I recently had the opportunity to interview one of our Adlab members Brent Broadnax, the founder of NerdBox, about his case study on a Shopify store that got an 800%. ROI in less than 90 days. Nerdbox is a full service digital marketing agency based in New Jersey and has been featured in Ink magazine and The Street. Brent walked me through how he found the perfect ad to attract ideal customers for his e-commerce client.

THE OPPORTUNITY

Brent got his client as a referral from a mutual friend. He and the client spoke briefly about her business, an online women's plus sized clothing Shopify retailer. Prior to working together she had done very little advertising. The little Facebook advertising she tried went horribly. She had also tried Pinterest advertising and wasn't happy there either with her return on investment. The shop was averaging just shy of $850 per month in total gross revenue.

The first step was to have a conversation about who her perfect customer was and what they care about. To do this Brent needed to assess her social media profiles because she had a very active following on Facebook and Instagram. People loved her and her products. He used all of that information to construct an idea of an ideal person and to the market to that person.

A COMMON MISTAKE

In the past, the client would create an ad that would simply announce a product and follow up with a “Come buy it now” call to action. There was no reason for the potential customer to care about the product. Brent told his client she needed to appeal to their needs, or their wants, or their desires when creating the audience and then target that customer’s profile.

Many businesses make the mistake of creating ads without having a clear customer profile. They get frustrated and think that the ads aren’t working, when the reality is the ads are not focused on appealing to an ideal customer. They are simply too generic.

THE AD

Brent’s plan for the ad was to focus on the needs of the client’s ideal customer. What is she going through that would make her consider buying the seasonal clothing in the Shopify store? The goal of the ad was to sell more products from the store by appealing to a woman's desire to be comfortable, to be warm, and to relax after a strenuous day.

Main Ad copy: Was short and simple and played off the target audience’s love of wine as well as offered free shipping.
Ad image: The image was a little outside the box. Feet with a funny pair of socks which also appealed to wine lovers, snuggled in a fuzzy blanket. It made it easy to identify with the products.
Ad headline: Mentions the fall collection. Using seasonal words is a great subtle way to add scarcity. The potential customer believes that these may not be available in a few months, when the season changes.
Ad description: The ad description does a few things. It again mentions the season (scarcity), lists some of the products and restates the offer of free shipping, all while keeping the theme of the ad the same, appealing to the ideal customer’s need to feel “warm and toasty”.
Call-to-action: Shop Now, indicating they would land in a store.

Brent split tested several different ads and this one was the one that performed the best, so he ran the ad for around $10 day, slowly increasing the budget to keep the Facebook algorithm the same.

THE RESULT

Within 90 days the store began averaging over $3800 month in sales and has been able to maintain that average revenue even after stopping that initial campaign.

The average CPC (cost per click) – $1.04
Total clicks to the ad – 1104
Total revenue – $8,345.24
Average ROI (return on investment) – $9.14 per every $1 of advertising

The customers that this ad attracted were not one time customers. They became loyal, repeat customers. The next step with this client is to refine the audience even more, to scale up to $10,000 per month in revenue.

[LISTEN TO THE FULL CASE STUDY INTERVIEW IN ADLAB PREMIUM NOW!]

For so many people defining their initial audience is a difficult process because they cannot make the connection between their audience’s demographics and their intent to purchase a product. This makes it incredibly hard to target in a way that creates those loyal, return customers.

HOW TO FIND YOUR PERFECT AUDIENCE

Facebook has an amazing Audience Insights tool that can help you find some of those buyer intent targeting's that you can use when setting up your ad. Knowing your audience's buyer intent is a game changer for your ad campaign. This lets you know the likelihood of the audience to purchase your product or service without your wasting money on ads first. This targeting yields higher relevance scores on your ads, cheaper costs per click as well as more conversions.

To find the insights tool, click on the top menu of the ads manager and select “Audience Insights”.

Step One

The first thing you need to do when using the insights tool is to set the basic demographic information of your target audience. This includes:

Location
Age
Gender

You can learn how to setup business location targeting HERE.

Step Two

The second step to using the insights tool is to enter your audience’s income range. This step often gets overlooked and can be the difference in the success or failure of your ad campaign. This is especially important when selling high ticket items. You don’t want Facebook to show the ad to people who cannot afford your product and waste money on clicks that won’t convert.

Continue adding relevant demographic information such as:

Marital status
Education
Family makeup (are they parents, etc.)
Life events

All of those things are important indicators as to whether a person will purchase a product or not.

Step Three

Begin adding and assessing interests. The audience insights tool shows you what percentage of your selected audience is on Facebook. It shows qualifiers of your audience such as

pages they like
activity they engage in
purchase behaviors
location concentration

[LEARN THE FULL B.I.B.I. AD TARGETING METHOD INSIDE ADLAB PREMIUM]

You can really get a sense of who your audience is and what types of things they are already spending their money on. You can then take this information and stack it inside your ad targeting in a way that excludes unqualified / uninterested people from seeing your ad.

THE TAKEAWAY

The secret to any successful ad campaign is knowing who your ideal customer is. To identify your ideal customer, you need to answer the following four questions in as much detail as possible:

Where is Your Customer Now?
Where do They Want to Be?
Why do They Want to Be There?
How does your Product Help Them Get it in a Unique Way?

The reason Brent was so successful with his e-commerce client was because he had a clear vision of who the ideal customer was, and the things they were most likely to purchase. He created an ad that attracted that specific customer and the results were life changing for that business.

Setting up ad targeting that attracts the perfect or ideal customer can be tricky if you don’t have a customer profile to build from. If you would like to learn more about professional ad targeting as well as get access to our Adlab Mastermind, click the image below to join Adlab Premium.