Lessons

Lesson Info

Example of An Ad Campaign That Won

So to wrap us up, I'm going to look at a recent ad campaign that won for me, and I'm going to dissect one of my winning campaigns for all of its working parts, and I'm gonna look at some advanced strategies that you can employ. I'm excited to show you some advanced strategies. These are the kinds of things that I wish somebody could have walked me through in the beginning so that I would have at least some guidance to know where to go and how to grow as my business was growing because sometimes, I have felt, and especially in the last couple years that I'm bottle-necking my business by being the only one that serves it. By being the only one that knows the inner workings of it, and by not knowing how to, I want to advance to the next level. I have all of my ducks in a row to advance to the next level, but there's certain building blocks that I'm not sure and I'm gonna walk you through those as well. So remember that a good marketing campaign is always gonna bring you new customers, new...

subscribers and repeat business. A good marketing campaign can do all three at once so everything we talked about, market your Etsy shop to sold-out success is kind of doing all of that once. When you're throwing a big sale, you are enticing new customers, you are enticing new subscribers and you're encouraging repeat business all at once, all three things. So to quickly recap, this is the marketing campaign that I showed you, the second example in yesterday's class and the goal was to sell 10,000 copies of my workbook and planner; it's an annual thing that comes out called Your Best Year 2016. The potential earnings, should I meet that goal, were huge for my business at $70,000. That's huge and exciting, and a glorious figure. I set the advertising budget because did I win with this campaign, that amazing figure was well worth it. I set the advertising budget at $2,000. Things were going so well during that campaign that I automatically and eagerly upped that by $1, in December, and I invested $3,000 into this campaign. The other thing about this strategy, was that it was in its third year running. So this is my third test, and I knew what works and what doesn't work. With this specific product, and with this specific market. As I told you, I took $500 of the ad budget and I didn't even use it for ads. I used it to get the book out for free to the clients that I work the most closely with, and I mailed free copies to anybody that would like to exchange it for a review of the book early, early before the actual season started. I was boosting posts on Facebook, spending anywhere from $5 to $15, very soft boost to the mixed target. Sometimes to my own fan base, sometimes to other businesses, other likes and interests on Facebook. In December, I got into the thick of online advertising. I created a free sample opt-in. The book is 150 pages long, and I package a sample that was like 18 pages and I invested a little bit extra at the time, so that my total spend was $1, but I took out several ads at about $250 each. There was one ad that was just performing so well, I spent $500 on one boosted post. That's the high for me, I've never done that before. The thing about those ads and why I kept boosting them, is that it was not only converting sales, it was converting my sales at a whopping 10%, and those are only the sales that I could track digitally. When the free sample went out, it all went into a system where the goal in this campaign, I'm gonna show you all these things that I'm saying to you; where the goal of this campaign was that they walked out with a digital copy. But if they didn't want the digital copy they could have left my whole system and went and bought it on Etsy or Amazon.com. They could've bought the paperback. They had other options, but I know for a fact that 10% converted within my system, so it's outrageous success for that ad. Then again, it's also building my list and building it rapidly, so that was where I decided that this was worth more money being invested, because it was gonna pay off even longer over the long-term. So I spent the last of my advertising budget on promoted pins to the same target audience that I was promoting to on Facebook. So I'm meeting them in other places and I had great images of the book set up and I had great Instagram images of the book to use, and I was spreading them everywhere all the time and at the same time, it's also important to know that there's so much going off on my campaign by December, that if you searched hashtag YBY2016, you would see hundreds of creatives already using their book, hundreds of pictures of creatives with their book in their hands and actively loving it and sharing it. On top of that I invested in Leadpages. So I went to Leadpages, and it was something that I had mentioned in marketing yesterday, that I was scared to try Leadpages for the longest time, because I knew it was working for people but I didn't know how to do it yet, so I went after it. That cost $300 a year, the campaign that I signed up for, and I'm also invested in customer relationship management. So I am off email managers, like Aweber, MailChimp and I am using Infusionsoft, which is very advanced customer segmentation, marketing segmentation and ways to manage your customer