I will note, recent and continuing changes in the way Facebook handles pages may make my own not so long past positive experiences on using ads obsolete. Take my input with a grain of salt and watch the horizon for additional changes in the Facebook landscape. I’ll chronicle my own experience, while also discussing the nature of the recent changes and how it could affect your choice to follow in my footsteps.)

There are a number of types of Facebook ads you can run, but I’m going to focus on three types: traditional ads to a third party site, ads for your Facebook page, and sponsored stories.

Overview of Ad Styles
(and My Experience on our Kickstarter Campaign)

Traditional third-party site ad

The user clicks the ad and is taken to a third party, non-Facebook site. In our case, we were linking to our Kickstarter campaign, though you might be linking to your own site. (If you are linking to your own site but promoting Kickstarter from there, I wouldn’t recommend it, as a user will be less likely from there to go to your Kickstarter page.)

There is no way to track the return on a link from Facebook to Kickstarter, but if you have another type of product you are selling on Facebook, you can create a custom landing page that viewers of this ad land on. This way you can track your return on investment directly through Google Analytics. However, for Kickstarter there’s not much you can do to track your return. For us, the only correlation I could make was between the targeted audience location for the ad and the countries that donors came from. (In our case there wasn’t a lot of return from this angle, as the country we were targeting did not result in many contributions… However, I think this is mostly explained by cultural differences, and I think in some cases that one could track in this way and find a decent, traceable return.)

Facebook Page Ad

In this model, the ad links to the Facebook page you connect it to. The prominent feature of this type of ad is that, if anyone in the user’s network has already clicked the ad and liked the page, the user will see their friend’s name associated with the ad. Also, the user can easily like the page through the ad itself without ever having to visit the page. The byproduct of this is that, now, the user will automatically see updates from the Facebook page in question in their feed (unless they are deliberately only viewing a feed with their own selected friends).

Wait, back up. So, the above good result is what we achieved, but some users are complaining that this is not the same as of some recent changes made by Facebook. Let me relay their experiences.

Facebook Changes How Page Posts Appear in Feeds

In recent weeks Facebook has made a major change in how Facebook pages show up in user feeds. Facebook page owners are noticing a dramatic drop in engagement and receiving reports that their posts are no longer showing up in feeds. Apparently, now a user who follows a page has to explicitly indicate that they want a page’s updates to show up in their feed, or the page owner has to pay for a sponsored story to ensure their posts are seen by all members of their audience.

This has resulted in a massive outcry from businesses, artists, musicians, and other users who make use of the Facebook page feature, as it results in making Facebook nigh on useless for this form of business connecting, and has forced many to return to the traditional personal page as a means of promoting their endeavors (which is impractical from a business standpoint due to the limits on friends you are allowed to have, and also from a standpoint of not being able to separate personal and business communications).

I am not sure what will happen in the future, but it seems inevitable to me that Facebook will have to alter this behavior in some way, unless there is a larger plan relating to forcing these users to pay out more money to promote their content. (Edit: There is… Check out this post on Danielle Ellwood’s site to find out more.) However, as a business decision it seems to me that the backlash they have received as a result of this policy change will inevitably lead to other changes to put a damper on the number of business users who are jumping ship because of the sudden seeming uselessness of their pages. And seeing the low return many businesses receive on Facebook ads, I can’t see many users shelling out the dough to pay for a sponsored story. We’ll see how it goes.

I will say, I have been watching our Facebook page and plenty of people seem to still be seeing our own stories and responding to them, and we haven’t been doing anything different than anyone else. I don’t know if our large audience of 800+ people gives us a greater edge. It’s possible that only a fraction of our audience is seeing stories versus what they saw before, but it’s hard to tell. Since we started getting the new and improved Facebook Insights, our posts seem to be showing up for between 15% and 35% of our audience, which seems like a pretty good number to me. But there’s no telling why we have those numbers… It could be that Facebook made all likes past a certain date automatically show up on feeds, and all likes after a certain date have to be manually added to the feed. It’s a mystery.

In my book, I’ll be sticking around on the Facebook pages and continuing to recommend them as reasonable options for any sort of business promotion for the time being. If you can get a lot of new likes, it seems like the benefits outweigh the disadvantages. But I’ll definitely be keeping my eyes peeled to try to figure out what the real story is, and if Facebok is no longer the affordable social media business solution it once was.

