| Hey, Today we are continuing our series – by popular demand, no less! – on how to scale Facebook Ads. If you missed Part 1, you absolutely must read that first. As a very quick reminder, last time I broke down why sales often don't scale with Facebook spend. I explained that while scaling in a profitable and reliable way is certainly possible, but doing so correctly is a long and involved process. I view this in four stages: - Scale the offer
- Scale the interests
- Scale the audience
- Scale the budget
With the basic philosophy set out in detail last week, today we'll focus on the first step - how to scale your offer. This isn't about honing your presentation - again - or your ad graphics - again. (Although I do strongly recommend eliminating any possible variables in all that stuff as you go through this process. A series of marginal gains all along that chain will have a big impact on your bottom line. Same goes for your "reader pathways" i.e. your end matter, your newsletter CTAs, your landing pages, your welcome sequences, and so on.) All that is really important, don't get me wrong, but we're moving beyond that type of advice here. scaling your offer What you need to do is really dig into that offer you are making to readers. In fact, we want to surface multiple offers we can present simultaneously. This will create synergy between your books on Amazon and allow you to scale your Facebook ads horizontally - in a way that won't act as a drag on performance. And if you don't know what horizontal scaling is then you really need to read last week's email. Scaling your offer in attractive ways won't just keep diminishing returns at bay, it can push things quite strongly in the other direction. Yes, I'm talking about increasing profitability as you scale because you can hook readers who might have slipped the leash otherwise. And sell all these people multiple books - at once, rather than (hopefully) doing so at some point in the future. Those are big claims, so let's dive into an example - a scenario I've been in many times. launching a book 3 Let's say you are launching the third book in a series and want to put some welly behind it. Maybe it's the culmination of a rapid release you have been powering through over the last couple of months. Or perhaps you released the previous two books as they were ready in the regular fashion. Either way, you have three books to play with now, opening up both more marketing options and increased return baked in; readers now have three things to buy, after all. I've been in a scenario like this dozens of times, particularly for clients. (I don't do so much of this work anymore; these emails aren't an elaborate pitch, I'm not for hire.) I advise moderating the push for the launch of Book 1, and to a certain extent for Book 2 also - holding back much of your juice and ad spend for Book 3. Not saying this is the only strategy that can work, all sorts of wildly diverse strategies can work.... but it's my default advice for all sorts of reasons. Anyway, by the time Book 3 is ready to launch, that's when I like to really go for it. So here's how to scale the offer for the launch of the third book in a series. - You have one campaign pushing the new release - which I like to launch at full price, barring exceptional circumstances.
- You have a parallel campaign pushing the discounted Book 1. That's your series entrypoint and the price means it will be the lowest path of resistance for newer or colder readers - which will normally form the majority of any audience you are targeting, especially when you are scaling up. Having a Book 1 at, say, free or 99c puts it firmly in impulse buy territory for any curious fans of the genre, strongly appealing to anyone who is price conscious or perhaps on the fence about your book.
- You have another campaign, running at the same time, pushing the entire series at once. For me, this normally takes the form of a series page ad - i.e. an ad pointing at your series page on Amazon. These series page ads appeal to everyone, quite frankly, but especially those seeking the best deal or the most value or looking to load up their Kindle. The design of the ad image can be challenging, especially when the series really grows in length, but these ads usually outperform everything else by quite a stretch. If you want to go further again, you can also consider adding Carousel Ads, but I should warn that most authors seem to hate them (I often find value in them, personally). I'll be doing an episode of the Image Workshop dedicated to series page ads - where I'll probably try and squeeze in some Carousel ads too - so keep an eye out for that.
