How-To Turn $4,822 in to $16,730 in Sales Using Facebook Ads [Case Study]

In case you didn’t know, Facebook is still the most effective outreach and marketing platform ever created.

With over 2.32 billion monthly active users, it’s pretty easy to understand how hundreds (if not thousands) of your ideal customers spend time on the platform every day.

But don’t think you can just hit the “Boost Post” button and expect to start raking in the dough…

For local businesses to tap into the real power of Facebook, they don’t need to go broad. They need to go narrow!

I created this case study to show you exactly how to do that.

You are about to learn how we turned $4,822 in Facebook Ads into over $16,000 in sales from 18 new-client sign-ups in 90 days AND how we built our client a revenue-generating machine for years to come.

This client sells off-market motivated seller leads to real estate investors and realtors and wants to get more real estate investors as clients.

Now, these are not cheap leads. They are quality leads–people actively looking to sell their home ASAP.

To keep providing their current and future clients these types of leads going forward, they knew they would need help to find more investors and realtors to sign-up. That’s where we come in!

Here’s how we did it…

Step 1: Build A Warm Audience

Most service-based businesses (and local businesses in general) tend to shout “BUY BUY BUY” in their advertising campaigns.

That’ just lame…People hate being sold to (Seriously, think about it. Do you like being sold to?).

Humans like to come to our own decisions and on our own terms. It has to be our idea, duh!

That is where all of your content comes into play.

Luckily, we had already been creating a lot of high-quality content and resources for this client.

We had a little bit of everything:

Blogs
Testimonials
Videos
Infographics
Social Posts

Here are a few examples:

Sharing this type of content Facebook (and other platforms and websites) does 3 essential things for us:

It builds our “retargeting” list on Facebook of people that have visited our website, liked our page, or engaged with our content. That builds our “warm audience.”
It builds our email list so we can create “custom audiences” of those people on Facebook.
It builds our paying customers list so we can create value-based “lookalike audiences” on Facebook AND measure the ROI of our campaigns using its Offline Events feature.

Here are some other types of content you can develop to create brand awareness on Facebook and build a warm audience:

Live Video Streams
Contests
Customer stories/testimonials
Videos / slideshows / visuals / photos
Run “Post Engagement” campaigns to get more post reactions and shares to build social proof.

Step 2: Sales Ad Creative & Copy

So before we jump into all of the ad details for this case study…

Here’s a quick look at the best-performing ad that and you would have seen in your news feed.

Newsfeed ad creative and copy:

Headline: Off-Market Seller Leads for Real Estate Investors

Text: Hey, Real Estate Investor! Wouldn’t you love to have an entire team of geeks working around the clock to find you motivated seller leads? Well, you can! Our LeadGeeks receive cash offer requests from motivated sellers, daily.

Get Leads. On Demand. No Contracts. No Setup Fees. Click the “Request Time” button or head over to www.leadgeeks.com to schedule a call with one of our geeks, today!

Call To Action Button: Request Time

Take note that we’re incentivizing people to request time for an appointment by focusing on a traditional pain-point of real estate investors: finding qualified off-market motivated sellers.

Even though every one of these leads won’t close, this service can allow real estate investors to focus on closing deals instead of figuring out a way to get a consistent flow of leads to turn into booked appointments and eventually closed deals.

Step 3: Ad Details

Impressions: 30,106

Frequency: 1.70

Clicks to Website: 681

Cost Per Click: $0.99

Total Cost: $675.28

Targeting:

Custom audience: Website traffic
Custom audience: Page Engagers
Lookalike audience: Website Traffic
Lookalike audience: Email list
Everyone with the Job Title/Employer: Real Estate Investor

Here’s what the landing page looked like:

Step 4: The Results

It’s funny…Before I heard that my client had done over $16K in revenue from that campaign, I just had a feeling this campaign was going to crush it.

Why?

Well, I didn’t hear from that client for over a week, which typically means they are busy following-up with leads and onboarding new clients.

So, when they finally had a chance to breathe, I called up the owner of the company, and he told me I needed to shut off the campaign until he could bring on some full-time sales reps.

This wasn’t the first time a client has told me this, and it is the ultimate compliment a campaign can receive.

But I didn’t care about how many leads we generated. I wanted to know how much revenue our leads generated.

