How this Australian D2C achieved 7x ROAS through this new Facebook Ads format
Quad Lock did it the same way La Mer Thailand achieved 14.2x ROAS. This is crazy 🔥
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Influencer and creator collabs aren’t new – but previously, an influencer collaboration ended after the post was made, relying on the organic reach of the influencer, which is usually only 2-4% of their entire community depending on their engagement rate. Moreover, being organic posts, they usually don’t have the capability to drive traffic to a landing page or target specific people.
However, in June 2019 Facebook launched a new ad format that allowed brands to advertise organic posts from creators as feed and stories ads, completely changing the game for influencer collaborations. 68% of people say that they come to Instagram to interact with creators. This now allowed brands to reach users through these creators.
Now, brands not only can organically reach influencers’ and creators’ audiences, they can also reach almost their entire audiences through paid advertising, greatly increasing the effectiveness of branded content collaborations.
In this week’s edition of Selling Social, we’re gonna look at how one company, Quad Lock, was able to achieve 7x ROAS through this strategy through a case study from Facebook, and also look at how this strategy can play out in a product seeding campaign through a case-study from Cody Wittick.
Let’s get social, let’s get selling 🤑
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Quad Lock’s branded content ads test 🎯
In April 2020, Quad Lock ran a test with Facebook Branded Content ads by reaching out to their network of content creators/ambassadors that had already shown past success in generating engagement with the brand, through previous ambassador/influencer campaigns.
The creators made video content that featured them using the product in their daily lives — while cycling or on their motorbike, in line with the brand and products’ intended use. The idea was to make authentic content, since the company had realised that when consumers perceive a content creator as authentic, they are more likely to take positive brand actions.
Once the content was created, the company then pushed the content in the form of ads, reaching a much wider audience + having the ability to track and measure successes.
This led them to a 7x ROAS and a 10% increase in new customers.
How can you do the same for your brand? 👇🏼
Making it authentic
The idea is that you want your influencers/creators to also follow the same customer journey that your actual customers follow, except of course that for them the product is a gift they didn’t have to pay for. The rest of the journey remains the same, and the product should speak for itself.
For that reason, Cody recommends that when you send products out, you should always include “no strings attached” in the outreach message, just to make it clear that you’re not expecting anything out of the gift.
In fact, there’s a wonderful course on Shopify Learn about this, also by Cody.
Owning the content
As Cody Wittick writes here, you could either consider influencers as distributors or creators of content. If you’re partnering with high-quality people who make high-quality content, it is in your best interest to try and “own” or “rent” the content that they create, so that you can then use this content in branded content ads, as well as in other places like your website and social media.
However, what’s also important is making sure that the content is authentic. Viewers can always tell when something doesn’t feel authentic, and they won’t be as convinced to believe your creators’ message when that happens.
Once your creators have posted their content, which could be stories, videos or posts of all kinds — unboxings, try-ons, reviews, what have you — you should reach out to the best ones and ask them for the rights to that content, at least for 30-60 days. Once you have the rights, you can then run ads with it.
Of course, you can take it a step further and run branded content ads with this content, just like Quad Lock did.
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And then you can keep it rolling
Once you’ve established who are your best creators, you can seed and gift them more products and use the content for ads once again. Or you can find new creators. The possibilities are endless!
You should definitely read Cody’s article on this.
Tools Required
Of course, you can do all of this manually, without a doubt. But if you want to do this at scale, and make your life easier, it’s way better and easier to automate parts of this process and use tools to aid you in the other parts.
Shameless plug: using Ubu, you can find effective ambassadors and creators within the communities of your brand as well as others, mass DM them with a personalised message, manage all the (potentially hundreds of) conversations through the pipeline, and then track the sweet, juicy content (🤤) that comes out – and then DM those creators at scale once again to reach out for rights. Once you set up your ads, you can even manage the comments on those ads in Ubu. All of this, on the same platform.
To finish —
Branded content isn’t new, but with the latest advertising and management tools on the market today, you can take branded content to the next level, to drive your brand’s message even further.
Thanks a lot for reading this issue of Selling Social! See you again next week 😄