Facebook ads for a fitness video product
The creators of a Broadway-themed workout were running their own ads blindly. Sales went up, and so did the number of people who made it through checkout.
Jonathan, Fitness DVD & download. Recorded December 2020.
Jonathan co-created a Broadway musical workout, sold as a DVD and as a digital download. It is a genuinely unusual product, which cuts both ways in advertising: nothing to compare it to, and no established audience to buy against.
They had been making their own Facebook and Instagram ads without any training. His framing of it is fair — it seems straightforward, and they suspected there was something they were missing that would make it more effective.
Sales increased once the campaigns were properly built. What he emphasises, though, is the audience work: figuring out who the buyer actually was and what they would respond to, which for a product with no obvious category is most of the job.
The other change was outside the ad account. Traffic was arriving and then losing people at the checkout page, so that got attention too — what a customer sees at the moment of paying, and what they are likely to be thinking. Fixing a checkout is often worth more than any bidding adjustment, because it improves every campaign at once.
Jonathan’s caveat is the one I would repeat. This works if you are open to suggestions. If the arrangement is only that someone places ads and nothing about the funnel can change, most of the available improvement is off the table before you start.
For an unusual product, expect the first job to be finding the audience rather than scaling one. That takes testing, and it takes being willing to change things the ads point at.
In Jonathan’s words
“Before we started working with him we were just making Facebook and Instagram ads ourselves, kind of blindly, because we had no training in how to do it.”
“He’s been really dialed in to figuring out who our audience is and what they’ll respond to. He’s not looking at only how to place the ads — he looks at things like what does our checkout page look like.”
“Maybe don’t work with him if you’re not open to suggestions, because I don’t think you’ll get the full value out of it. He’s had new thoughts that never occurred to us.”
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