Nashville-based nonprofit Corner To Corner wanted to build on the success of their entrepreneurship training program The Academy. They recruited 15 participants for their first cohort in Spring 2017. They brought me in with the goal of doubling their enrollment to 30.
Results
New Students Acquired
16
Cost Per Student
$25
Average CPC
$.97
The Targeting
Targeting was a bit challenging to dial in. The Academy focuses their efforts on equipping African-American entrepreneurs to turn their business ideas into business realities.
The first aspect – African-American – is fairly straightforward since Facebook allows you to target (with some restrictions) based on what they call “multi-cultural affinity”. Essentially this means you can single out specific ethnic groups based on race or country of origin.
The second aspect – entrepreneurship – was more difficult. What we want to do is target people who aren’t yet entrepreneurs but envision themselves that way.
After some searching and playing around with different combinations, we settled on the targeting below which relies on demographics as well as interests (particularly interest in other famous entrepreneurs like Gary Vaynerchuk, Daymond John, etc…)
The Creative
We took several approaches with the ad creative, including stock images, editorial images, and video. The creative that wound up working best was actually this simple iphone shot of a class in session.
We also experimented with long copy ads. I think long copy can especially be helpful for marketing something that is high-commitment. The Academy is a 10-week class, each class lasting for 2 hours. That’s a big commitment and it helps sometimes to devote more energy to educate and persuade within the ad itself.
The Landing Page
The landing page was on the longer side as well. Again, the idea here is that the more expensive an item is, the more questions you need to answers and objections you need to address.
It included important questions like what topics are covered, the full course curriculum, an FAQ section, and even a video montage of past student testimonials.
What Worked
TSU Promotion – in the waning days of the campaign we were a bit behind our target and needed a new idea that might generate some activity. Out of that fell a mini-promotion that would target TSU students and offer them a coupon code for 25% off. This particular ad generated 3 conversions off of just 40 clicks.
Video Ads – We ran a square-formatted version of the testimonial video as a separate ad. It was the second-highest performing ad creative
What Didn’t Work
Hyper-Local Ads – Since the class is community-focused we tried a couple hyper-local ads that featured a picture of the building where the class was to be held. We targeted only the zip code of the building with the hypothesis that people would recognize it as the building just down the street and click out of curiosity. That did not happen. This ad was well over $1.50 per click so we shut it down after 2-3 days.
Stock Image Ads – We ran a few ads using the stock image library available for free on Facebook. These performed pretty badly. My experience is that “stock” looking photos sometimes perform badly on Facebook because they stick out in the feed – in a bad way. They scream “AD!!” and that encourages people to keep scrolling. The ad below was pulling in clicks at a whopping $1.43.
Key Learnings
Authentic > Polished – Develop ad creative that has a real, human quality to it. Audiences are savvy and can smell an overly-polished heavily staged stock photo.
Always Be Testing – Scaling Facebook campaigns is not just about putting more spend into an ad set that is doing well. Scaling “horizontally” is also important. That means always looking for new angles, new audience/message combinations, new ad creatives, and so on.