Facebook ads for a direct-to-consumer manufacturer

A manufacturer with 25 years of experience in China had no idea how to sell to North America. Sales went from six or seven a day to more than fifty within three weeks.

Sean, DTC ecommerce. Recorded April 2021.

Sean spent 25 years as a design manufacturer in China before the pandemic left him back in Vancouver with time on his hands. He started an ecommerce business selling direct to consumers, which meant selling into a market whose advertising platforms he had never used — Facebook and most of the Western internet are blocked where he had been working.

So the product side was not the problem. He knew how to make and source things. What he did not have was any read on how North American customers are reached, who they are, or what makes them buy.

Sales were running at six or seven packs a day when we started. Within three weeks they were over fifty. Two things drove it, and neither was budget.

The first was creative. Ads on Meta live or die on the asset, not the settings, and video in particular was doing the work here. Producing more and better content, rather than reshuffling targeting, was where the gains came from.

The second was finding the actual audience. Rather than assuming who the buyer was, we watched who was purchasing, tested into adjacent groups, and moved spend toward what responded. For a new product that is the only reliable way to find the market, because the audience you imagine and the audience that buys are rarely the same people.

If you make a good product but have never sold it through paid social, this is the usual shape of the problem: not the platform, not the price, but creative that gives someone a reason to stop, and enough testing to learn who they actually are.

In Sean’s words