So, I had the owner pull the leads and sales for all new clients since we started the campaign. We then calculated the cost per lead and cost to acquire a new client. Here were the totals:

That $16,730 of sales is only from new clients from the first 3 months of the campaign (May 14^th – August 31^st)!

You’re probably wondering: How did you confirm that customers were actually coming from Facebook?

Excellent question!

For this client, there are 3 old-fashioned ways we measure ROI:

First, we match people who opted-in on landing page against their closed customer list.
Second, we look at who engaged with our sales ad on Facebook (liked, commented, shared, etc.) and match those names against their closed customer list.
Third, the sales team asks every customer where they heard about us. Can you guess where most people said they saw our ad? Some said our organic search, but the majority said Facebook!

Another way we measure the ROI of campaigns that have sales occurring offline is to use Facebook’s Offline Events feature.

You can call us paranoid (we prefer thorough 😅), but we wanted to make sure we got the most accurate numbers possible for our client using a little technology.

Facebook has 17 unique characteristics of users you can upload to match-up your offline sales to your campaigns.

You only have to upload the name, email/phone number, and date the transaction occurred at a minimum. But the more characteristics you have, such as sales price, billing address, and customer IDs, the higher match rate you will have.

Facebook knows the exact users it shows its ads to, what users clicked on those ads, and any other associated actions we all take in addition to our profile information.

All users must enter an email and phone number to verify their account when signing up, so Facebook uses the sales data we upload and cross-reference it with its treasure trove of data.

Facebook will then attribute sales that occur within 28 days of viewing or clicking an ad to campaigns.

Part 5: How To Use These Strategies For Your Business

Even if you don’t sell motivated seller leads, I’m confident the framework that I laid out here can help almost any service-based business and other local, brick-and-mortar business.

Restaurants, bars, gyms, barber shops, clothing retailers, doctor’s offices, chiropractors, plastic surgeons, and everyone in between!

Here’s how you can apply these strategies in your business:

Create content for brand awareness: People want to buy from people/brands they know, like and trust. Helpful content that’s valuable to your target audience and builds credibility before you ask them to make a purchase.
Target “warm audiences” with offers: Earlier we discussed how it’s not a good idea to hit random people over the head with a “buy now” sign. In the same way, you want to show your opt-in offers (like lead magnets, sales offers, events, etc.) to the people who have already engaged with your brand.
Offer something that will make someone get off Facebook and into your business: Here’s where the magic happens (and where you need to get creative). Based on what you’re selling and who your target audience is, you’ll need to craft some kind of offer that makes people take action and come into your business. That can be a redeemable coupon, VIP event, complimentary service/consultation, contest, etc.
Encourage opt-ins and engagement so you can track your ROI: Whether you’re a store owner or a consultant running the ads, you need (and want) to know your return on investment. The easiest way to do that is to encourage people to “opt-in” by entering their name and email to receive your offer. (There are more ideas for tracking ROI in the last section in case you missed it!)

Alright, let’s wrap this up!

Summary (Plus, What You Should Do Next…)

Learning what has worked for others is just the first step. However, if you want to maximize your potential on Facebook, you need to understand the powerful tools that you have at your fingertips…That’s why my partner put together this bonus, on-demand video that you can get access to below.

Here’s what we’re going to cover:

Proper Tracking Codes: With adding one line of code to your website, multiple social networks can track what people do on your site and enable you to “retarget” them at a later time.
Audiences: The groups of people that you target to show your ads to. Can be built from email lists, website visitors, people who interact with your brand online and more.
Irresistible Offers: Giving people a good reason to come into your business is critical. Creating urgency and scarcity (legitimately) is the best way to do this.
Brand Awareness Campaigns: People don’t want to see sales ads from businesses they’ve never heard about. Campaigns that generate local awareness get your “foot in the door” so people are expecting to hear from you again.
Great Design & Copy: The real secret to making Facebook ads work is beautifully designed ads with persuasive copy that makes people act.

Author: Rahul Alim

Custom Creatives was established to serve as your full-service one-stop Digital Marketing Company, offering graphic design, web design and web development agency, catering to businesses of all sizes. Custom Creatives has designed and deployed over 100,000 banner ads, as well as thousands of websites and landing pages and print collateral for small businesses and large international corporations. Providing exceptional quality services and products with a high return on investment is at the heart of everything we do.