Over $2 million generated for this ECom brand in 2020 - here’s how.

Over the course of 2020, we have generated $2 million in revenue on this account through Facebook ads. Today I’m going to show you exactly how we did it.

Here’s the thing. The algorithm is hungry. And she’s looking for juicy new content to show to the world.

So...feed the beast, and she will deliver.

We simply made it our primary focus to produce a TON of creatives.

That’s all scaling up is. Turning the dials enough times to crack the advertising code. The more combinations you try, the better chance you have of finding a solution.

And that’s exactly what we went about doing. Let’s get into the strategy.

STEP ONE: BUILD OUT A CONTENT NETWORK

My goal was to build up a pipeline that would routinely produce 5-10 good pieces of content per week.

So I started by using UGC already out there. Instagram posts, YouTube unboxings, stories, TikToks…we cherry picked the best pieces of content from everywhere on the internet (obviously making sure we had permission from the creators to use). Most of it was from social media so it didn’t need any editing.

That will give you a solid foundation but now you need something more reliable. That’s when we turned to micro-influencers. Most influencers with followings between 3k - 30k will be more than happy to make content in exchange for a free product. Ideally, look for people with 4-5%+ engagement as it shows they know their audience well.

It’s important to outline customer pain points and key benefits of the product when you ship it over. Send through a couple of examples of previous winning creatives - or just find some on YouTube. But don’t get too rigid - you want to allow them enough room to make it their own.

Once we had the network was set up, it was time to move on to the ads.

STEP TWO: CAMPAIGN SETUP

I like to keep things very simple at TOF so we only started out with 2 campaigns, one for testing and one for scaling.

The testing campaign was always some combination of lookalike and interest audiences. I imagine interest targeting will overtake lookalikes over the next few months after iOS 14.

When you find a winning audience/creative, simply move it from the testing campaign to the scaling campaign. This means that you’re only putting serious budget behind proven adsets and ads. Use the ROAS to determine how aggressively (or conservatively) to scale. Make sure you make decisions based upon multiple days data to account for variance.

At MOF and BOF, once again, keep it simple. No need to oversell here because they’ve already shown intent. We’ve seen a lot of success when testing funny creatives, playful nudges and even memes for retargeting. A variety of different formats also works well (i.e. vertical video, image ads, carousel etc.)

STEP THREE: CONTINUOUS TESTING

This is where the real work begins.

Audiences can last a long time but creatives will fatigue much quicker which is why you need to keep producing content. We cycle in new creatives every 4-5 days depending on how well the current ones are performing.

If that sounds daunting, it’s really not. In fact, a couple of “main” videos can easily be chopped up and rearranged into multiple different ads.

We simply tested new creatives by duplicating a top-performing audience in the testing campaign. If it proves to be a winner, move it to the scaling campaign and ramp that budget up.

Finally, don’t spend too much time editing ads. Our best performers have literally been edited on iPhones. They look organic which stops the scroll. Apps like LifeLapse and CapCut are great for this.

To wrap up, I’ll leave you with what I’m finding in our creative testing right now:

1. Short video > Long video. If you can, cut some of your content clips down to 5-10 seconds - it’s currently doing better than 10-30 secs for us.
2. Video copy > Primary copy. People aren’t spending as much time reading the primary copy. There’s a lot less variance in our primary copy testing which - we’re actually seeing more changes when testing the copy on the video ad itself.
3. Broad audience no targeting! A great move if you’ve invested heavily in content (which I’m hoping if you’ve got this far, you’re thinking of doing). In scaling campaigns, go broad and let the creative do the targeting itself. This has been working insanely well for some of our clients.

Hope this has been helpful for everyone. Feel free to ask me any questions about anything above or Facebook Ads related!