Okay, back to the post-mortem.

Google Ads

Just to note, we did not try Google Ads, and the reason for this is that I did not feel that Google Ads would be a strategic match to a Kickstarter campaign. Google Ads are notoriously higher on return, and if we had just been trying to promote the film, that might have been a good one to experiment with. When the film starts to garner a bit more money, we might consider a more dedicated marketing budget, and it wouldn’t have hurt us to have worked on building our site’s audience in advance of our Kickstarter campaign. However, Google Ads do tend to cost more, and with our shoestring budget and our more grassroots, collaborative, and connection-oriented approach, Facebook seemed like the better choice.

What We Spent

I gave our campaign a total budget of $120, since I was paying out of my own pocket and very curious to test the Facebook ad waters. In the beginning I primarily posted a regular Facebook ad linking to our Kickstarter, but over time I gave more and more funding to our Facebook page ad, primarily to our Mexico-centric ad, as it got the most results. With Facebook ads you pick a bid amount, as you are competing in a pool of similar ads for space. Because I was paying per click instead of per impression, the cost on the bid was higher, but the clicks were minimal enough that it was fine for me to bid higher.

Overall, I think we spent about $93 of that on our Facebook page promotion. I think growing our audience by 600 people was totally worth it, especially since some of the returns we get from that endeavor are tangible to the success of our project as a whole.

Advertising Your Overall Endeavor vs. Advertising Your Kickstarter

You may think you’re just advertising your Kickstarter campaign, but what you’re really doing is building engagement for your project. And the sooner you can do this, the better. Building fan engagement before a Kickstarter is ideal, because then you have a ready-made audience to promote your Kickstarter to. Sadly I came to bat on the Facebook ads later than would have been ideal. Our Kickstarter launched right about the same time we had begun the process of creating our promotional materials… We had a relatively small budget to land with our Kickstarter endeavor, and the need for the team to travel soon was at the forefront of things, so there was no opportunity for us to prep. It ultimately worked out for us just fine, but I wouldn’t recommend anyone follow in our footsteps.

If I was to advise one thing, it would be to start sooner with your marketing. Once upon a time an easy way to do this would be to create a page for your project on Facebook, then create a Facebook Ad where people could easily “like” the page. That might be an approach still worth trying, if our example is anything to go on. If you are successful in getting enough likes you might still be able to break through the feed barrier.

Immediate vs. Long-Term Gains on Facebook Ads

We got 600-650 new fans from the “like ad” method, and we paid about $90 for the month for these ads. Not too shabby! Even with the recent FB changes in approach, having that many fans on a page looks good. We can show this to investors. And it’s the kind of thing that, the more you have, the more momentum you have. In a couple of months we are up to 800. If someone does catch one of our stories and shares it, then it is more likely to show up in feeds. In the world of Facebook, popularity counts. And, if you play your cards right, you can make more people aware of you, and increase your chances of catching the eye of someone in your tribe.

Note: If you want to increase your likes, make sure your cover image on your page is professional and compelling. Changing our image resulted in a dramatic increase in likes. Also, make sure your page looks active. If it’s only got a handful of posts, people are going to be less likely to be enthusiastic about it.

Our ad that went directly to the Kickstarter page got fewer clicks, but it was still pretty respectable. I think we had something like an overall 0.13% click through rate, which, from my reading, is okay (though you can imagine such a low number does contribute to the impression that for many Facebook is not a pragmatic choice for advertising). We were closer to 0.18% on our Mexico-centric ad, which is a much healthier total.

The Return on Investment

What was our return? Well, as you can guess, we can’t really answer that. We can surmise that a few people who found us from our ads and saw our Kickstarter promoted on our page did indeed contribute. Beyond that, it’s anyone’s guess. What did we get out of it? Lots of connections. I created an ad targeted entirely to a Mexico audience, and this was the biggest success we had. Since our team’s fundraising was targeted on taking their first filming trip to Mexico, this was a logical choice. The audience in Mexico was hungry to learn more and many people made comments on the page, reached out to the team to offer tangible support, even if it wasn’t monetary. The team now has many more opportunities to connect with local derby teams on their upcoming trip, and lots of friends waiting to help them on the journey. There’s no scoffing the power of enthusiasm. How these initial efforts will pay off in other opportunities is anyone’s guess, but I am betting it will lead to something good. We have a healthy audience, now, and it will only grow more quickly with such a large fan base to seed it.

