In Early 2019, we were approached by Janice Sarich with the idea of bringing in Julia Cameron, an American author best known for her book, The Artist’s Way, to host a creative workshop in our home city of Edmonton.
The primary goal was to sell out the event with Facebook Ads by exposing Julia Cameron’s Workshop event to a highly relevant audience with various targeting methods. Our monthly budget was $1000. Thus, we had to ensure that we spent our dollars wisely to reach our goal of $62,800 in net sales.
Social Hero Banner made for It Begins With You™
Our Approach
We started by split-testing various interests within Facebook Ads to a broad audience within Western North America.
Once we gathered enough data about who our purchasers were, we narrowed down our target audience until we discovered our ideal customer demographics and tendencies.
Event Demographics
Targeting
Many other companies will run very generic ads such as, “Person X is coming to town, hurry up!”. With any campaign we run, one of the first things we do is always establish the answer to one important question...
"Where is our time best spent in this specific campaign?"
It wasn't split-testing and optimizing advertisements and it wasn't optimizing Facebook Event pages. It was targeting.
Why? Because at the end of the day, I believe your advertisement and copywriting aren’t always going to persuade someone into buying an event.
When you show a Drake fan tickets to a Drake concert, it doesn’t really take much to sell them. What matters to our company as advertisers is that we show our offering to an audience of people that don’t require any selling, and that’s exactly what we did.
To even prove this point further, we split-tested advertisements with absolutely no copy and the majority of the ads performed similarly while some ads without text actually outperformed the one with sales copy.
Facebook Ad Results
Now we don’t recommend running ads without ad copy as this was simply an experiment to prove a point. Depending on the nature of what you’re selling, it’s easy to forget where your efforts should be allocated. Our belief is that in the business of ticket selling, targeting is where the majority of your focus as an advertiser will be rewarded.
Lookalike Audiences
As we gathered enough data on which audience segments had users that were converting, we created a new Facebook Lookalike Audience to target.
This audience was composed of what Facebook's artificial intelligence believes is the top 1% most similar users to the segment of Facebook users who already purchased a ticket. These lookalike audiences allowed us to extrapolate data and discover a highly relevant segment of purchasers who didn’t even know they were interested in attending the event.
Lookalike Audiences were our bread and butter throughout this campaign as it created a highly relevant and unique audience for us to broadcast to. The results from targeting this audience resulted in an immediate 916% ROI within the first week.
Results
We closely kept an eye on our Facebook Ad Campaign throughout the months and ensured that all our ads were relevant by monitoring comments, deleting ads with poor results, and consistently improving our targeting methods.
Julia Cameron Live Workshop - Advertising Results
In the end, we were able to achieve a 1013% Return on Ad Spend while selling out the event a month prior to its date. Additionally, It Begins With You Inc. was able to generate more awareness for her brand and stir additional interest towards her other upcoming events throughout Canada. Over the course of the campaign, the content created awareness of her brand to over 429,000 Canadian women interested in self-development.
Due to the amount of traffic our campaign was able to generate, this event took the number one placement on Eventbrite for all events within the Edmonton region. This resulted in an additional 12.5% of ticket sales being attributed to an organic placement.
A big help to the actual production of this event was utilizing our sister company, Iconic Print Co, to create vertical banners, signage, thank-you cards, and more. We utilized another Edmonton company, HustlePrints, to create limited-edition canvases as giveaway items for the attendees.
Selling an event out isn't always smooth, but when you understand the nature and mindset of whom you're selling to, you'll utilize whatever you have in your marketing arsenal to reach these individuals.
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