Scroll down if you want the summary version for those who suffer from internet ADD.

First, all these results were achieved in a 7 month old ecommerce store with a product that we have been selling for months. Before this strategy we have been doing heavy manual bidding to scale the business, but it suddenly stopped working for our account and we have been losing thousands per day. So we had to pivot…

After much research we decided to use couple of different things and build our own strategy that can help us survive and it worked as you can see on the photos below. In the meantime we were testing almost every popular way of selling products on Facebook and even our retargeting has stopped working.

The Data: $4.96 CPA, 13.11% CTR (Link Click-Through Rate), $0.07 Per Click For A $39.99 Product In USA, On COLD USA traffic.

Here’s what you need to do step by step

1) RESEARCH THE NICHE CONTENT

Based on our knowledge from experience, other trainings and podcasts, we have decided to start with research about the most popular articles related to our niche.

The most important tip here is that we searched for topic that has buying intent. To conduct our research, we used Buzzsumo.

Thanks to the platform, we discovered that our audience wants to know the 7 things that can help find out how to buy the quality product. So an example headline is 7 Things to Know Before Buying This Soup. Something along those lines. This combines lists with curiosity. 

2) HIRE THE TALENT

Using Upwork, we found a freelancer to write an article for us, but with few important caveats.

First, they had to include as many scientific references as possible. This makes the article more legit and trustworthy. It also makes it more interesting and value-driven.

Second, we asked them to include a call to action within the article itself that is sent to the product page. You must link the article to the product page. The most profitable CTA was the one added at the end of the first point. of the first thing from all these 7 things that make our product to be the right choice) to buy our product and we added a button below each of them that redirected to the product page.

3) BUILD THE AD

Now it’s time to build the Facebook Ad.

We built a simple Facebook ad that consists only two sentences – the first is the name of the article and the second is the call to action and the link.

We used only 2 emojis for this post. But the trick is that we used the same product video that was on the product page itself. If a potential customer decides to click from the article to the product page it will have familiarity to them. We know that this helped our conversion rate significantly.

Because we researched our audience and knew the most popular topics and articles, this drove the click cost significantly down. They even started discussions about the content below the Facebook post and commented on the article page itself. Even though the headline of the article may seem “clickbaity” to some, we didn’t have a single issue with it on Facebook.

Our customers loved it and quite a lot of them went through to purchase. Indeed, we even were able to build our list faster using this article than just the product page directly. 

4) SELECT THE CAMPAIGN STYLE

Now this is an important one. Facebook has many optimization strategies that I won’t go into. You can optimize for Link Clicks, CPAs, or Engagement. For this article, we chose Page Post Engagement because the traffic is much less expensive and we were just optimizing for users to share the content.

They also happened to click the link and purchase the product through this ad. Honestly, you will need to test it on your account because each pixel is different and each account behaves differently. We had some massive success with small budget PPE ads for this type of product campaign.

The CTR Link was 13%+, so clearly we were getting more than engagement, but the algorithm optimized for more engagement, which meant more clicks and more sales, and so on.

5) SELECT THE INTERESTS 

Ok so we didn’t use only interests. Because we already had a pool of users who were purchased the product, we were able to build Look A Like Audiences based off of purchases. Of course, we had interests in the mix, but LLAs performed far better.

Keep in mind, you don’t need purchase LLAs for this to work, you can use Lead, View Content, Add To Cart, Initiate Checkout or any other LLA you may have available based on your pixel information. The further down the funnel, the better we saw performance, hence why we stuck with Purchase LLAs. 

When you follow the strategy like us, there is a chance to achieve such results:

CONCLUSIONS

Think about all this for minute. What are we doing here? We are basically sending users to a value-driven non-sales landing page to convert them into customers. We slowly push them along the funnel. From article->product page->add to cart->checkout->purchase.

Sure you can use a landing page to accomplish the same thing, and we have. However, when the user is on the blog, they are consuming content not being sold. They only discover the product later and decide to purchase on their own. It’s quite simple. After reading, the user convinces themselves that this is the product they want after receiving the ideas about the product. You can literally do this in any niche for any product.

So for example if you’re in the furniture niche, describe 7 places to put the piece of furniture. If you’re in the clothing niche, talk about 7 trendy styles for the season that you’re marketing the product. The combinations are endless. You just need to do your niche research and understand your audience, their wants and desires.

Oh and let’s not forget the retargeting as well. Once you start getting tons of traffic to your articles, you need to build a retargeting campaign to further encourage users to go through your funnel. Below is an example flow of what it would look like. This is a basic flow chart, so obviously there is a lot more going on than this, but this is the 30,000 foot view of what we are talking about.

So here are the bullet points for those who don’t want to read the whole thing. 

  • Find the most popular article in the niche with Buzzsumo
  • Find what your potential buyers want to know about your product before they buy
  • Hire someone to write an article for you on Upwork
  • Use the same product video you have on the product LP in the FB ad
  • Use PPE campaign with short copy ad (test other types too, but start here) 
  • Test interests vs LLA
  • Retarget users and push them through the funnel

As a side note, not every article will work, but you only need one to scale. Some of our articles reach 50+Million people on Facebook. We test new articles almost every week and few are as successful. It’s the same as testing new products, it takes time to find a working, high converting article that convinces the user that this is the product for them. It will solve their pain or need. 

What questions do you have? Comment below.

About the Author Yury Vilk

I've been in advertising since 2006 and started off promoting affiliate offers. From there I helped scale multiple high-5-figure/day campaigns on Google Ads and eventually found my way in Meta Ads. I've worked with & owned eCommerce stores and helped build multiple 8-9 Figure brands both straight sell and subscription. I've helped build and manage a disruptor team with a brand worth over $500M managing over $100k/day in ad spend personally. I've helped venture-capital backed unicorns worth over $2B scale on paid media. I currently help a variety of clients build, scale and grow with paid advertising.

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