Ultimately, the gist is that advertising your project is of ultimate importance, and you shouldn’t neglect this before and during your Kickstarter. Especially before. Build momentum and make those connections. Give people something to get excited about. Then hit them up for support. You’ll probably have an even greater success than we did.

Next… I’ll talk a bit about how to put your Facebook ad together and some simple ways you can use Facebook’s demographic information to target your ad and refine it over your campaign.

CHECK OUT MY CURRENT KICKSTARTER: THE PORTLAND TAROT!

Let me know in the comments below if you have any questions, or want to share your own experiences.

Social Media Marketing for a Kickstarter Campaign – Pt. 3

What makes a successful Kickstarter campaign?

From what I can see, Kickstarters generally succeed for one of four reasons (though the list is certainly not exhaustive):

The campaign focuses on a small, achievable funding target that outlines an easy-to-comprehend need and doesn’t require much capital to succeed
The people behind the campaign have an idea that is revolutionary… or they have a highly-coveted product that they offer as a reward for a pledge that is drastically under-priced compared to what the retail price will be in the future (creating the sense that there is a high return for investing in this product at an early stage)
The campaign or project is centered around a well-known person who can easily rally social support through their existing social media networks
The campaign team spends a lot of time and energy expanding awareness of their project across multiple channels, leveraging personal connections, social media, traditional marketing, press releases, and press opportunities both before and throughout the life of the campaign

Most of us probably don’t have a huge audience yet (though it pays to try to build one up before you do a Kickstarter). And unless you are a well-known musician or in product/fashion design and have an audience ready and waiting for what you’ve got to offer, you might find yourself needing to be scrappy to get your funding targets met. Sure, scenario #4 probably applies to people who fall under #1-#3, but if you don’t have #1-#3 going for you, then you really have to lean into using all your marketing resources to achieve your aims.

My team is promoting a documentary. Naturally, the impact of the story we are trying to tell, the quality of the team that we have assembled, and the beautiful way that Cynthia and Juvie illustrated the film’s concept are all keys toward communicating that this is a project worth contributing to. But let’s face it—we are competing against hundreds of other quality documentaries who are also seeking funds through Kickstarter, and a film is not something that affords any obviously radical awards that can attract people on their own flash and dazzle.

We had to get creative to come up with some unique rewards, and use those awards to create a personal connection with our contributors. However, persistence has been the biggest key to date, and I imagine that this is true for most projects. Creativity, consistency, and dedication are absolute necessities for anyone to succeed in Kickstarter funding. Good thing we have the wonderful tools of social media and on-line networking to help spread the word and make our jobs easier!

Dedication to the campaign

I have heard a number of stories about people who took the month off to focus on funding their Kickstarter, or at least had to put aside all of their free time toward the effort of keeping the buzz going. You have to be dedicated and ready to release regular updates, or you’ll lose the interest of your audience. People pay attention to things like number of updates over the life of the Kickstarter when contributing, and regular conversation around your project helps people to maintain awareness of your campaign (also, lower numbers of updates could communicate a lack of commitment to the project, and you want to make sure to get across the passion you have for achieving your target).

You also can’t be afraid to keep promoting your campaign in your personal channels, to ask friends to help, or to contact people who can spread your message more widely. You can do it in friendly ways, by offering special rewards to people who contribute by a certain time, are the 25th or 100th contributor, or periods of time where you give higher-level rewards to lower-level contributions. We did a few of these on our Kickstarter, offering $30 level rewards to people who contributed $20 on a certain day.

Consistency in social engagement

One thing I consistently hear is that people worry so much about annoying the people in their social circles through regular updates, and this can cause them to hold back at a time when they really need to keep reminding people about their efforts. During our Kickstarter, I asked friends, “Are my posts annoying you? Be honest.” I was happy when they replied, “Absolutely not!” Most everyone was excited to see my progress and feel a part of the journey. And they universally agreed that it was necessary in order to get to the goal.

