Turn $1700 in Facebook Video Ads into $38,000 in Business

Late last year Facebook announced video ads. I am sure you have noticed that video has exploded onto Facebook. By my estimates, almost 40% of posts to Facebook have to do with video. As a marketer that was frustrated with what Facebook was doing to those of us with business Facebook pages, I was excited to give video ads a try.

I own and operate Hill Media Group, but I am also a photographer who has photographed a lot of weddings over the years. Though I had not really been marketing my wedding photography services much for the last few years, I decided it would be the perfect service to try marketing with Facebook video ads. I assumed that if my ad performed like previous ads I had run on Facebook, I would probably book one or two new clients from the ad campaign. Little did I know that I would have to turn the campaign off early because of too much incoming new business.

On average, one could expect a click-through rate of around 2%. You should be relatively happy having 2% of people who see the ad click on it. Having a lot of experience with video, I already knew that video should work better because movement catches the eye. On Facebook, videos start to play right away. You can’t help but notice a video post on Facebook.

I setup one single Facebook ad which was set to display a video. An optimized campaign would include multiple ads with different ad copy that I could test to see which works best. I did not do that here. The call to action was a button under the video to learn more that would direct people to my website. The video I posted was a collection of clips from weddings I had photographed and filmed. It was not even a 2 minute long video and there was no voiceover. I was able to target that video to be shown only to the type of person who would be interested in seeing a wedding related video. Targeting is good, obviously I do not want to pay money for already married folks to see my wedding video. I was averaging $0.04 per video play. The video was seen 45,446 at the time of stopping the campaign. I was receiving multiple inquiries each day through a lead generation form I set up on my website.

Booking a wedding photographer is a higher ticket item so I knew to expect some fall off after responding to the inquiry with my pricing. I originally planned to run the campaign for 60 days with a total budget of $2000. My goal was to book 2-3 weddings with would be a decent return on investment. I was not prepared for the influx of inquiries I would get. With no marketing at all, I receive 3-5 inquiries each week during the December and January months. With this ad campaign running, I was averaging 3 inquiries each day, and they were warmer leads than people who found me organically.

After booking just over $38,000 in new business, I decided I needed to turn the campaign off early. I love to photograph weddings but I also love to spend weekends with my family. Wedding photography is not my primary source of income, so I try to shoot less than 15 weddings each year. Thanks to this ad, I met that goal in a couple of weeks.

So what do you need to have a successful Facebook Video Ad Campaign?

1. A compelling video. Your video needs to be interesting and what your target audience is expecting to see. My video did well because it was clips from weddings and it was targeted to newly engaged people on Facebook.
2. Good Ad Copy. The text in your ad needs to be compelling. It needs to help people understand your video and drive them to click on the link.
3. Be specific. Do not try to market all of your services in one video. People are not going to watch your entire video unless it is a match for one of their interests. If you have multiple products or services you want to market, each needs it’s own video and ad campaign.
4. Landing Page. Do not drive traffic to your website homepage where people will easily be confused. Send the traffic to a landing page where it is very obvious what you want the viewer to do. If you want them to contact you by filling out a form, they need to know that. If you want them to call or visit your nearest location, tell them so. Don’t leave anything up to chance. Confusion is a conversion killer.

You should also continuously test your campaign. Launch multiple versions of the ad with different text, call to actions (CTA) and even different variations of the video if you have the budget for that. See which ads are performing best and kill the others so they don’t use up your budget. Make continuous improvements. Never be done with testing until you are ready to turn off the campaign.

If you need help, call my team and let us help you get started. It’s only a matter of time before everybody is doing Facebook ads, which will drive up the cost and make it harder to compete.