base. I'm gonna show you a picture, that's $300 a month. I have to tell you that whenever I signed up for that it was like, that was the push. If you do this, what's it worth? Look, this is the (laughs) this is the Facebook ad. This is the image that I connected with ... This is the actual campaign, so this is what's running from December 15th through January 15th. It's converting like crazy; 4,000 people were signing up, and they're gonna get a sample of your best year for free. I'll know that it's working if they complete the goal within the system, which is by the digital copy but then again, that's converting at 10% but sure, they're also buying products online in different places. Leadpages is a landing page. It's a sales page of sorts and when you get there, it's selling something for you and then it's connected to your email manager, and it has an opt-in box, so it's a very direct ask. When they click your site or your social media account they go to a landing page and their email address and their contact information is collected. When you have an account with Leadpages, there's also a thing called a lead box, and I'm sure you've seen these happening a lot on Facebook. These are different than a Leadpages, this is not a landing page. This is a box that pops up whenever you click an image on a social media platform. It's instant contact collection. So you've seen them probably with webinars. I know I get marketed webinars all the time and if you click that you're automatically prompted to opt-in to something. That's what a lead box does. So this is the image that is connected to the lead box and it's basically just the door that people will knock on. As soon as they click that, I'm connecting to this, where I'm saying, "Get your free sample. "Enter your name and email address." So if this pops up to you on Facebook or right now, it's pinned on my Twitter feed, 'cause I can share it everywhere, I can share it on Pinterest even. I can promote that on Pinterest. I think I can promote it on Pinterest. It's also on my blog sidebar. So anytime that you would click this image, it says, "Try it for free," the next thing you see is this. It's instant contact collection. That is huge and that is powerful, and it's so worth the $300 a year to immediately collect contacts like that. This is to promote my sample of Your Best Year 2016. This is showing up on my fans' pages, and this is showing up at the time I'm advertising to people who love planners, people who love new year reviews. I'm going where there's already momentum in that market. All right, now this is so simple and quick and that's the most brilliant thing about it. I did not direct anybody to a sales page where they have to read and figure out or anything like that, and this has definitely been the biggest win for the campaign and so worth the investment. It not only resulted in sign-ups, which obviously I'm getting sign-ups with everything, but it resulted in a lot of sales. A lot of sales so if I brought in 4, new subscribers, that's converting at like 400, at least 400 sales that I know of. How do I know? This is what my Infusionsoft software looks like. This is what a campaign looks like in the Infusionsoft program. I'm showing this to you because I feel like you can take pieces of this, and you can build it yourself on MailChimp or Aweber or the different email managers, and I wanted you to see how complex it gets so that you could see what you can do. (sighs) Let me just show you what all this means. This connects directly to my Leadpages' lead box. That is where the customer signs up. I set this up, I build these things. Then this is an email confirmation request. That's called a sequence, if you open it up it said confirm your email. This little thing means they're coming further into the sequence, because they've confirmed their email, and then they get into my email sequence. My welcome sequence is not just the Your Best Year sample, although it's the first thing that comes up. As soon as they get that in a few days I say, "What if I told you that I could help you "boost your reach by 1,700% for free?" The auto-responder goes on from after they get their sample, but I give that to them first. That's what they signed up with, and I want them to have it immediately. Couple days later, I introduce myself, and then the goal of the campaign is to digitally buy Your Best Year directly from me, directly in my system. I like it in my system because I also have affiliates, and this is where I keep the affiliates inside of my Infusionsoft campaign. There's a lot of parts that you can take and you can build yourself. This can definitely be a DIY. The certain things that are advanced that you couldn't build yourself is that, while people are in my welcome sequence, I will not sell them anything else. They're in my welcome sequence, so I can exclude them from campaigns, because they're still getting to know me and I don't want to ask them yet. So there's different things I can do like that that get advanced, but everything else, from the web forms to the auto-responders you can absolutely set up in your mailing providers. I can show you an example of the recent conversion. Now we're out of the season, I clipped this literally a day before I came here, but this is what I've captured recently, and I love it because it's