So don’t be afraid to talk about your project… If you are sincerely excited and treat it as an opportunity to share your enthusiasm about your vision, people will be glad to tag along for the ride. And as the finish line draws closer, you might be amazed to see friends and colleagues rally around your project to spread the word… Especially if you are bold enough to keep asking.

Creative content and outreach

Keep coming up with content related to your Kickstarter to keep people engaged without simply spamming them with money requests. We had lots of goodies to share over the life of our project, like logo designs, interviews, project news, and video samples. The more goodies like this that you can build up before you start, the better. (And the less exhausted you will be during the campaign itself.) Also, don’t be afraid to add new rewards to different contribution levels as you go, especially if ideas organically come up over the life of the project. There are no people better than your Kickstarter tribe to reveal the things your audience is really jonesing to receive for their pledge.

Contact web sites with related subject matter to your project. The leaders of our project contacted a few derby-related sites with information about the project and landed an article as well as a podcast. Derby-related Facebook groups and pages followed us, and some of their owners promoted the project in their social media venues.

Facebook pages, likes, and ads

Don’t forget to create a Facebook page for your project. This helps you develop a community of people who will follow your journey toward funding. You can use Facebook ads in a number of ways to expand awareness of your project… Try creating an ad to promote the Kickstarter and another to promote your Facebook page, and don’t be afraid to experiment with titles, descriptions, imagery, and demographics. (We got around 500 likes on our page from the ad by targeting derby fans and derby aficionados in Mexico, and if we had done it before the campaign we would have had more people on board and ready to support us from day one. Whenever someone likes the page through our ad, we get a double bonus: they can easily follow the project, and if their friends see that they liked the ad, then they will be more likely to follow along, as well.)

Unless you purchase subscriptions with sites designed to help track return on investment between FB ads and Kickstarter, you won’t know exactly what gains you get from the Kickstarter-focused ad… I think we got at least a couple of people supporting through this effort, and it definitely paid for itself. I will talk more about what I learned about Facebook ads in a later post, but in summary, you should definitely consider making Facebook ads a part of your arsenal.

Print promotions (and connecting them to your social media efforts)

It doesn’t hurt to create print materials to promote your Kickstarter and leave them around town right at the start of the campaign. Make sure you leave your materials in places relevant to your topic. I didn’t get many returns on our postcard endeavor (we handed out couple hundred of them at a derby bout), but I imagine that the results you get will be heavily dependent on the type of project you are running. Try fliers and postcards, and be sure to include a QR code so that people can quickly go to your page if they see it on the go.

Another suggestion for which print assets would be helpful is if you set up a table at any relevant events where you can discuss your project with people 1-on-1 and make an in-person connection. (If you have a laptop handy you can let them contribute right then or there, or you can take cash contributions and work with a friend to turn this into Kickstarter cash.) I’ll share some tips later about ways to optimize your print materials for your campaign.

When generating promo materials and rewards for supporters, make sure you consider the return on each investment. Don’t set yourself up to owe more in rewards or marketing than you make on your Kickstarter campaign. And try dipping your toe in the water of any new materials you put out. If you aren’t sure if a postcard will work for your promotion, start out by trying a few fliers from your color printer first, and track the results of those before expanding.

Tap the tribes of thought leaders

The most results you will get are by finding connections with notable people in your area of interest and getting their help to promote your project. If you aren’t widely known, getting the assistance of better-known people and tapping into their circle of followers is the best way to push your effort forward. Consider offering a favor or special reward in return for their help. Just make sure your ask is relevant to their focus, and that you quickly get to the point on your ask. Anything that makes them feel like they’ve just been spammed is going to hurt your effort more than help it. And they are likely very busy people, so make sure you don’t waste their time.

Go get’m!

In short, be bold and experimental! Get ready to work your toosh off and make new friends! And if you don’t make it on the first try, don’t worry… There is an art to creating a successful Kickstarter campaign, and there are lots of stories out there from successful campaigns about the many false starts that preceded amazing victories.

Stay tuned for my upcoming posts on Facebook ads and optimizing print promotions to integrate seamlessly with your web marketing.