Recently, I spent two weeks promoting a local fundraiser event. As in year’s past, I started by creating a flyer on Canva that contained all the details. The venue insisted on printing 100 color copies of the flyer to be handed out and posted around town. It cost $59 and several hours of hustle to disperse those flyers. In the time leading up to the event, I’m sure hundreds of people saw those flyers, but here’s what I did to massively improve the advertising reach.
First, I made a Facebook Event using the image of the flyer. Then I ran video ads to drive traffic to the Event page. Finally, I retargeted the people who had watched the video ad and showed them a more casual follow up video to watch.
To make the initial promotional video, I gathered some still photos and a video clip from a similar event the venue had previously hosted and made a slideshow video in iMovie. I added an instrumental backing track and also a live narration of the video, just like a radio commercial would do. Then I added captions to this 43 second video and saved it as a square video (aspect ratio 1:1). This way it would appear well in the Facebook and Instagram feeds on mobile devices. I wrote a short text and provided a link to the Facebook Event page.
Next, I set up an advertising campaign for video views in the Facebook Ads Manager. I created two Ad Sets to target different viewers. Ad Set 1 was directed to a cold audience whom I believed would have an interest in the featured artists appearing at the event.
Ad Set 2 was targeted strictly on the basis of geography – people living near the place the event was being held.
I then made a 40 second retargeting video with individual video testimonials about the upcoming event, again providing some stock video backgrounds and a royalty free music bed. I ran this ad to anyone who had watched 25% or more of the original promo video.
So how did they do?
100 Flyers
Total Impressions: Hundreds of people walking by
Cost: $59Facebook Ads:
Ad Set 1: 5979 Impressions
Ad Set 2: 7688 Impressions
Retargeting Ad: 3248 Impressions
Total Impressions: 16,915
Cost: $145Advanced ticket sales were not happening for this event, so we don’t know how the campaign would have converted in that way. But the event was a huge success and a lot of money was raised for a good cause. Looking at the numbers, we can easily see that:
$59 bought hundreds of views, and
$145 bought almost 17,000 views.
Now, Impressions on Facebook means the number of times your ads were on screen, so the same person may have seen it multiple times (which is great). And when we look at the Reach, we see that 6731 people saw the ads at least once.
As if that’s not compelling enough, there’s also a
bonus. We now have a Custom Audience of people who viewed one or both videos whom we know would have an interest in future events like this, and we can run future ads to them.
Once again, it just doesn’t make sense NOT to advertise on Facebook and Instagram.