taking the world on The fun doesn't stop there either. You can also expand geographically too - running all these campaigns in the UK, Canada, and Australia as well, with slight adjustments. But even if you just keep things to the USA for now, just by using the above steps, you can multiply your reach without even touching daily budgets or targeting. We'll be doing all that as well, but scaling your offer is the foundational step. Really dig into what you're presenting to readers, try to surface more than one offer you can present them, which will broaden your appeal and increase your return. You might have a free Book 1, a 99c Book 2, and a $2.99 new release. Alternatively, you might have a 99c Book 1, a $2.99 Book 2, and a $4.99 new release. Or any variation thereof. Whichever way you slice it, there's at least three distinct offers you can present to readers, before you even add in potential international expansion. And this is just one of the ways you can scale up. This is the basis for the fancier horizontal scaling we will do with both interests and audiences, before we raise the roof with vertical scaling too. Obviously you can't do this with just one book - and you'll similarly struggle trying to market disparate standalones in this manner; the reasons why should be obvious. And you'll only see a modest benefit with just two series books to play with. But things start to open up when you have three books, and only grow from there. The sky is the limit with this approach. A case in point: I recently applied this logic to the launch of a Book 20. The underlying process is the same: - I push the new release at full price
- I push the Book 1 at free or 99c
- I push the series as a whole - at once.
And I do all those things simultaneously - and they all feed into each other. Of course, there's a lot more to it in practice - many more layers of horizontal scaling and vertical scaling - but we'll get to that in subsequent emails. But this scaling of the offer is the initial step. Sales of the new release lift the earlier books in the series, sales of the first book feed readers through to the rest (and in an immediate fashion if you have more series discounts to dangle), and then the series ads will just turbocharge all of that, selling large numbers of multiple series installments at once. When you pull it off, your entire series can hit the bestseller lists, dominating the charts for your niche - taking over in a spectacular fashion. This creates so much social proof for your books, it's crazy, because you are giving readers huge confidence that your series is for them. Ever wonder how some bestsellers magically get their entire series into the charts at the same time? This is how. It's like having your own Kindle Daily Deal - in your pocket, that you can deploy whenever you like. One that pushes your entire series en masse for 5, 6, or even 7 days, on your schedule. (This latter point is crucial. Because you control everything, it means you can line up your newsletter sends, your swaps, your social media pushes - everything working together, at the same time, across your entire series, for maximum effect.) onwards and upwards Needless to say, I'm a fan of this strategy, but it's only the beginning. Next, we'll scale our interests, then our audiences - which will further multiply our reach and our spend, without touching bids and budgets. And without any hit in performance, once you are going with road-tested images, text, and targets. This is only stage one, but already you should see how you can potentially multiply your Facebook Ads spend, without running into the issues you normally might when you simply raise your buidget. Yes, you might have to do more testing, to make sure the images and ad text for any new offers are resonating with your audience, but once you have those down, you can now expand your campaign considerably without even touching budgets or targeting or audiences. However, before you attempt this, I strongly recommend that you are already extremely familiar with the platform and are already running profitable ads. That you have already chased down all variables in presentation, and so forth. As well as test any ad text and image combinations to make sure they are landing with your target audience. Take it from someone who previously tried to scale without the right preparation, and got his fingers burned: you really don't want to magnify any flaws that might exist in your ads or presentation. Don't add turbos to an ad which is already losing you money; it will just lose you more... faster! Dave P.S. Writing music this week is Blaze Foley with Livin' in the Woods in a Tree. | 
![[THE LATEST] Inside hell's kitchen 👩🏽🍳](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_svPOfDpvJRW23Mk8vcAYUMgtza-Tyh3j2OGnS7g3SDskYYgYOsR95IxQZymtWzFNwzWWH385-kRZQgNCBQ4oXNm2zG_fcaQ3iCsyedFiUfpevsOW5edSEJeefVNeMSZKZtSZNScGPlB2qXd_dI5IXZ1KZtU3-Gumsf8viOAclF-6JqNSYEUmlMBNuHIuYA1JvDubtV50j-lqcnmDksxgq5sOsZ0aNHqacc82pleQUwEoSvSXHuLUy7yC4kM-stBVprfRqLxqTX1lRldTpkih8=w72-h72-p-k-no-nu)
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.