Facebook Ads Case Study - Vital Animals Course Launch

Wondering how to launch your product using Facebook Ads?  Facebook Ads can be a great place to reach your perfect audience and in this case study, you’ll learn some key things you need to have in place before launching your product.

I recently helped Dr. Will Falconer with a Facebook Ad Campaign for his new product, the Natural Rearing Roadmap.  Dr. Falconer is a holistic vet working to educate and empower pet owners about natural remedies and rearing.  His site is the Vital Animal and you can find his Facebook Page here:  https://www.facebook.com/VitalAnimalNaturalPath.  He’s also a great guy.

Dr Will Falconer Vital Animals

The campaign and the course sales were a success but it wasn’t only because of Facebook Ads.  Dr. Falconer had a lot of things in place that helped ensure a great launch that I’ll share with you in this article.

Strategy:  Build the Email List with a Series of Freebies

Dr. Falconer was using Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Formula, which I also highly recommend, as a roadmap for his launch.  I recommend you start with the book before diving into the course to make sure it’s right for you.

There were 3 freebies that included a video of Dr. Falconer and a downloadable ebook around 3 topics that directly related to his course:

  • Puppy Immunization Without Vaccination
  • HPP and “Raw” Dog Food – Is Your Raw Food Really Raw?
  • Choosing a Natural Rearing Breeder

He released them about 4 days apart and each freebie had its own landing page where people could sign up.

Then at the end of the freebie promotion, he announced his course and had the doors open for about 5 days.

Checklist to have in place before your Launch

Some of the things that Dr. Falconer had in place to make this launch successful:

  • 3 different freebies to test – that helps ensure more optins and you can then see what your audience finds more appealing
  • Individual landing pages for each freebie
  • Individual Thank You pages for each freebie so we could track the optins.
  • Videos and ebooks were completed ahead of time.  The ebooks or videos weren’t terribly long but they contained valuable information (not just fluff).
  • Facebook Pixel installed on the landing pages and the thank you pages.
  • Time to split test the ads.  This is very helpful if you haven’t run ads before and don’t know your perfect keywords – you need to have some lead time so that there can be a testing phase.

He also had a few bonus things in place that helped the overall launch:

  • A decent amount of web traffic so that we could do retargeting with his ads.
  • An established brand and email list.  This is helpful but not necessary for a good launch.  If you are well-known in your industry you have a warm audience but I’ve also seen launches go well with a cold audience also.
  • An easier target for his product.  We were able to easily find good keywords for his product – dog owners or other Facebook Pages that indicate that a person is interested in holistic vet practices.  Sometimes that can be more challenging for some products.

The Facebook Ads Plan

During the freebie promotional phase, I created a split test plan with several different audiences to start with and used the same ad text and image so that we knew which audience and keywords performed best.  Then once we had the best performing demographics, we tested different images.

Some of the demographics we tested were:

  • Dog owners
  • Raw feeding keywords (an area his target customers are interested in)
  • Lookalike Audiences (to his website traffic and email list)
  • Warm audience who weren’t subscribers already (fans and website visitors)

Here are a few examples of the ads:

Immunization Facebook AdImmunization Facebook Ad2

HPP Facebook AdNatural Rearing Breeder ad

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sales phase: Facebook Ads

 

We would watch the optins for each stage and make adjustments to the plan based on the results.  Then during the Sales phase we only ran ads to the warm audience except for one ad we ran to the best performing audience to see how that did.

We tested both the best performing image and Dr. Falconer’s image since we were focusing on his warm audience who knew him.

We also ran a “Last Call” ad on the final 24 hours of the sale.

 

Natural Rearing Roadmap course ad with Dr FalconerLast Call Natural Rearing Roadmap

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Facebook Ad Case Study Results

Along the way we saw that the best Freebie was the Puppy Immunization lead magnet – it had the most optins at the lowest cost.

And we tested several images with that lead magnet and found that the 3 puppies together was the best converter.

We tracked the sales from the ads with the Facebook Pixel so we could see those conversions.  But Dr. Falconer also went through the sales and separated those out that had been on his list before so he could see exactly how many sales were truly due to Facebook alone.

  • 10 Sales directly due to Facebook Ads
    (brand new subscribers)

–$997 Course

–Several Assisted Sales (previous subscribers)

  • Resulted in a 221% Return on Ads Investment!  This doesn’t include the assisted sales numbers.

So you can see that Facebook Ads can be a powerful way to help grow your email list and then launch a course. The other benefit is that you find out what demographics respond to your ads and what freebies and topics work best to grow your list.

I hope this has given you some inspiration for your next launch.  Let me know if you have used Facebook Ads in a similar way in the comments below!

And definitely check out Dr. Falconer’s Page and the Vital Animal website if you are an animal lover – he has great advice.

 

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If you want to go farther with Facebook Ads, be sure to check out my full Facebook Advertising Secrets course which is amazing – 4 modules covering Facebook and Instagram advertising and a private Facebook Group to ask questions! Sign up NOW!

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