like March. The real season ends in January, so I love this because this is recent. This is three months into the year and it's still capturing 234 people recently. That's crazy. They confirm, which is for oddly reasons, larger than that, and then (laughs) There's older people in the welcome sequence, but that makes sense to me and then you can see that 23 people have bought the program recently in March from me. It was 10% like that, and this number has been as high as like 2,500 during certain months, and then panning out this entire time so it's been a really great idea. It's also why it's a good idea to set that budget, and then be willing to adjust it, but know up front what you want to spend, what you're willing to spend and what the potential of it all is. So when I set a $2,000 budget, and this goes back on exposure and the things that we talked about in marketing, that's the largest budget I've ever setup for any marketing campaign or any advertising campaign, that really knocked my socks off, that was above and beyond my comfort level and I'm trying to get more comfortable with investing back into my business as I grow, because it's been a hard thing to overcome over years. I think it's one of the most difficult obstacles, and weathering the slow seasons, it ties hand in hand. That's why the slow seasons are so hard. There's no rewards for all the efforts that you're putting in. Just like the exposure questions, when I put $2,000 up, did I know it was going to work? Did I know it was gonna pay back? The numbers that I set this year were absolutely huge and very scary to me. I had no idea it would work. I was worried I could lose it. I was worried, as I told you before I was worried every time I went to the post office with a stack of free packages and came back with a $400 receipt because I was mailing the copies out, but I learned from it, and it got better, way better than it did the year before and it's gonna get even better. Wait 'til Your Best Year 2017. I can't even, no, mind blown. It's gonna do really well. I'm gonna clear that board, I'm gonna clear my stuff all off of it. I wanna walk you through your own strategy. Your own strategy to creating your own campaign and your own advertising budget. So we're gonna start off with a marketing goal. This is gonna be a great summary of everything we've covered during the Turn Your Etsy Shop Into a Sales Machine session. The marketing goal is a realistic stretch. It's a realistic number but a bit of a stretch for yourself to make sure you're always pushing yourself, you're always challenging yourself to expand. It's gonna cover a 30-day period, or shorter-term period. It's gonna have a specific end date, and so you're gonna put By, with an end date right there. Give it a concrete deadline, and if the goal is not a dollar amount, what is the earning potential? The marketing goal is a specific number. It's either a number of sales. It's a number of subscribers, or it's a dollar amount earned. If it's not a dollar amount, what is its earning potential? If you actually met that goal, what would you make? What's the payoff? This helps with exposure, I find this helps greatly with exposure. When I fill this out and I set a goal and then I realize the potential earnings, that gives me the motivation to go after it. That puts some drive behind my marketing campaign and makes me keep at it, and I keep that goal front and center, and I keep those potential earnings front and center, because that's a glorious, that's always a glorious goal to reach, a glorious earnings to meet. That's also creating a finish line. I'll know I've done this successfully when I meet my potential earnings and when I meet the goal. Then next you're gonna set an advertising budget that makes you feel comfortable. This is not the place to stretch yourself, this is very different. I might pick something like 10% of the potential earnings or less, I mean you see in the campaign for 10,000 sales, my advertising budget was much less than 10% of the potential earnings, but it was still a stretch for me, I needed to feel comfortable with the number. It does not have to be a big number. You've seen mine, and there are bigger numbers like even with the 150 sales, it was $ does not have to be that. $50 goes a long way to a new marketing campaign. It will go a long way for your business. Then finally you're going to strategize that campaign and you're going to start by listing all the ways and all the places you're going to promote in order to achieve this goal. You're looking at the different social platforms you're gonna use, or where you're gonna boost your post on Facebook or what type of post you're gonna boost on Facebook and Pinterest. Pinterest is a great place for advertising. Then you're mixing in a variety of no cost, low cost techniques with your paid campaign. So blogging and emailing and sharing are gonna be low cost and no cost and it's all gonna make sense together. Then you're also looking for paid advertising opportunities, such as those boosted posts, promoted pins, the Facebook sidebar ads, things like that. (sighs) Then you wanna ask yourself where you're paying to promote, how much of your budget will you allot to each platform? How are you gonna play with your strategy, how are you gonna break it up? I usually allot 80% to Facebook