So a few weeks ago I got the good news of winning the “Best Paid Advertising Campaign” category in the 2020 The Marketer Awards. Working on this campaign was a great journey – especially as we launched when the tourism industry was in a “free fall” with travel restrictions due to Covid19.
We dove head first and it paid off. The campaign generated over 6 figures in revenue with a return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) of over 30 with a relatively small budget.
I’m going to share with you some lessons that helped the success of this campaign. Who knows, it could help the performance of your campaigns as well.
LESSON 1: KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE
This is marketing fundamental but so vital. You have to understand who your ideal customer is – we’re not trying to market to everyone.
The beauty of Facebook advertising is you can split test instantly to find out who is responding best and eliminate those that aren’t.
With a profile of ideal customers based on previous history and looking at economic trends on who is most likely to have higher disposable incomes, we were able to hone in on our ideal customer.
We did this with a range of Lookalike Audiences and Facebook Interest Targeting.
LESSON 2: EXCELLENT CREATIVES
Creative (videos, images, carousels) is one of the first things I split test. It’s statistically shown that creative is the first thing that captures people attention when scrolling through Facebook/Instagram which is why it can make or break a campaign.
If people don’t take notice of what you have to say, it doesn’t matter how good your message is.
For this particular campaign, video crushed it. It was engaging, exciting and captures people attention.
Check out the full article which I’ll post below that has 1 of the videos that we used.
LESSON 3: KEEP IT SIMPLE
Don’t sacrifice clarity for the sake of being fancy. With all the ads we ran, we made sure the messaging was to the point without fluff and clutter. The ads had to be scannable so the audience can easily engage with it.
The main theme being “Book a once in a lifetime experience to swim safely with whale sharks” was clearly highlighted in the first 2 lines of the ad copy or headline (the other 2 points which captures people attention).
We also told our audience exactly what we wanted them to do. For top of funnel ads, the CTA was “click below to learn more about our tours”.
For bottom of funnel ads, it was “click below to book your tour”.
Full article link here: https://www.themarketer.news/post/grill-the-marketer-2020-awards