The Effect Of Uniqueness on online campaigns
In May of 2020, I started working with a new client – “The Center for Compassionate Mindful Education”, or in short “Educare IL”. The small NGO creates educational programs for incorporation of mindfulness in the educational field. When one of my business associates and I started working with this client, they have never used online advertising for their marketing efforts before. As for digital assets, Educare had a website, and a Facebook page with more than 1,000 followers.
The Funnel
The product we were asked to promote was a professional course for educators and parents, teaching them to implement mindfulness methods in schools and other educational facilities.
Since Educare was new to online advertising, and so was the website – we had to build the funnel and audiences from scratch. The initial budget was not very large, but the client stated that it will grow once a few people register to the course. Taking that into consideration, we decided against sending traffic to the website, using Facebook lead-generation forms instead, for acquiring and registering lead details.
In the absence of a quality video, for the top of the funnel (discovery) we created a simple carousel ad with some pictures from Educare’s activities, and some interesting text. We then promoted this carousel with the Reach objective (since Engagement is not available for carousel ads) to two main audiences: one interest based audience of parents and educators, and another with a 2% lookalike of website visitors. Later on we also added a 2% lookalike of converters to that.
For the bottom of the funnel we created an image ad that leads to the lead-gen form, which also contained technical details of the course at hand. The following ads were served to visitors of the website and people that were engaged with the page over the last few months:
Preliminary results
After running this initial campaign for a few days, it was clear that the funnel is working well. Link click CTR of the adset was close to 3% and general click CTR was over 11% (!). In the first few days we spent 240 NIS (~$65) and acquired 17 new leads – avg. CPL (cost per lead) being 13.50 NIS (less than $4).
The most interesting thing we noticed during those first few days was that even though the stock photo ad yielded a higher CTR, the CPL for the website image was almost 30% lower. The client was pretty happy with the results at that time, but I knew that we could do even better.
Illustrated Ads
At that point I turned to a friend and colleague from my Synergy group (similar to a mastermind group), that is an illustrator. I really loved her style of illustration, and thought that it would fit this campaign perfectly. I showed her the ads we had in place, wrote her a short brief, and requested an illustration we can use for Educare’s ads. The assumption was that illustrated ads will be a more unique for our target audience.
Nina was more than happy to help us out, and quickly mustered up a quote and we started working on the concept. The idea was to show children meditating in a natural environment, using Nina’s unique style that should appeal to parents and educators. I really loved the end result, and after a short round of remarks, we were ready to show the illustrations to the client. They absolutely loved them.
Results
Very quickly after we started using these illustrated ads, we noticed a huge difference in results. 4 days later, the campaign had spent the same amount than before the change, and we could compare apples to apples.
The results amazing. I expected a rise in CTR and decrease in CPL, but wasn’t sure it will be this significant. The results for these 4 days was as following:
| Parameter | First 4 days (regular ads) | Next 4 days (illustrated ads) | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Link Click CTR | 2.85% | 2.40% | – 15% |
| Avg. CPC | 2.13 NIS | 1.41% | + 41% |
| Number Of leads | 17 | 43 | + 152% |
| CPL | 13.50 NIS | 5.5 NIS | – 60% |
Until the time of writing these lines, the campaign has been running for 3 weeks. The link click CTR dropped a bit more over time, mainly due to opening to new lookalike audiences. Even with the CPL increasing a little bit, the campaign continues to be stable around a CPL of ~6 NIS.
Conclusions
- The creative process for Facebook ads revolved around catching the eye of the user. Putting the right offer in front of the right user at the right time. By using illustrations, we differed ourselves from the common feed ads. Doing that, we found that we were able to create uniqueness that helped bring the brand to light.
- My experience in online advertising showed me that we could get more out of the audience we were advertising to. We could have continued the campaign with the results that the client was happy with. If that was the case, we would probably have exhausted the budget way earlier with results that are not optimal.
- Building the funnel correctly from the start was key to get the results we did. Reaching out to a large audience with a post that does not “sell” anything or use marketing language helps with brand recognition later on down the funnel, and makes the decision to click easier for the end user.
Excellent article. I am dealing with a few of these issues as well.. Letisha Donall Bonneau