and what I'm doing there because I think it's where everybody internet user lives. Then I'll put 20% into Pinterest, because those campaigns will go far. 20% will go far for me. Finally, what other enticing offers can you add, can you strategize into your campaign? Can you do pre-sale promotions? Can you offer something before the product? Can you do pre-orders? Can you give exclusive discounts to a very targeted group, like your email list? Can you do hashtag shares and involve the community in using the product or the community involved in the sale that you're running? Or even giveaways? Giveaways are sometimes a great technique. Do we have any questions? I have a question. Yes? Lisa when you talked about creating your ad or your Facebook ad that you boosted; sorry, your Facebook post that you boosted, and you talked about the text, the photo, do you always use a program like Canva or one of those programs you can add text to the photo and, or do you just post the photo without graphics on it? Yes. I believe that skimmers have become scanners, so where, as bloggers we are always hot to read by scanning headlines and sub-topic titles, things like that. Now we are looking to scan an image. We want that image to tell us everything that we're gonna get if we were to click or go that route. We wanna know before we get there. Images are very important, and it's important to explain something with your image, where you can. If I can go back to this example, I put this image together. I use a software program called artboard. I say that carefully 'cause I'm on a Mac, and people use photoshop for this type of thing. Photoshop is too advanced for me, I don't know how photoshop works and there's too many buttons for me to figure out but artboard is like my desktop publishing kind of thing, it's so easy to use. It's super user-friendly, I swear I could put my kids on it and they could get it right now. It's basically put pictures in, create text box, it's super easy. I don't know how much it costs, but it's not nearly the price of photoshop, it's like $20 to $ to get this software, but it's my photoshop hack to not using photoshop and to create whatever image I want and I create these images all the time. I create all my own images and I really love doing it, and I really think it helps my marketing campaign because I put those together. I'm not familiar with the free software that is out there, but I know I think you use ... I use Canva. Yeah. Canva is a good one, and I know people that use it and it's absolutely; yes, you want to add some text and you want to add your website and there's no website on that image, but you wanna add things so that people can scan it and know immediately what this offer is about or know immediately what you're selling or giving at that time. Great. Jake had a follow-up question to that: are you ever paying someone to create your graphics or you're doing them all on your own? Yeah. I do them all on my own. I use that app called artboard, which is available just for Macs. I don't know what the equivalent for PCs would be but there's photoshop hacks, like for people like me that I just wanna create a digital graphic and I want it to be really easy and user-friendly. I don't clip things and I don't do all the things that photoshop can do to my images, I just pull them in. If I wanna create something ... Like the (chuckles) like the book image that is standing up and it's the image of my book. This right here is a standalone image, and it's shadowed and stuff like that. I will go to Fiverr if I need an image like that 'cause I don't know how to do that for myself, and then I take home shot. Then I shot this picture, and it was an Instagram share, then I put those two together to make one of those banners that like, you see with Leadpages so it goes all the way across the wall on Facebook. I use Facebook's specific recommended suggested sizes for this so it would show up perfectly and beautifully for all of my customers that I wanted to get on this list. So if I don't know how to do it I use Fiverr for it and I pay $15 typically to get something created where I have more of a stock style image, and this is definitely a stock style image. It's not even the book. I just gave them the cover and he made it look like that, it's a mock-up. What's the site again that you went to? Fiverr. Fiverr. F-I-V-E-R-R. Fiverr. I also think it takes practice, so it's just like product photography. My first digital graphics, the ones that I created for myself, DIY, did not look that good. I mean I could do another embarrassing mistakes I've made. I've made some ugly, ugly graphics. But I've learned how, I've learned more. I've watched Pinterest; I learn a lot about images and appealing photographs by what's going on on Pinterest and what's popular there. Great. All right, so. That is going to wrap Turn Your Etsy Shop Into a Sales Machine. We have covered a lot in the last three days. I wanna thank you all so much for joining me and being here with me. I wanna thank everybody at home for tuning in. I wanna applaud you all because I absolutely understand the persistence and dedication this business takes to get off of the ground, and I want to commend you for showing up to that everyday, it takes courage. You're amazing, thank you all so much for sharing your time with me.