This Surprising Facebook Strategy Sold Digital Products Fast For One Company. Here's How..

There's a lot you can do with Facebook ads. With tons of data on every user, they're able to offer an unprecedented array of targeting options.

For entrepreneurs, this is a huge opportunity.

But naturally, some campaigns fall flat. There's a lot of trial and error involved in figuring out what's actually effective for your brand. You'll find yourself continually honing your strategy, keeping what works and tossing out what doesn't.

This is all very well and good, but as you can imagine, some things are easier to sell than others.

Digital products, in particular, can be a serious challenge for even the savviest of marketers. This class of products includes things that exist as digital information, but not as a tangible physical object. Their value is in the information they provide.

Think ebooks, webinars, paid courses, and similar offerings.

That can be a hard sell sometimes. There's a lot of great free information out there online, whether you're reading a book on Scribd, checking out a blog post, or watching a Youtube video.

There's so much value available for free, it can be hard to communicate why your product is something that's worth paying for.

And on top of this, the products don't have a physical presence in actual, physical space. Even services have a degree of tangibility, at least in how we think about them, that a digital product usually doesn't.

We live in a 3D physical world, where we interact with 3D physical objects. Our brains are our minds are geared for this, and a lack of tangibility can affect how people see a product.

But that doesn't mean digital products are a dead end.

Far from it.

If you market it right, a digital product can be very profitable indeed.

In a recent AdEspresso blog post, they present an absolutely fascinating real-world case study about how one company's digital product was able to get an impressive 4x lifetime ROI on their Facebook advertisements.

The company is called Mastin Labs, and the product in question was photography software presets that emulate the look of film.

Their success didn't come down to one single strategy, but to a combination of different tactics and approaches that, together, created the perfect storm of sales, revenue, and ultimately, profit.

There's one strategy they used that really stood out to us, because it's one that's really easy to overlook — especially on Facebook.

They started taking a direct sales approach, aimed squarely at what you might term “cold audiences.” That's people who've never even heard of your brand before. Think of it as the opposite of re-marketing.

Here's the full story on exactly what they did to transform cold audiences into a serious profit center.

Cold Audiences – Direct Sales

Before we dive into custom audiences (and our retargeting), we’ll also share how we do direct sales to those that haven’t heard of our brand before. ROI is less than when we re-market to people who have accessed our blog posts, watched our live videos, signed up for our newsletter, and downloaded our ebooks…

But nonetheless, direct sales to cold audience still has been a profitable avenue for us.

In all of the campaigns, we exclude those that know us (either page fans, website visitors, etc.) and adapt that for re-marketing campaigns.

Video Campaigns To Cold Audiences

We’ve gotten a lot of traction promoting video campaigns to cold audiences for direct sales. By taking this approach, there’s also an additional benefit of growing custom audiences out of video viewers to help us with re-marketing.

Similar to our “Join Our Facebook Group” campaign, our J-Trick Campaign (which showcases our software product) was heavily split tested, with 192 ad versions in total.

[image source: AdEspresso]
Split testing is one of the best ways to make sure you’re getting the most out of your investment. As you can see, there can be a 10X difference in cost per conversion for certain interests when targeting cold audiences.

Sharing an ad with the wrong messaging can be costly, that’s why spending upfront time and money split testing can have huge long-term financial returns. AdEspresso did the leg work of split testing and automatically optimized for the ads that performed the best for each audience.

Testimonials

With great testimonials from the group, we’ve been able to test a range of testimonials on cold audiences (and this also come in handy later on when we decide which testimonials to work on re-marketing audiences!).

We tested two testimonials against each other: one with a man and one with a woman. The female testimonial won out – so then went on to split test further elements (like headline and interests). This is the one that won:

[image source: AdEspresso]
As we’ve already demonstrated, there was – again – a huge difference in cost per conversions for various interests. We also noticed a big difference in conversion cost based on the headlines we utilized:

[image source: AdEspresso]