On January 6, 2019, I ran the first of two tests on our Shogun Albany Instagram account, as part of my efforts to run marketing for one of the family restaurants.
Test 1 : An Instagram contest where participants had to follow the Shogun account, tag 2 friends, and guess the type of fish in a photo. One winner would win a $10 gift card to Shogun.
Test 2 : I ran 2 ads to drive people to this contest, against two different Audiences: Mothers living in Albany and surrounding areas and Students living in Albany and surrounding areas.
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Here’s a summary of the results
We saw a lift of +29 Followers. Of those followers, 25 were organic , while 4 came from paid traffic. (My attribution came from analyzing the followers. It’s not perfect but a fair guess.)
The campaign was a $50 Spend ($10 on the prize, $40 spent on ads.)
Results analysis
In the 4 weeks before the contest, the Shogun Albany account was averaging 6 new followers a week. My major strategy for gaining followers was “hand-to-hand combat” (H2HC) which is a work stack of posting new content, following new people, following new hashtags, and engaging with people on the feed.
(Note: H2HC continued during the week of the contest, so it’s likely I would have seen a small increase in followers even without the contest.)
Positive: Gaining 29 followers instead of 6 is a lift 500% lift.
Negative: From a pure math perspective, gaining 4 followers from an ad spend of $40, or $10/follower, is not good ROI. However, I think it’s a necessary cost to continue learning about the process. I won’t draw any conclusions on ROI until I’ve spent about ~$1,000 on ads.
Campaign summary
Here’s a snapshot of the campaign results:
Key takeaways from this contest:
First, it’s important to remember in the restaurant business there are only two real metrics:
Revenue
and
Customer Satisfaction
Everything else is a proxy. IG followers is a (far removed) proxy from either of these metrics… but we must continue to become more proficient in this channel if we want to use this channel to market to our customers, understand their needs, and bring them into the store or order delivery.
Second, as hinted at above I’m less concerned about the immediate ROI of a single campaign and more concerned about learning as much as we can by running these experiments. Better to learn now before it’s too late. And I learned a great deal about targeting an audience, what is allowed creatively on this ads platform, and just general “how to” go about running ads.
For example, something I learned is that in order to link from a sponsored ad to an organic post on your feed, you can’t link directly via the ads platform. You need to link to an external link that redirects to the organic post (which I did via Squarespace’s redirect).
Third, there’s a degree of long-term brand building at play here — it’s not just about straight conversion: By running the ads against Mother and Student Audience, we got ~4,700 impressions, which is worth something, even if that “something” is difficult to measure.
Finally, in this particular test, running an ad against Students vs. Mothers was 2x more effective in all categories (results, CPC, reach/impressions). The leads to the following two hypotheses:
- If I’m offering a discount, this appeals more to Students than Mothers.
- If I’m going to run ads against Mothers, I should use more of an emotional appeal in my image, copy, and CTA
Here’s a bit deeper dive into the audience we reached:
It’s a small test, but influences how I think about our targeting:
- Should I narrow our focus on women students?
- Should I narrow our focus on Moms between the ages of 25 – 44 years old?
What I did next
First, I picked a winner from the contest, announce it, and deliver the prize.
Then, scheduled time to run this contest again in a month (I don’t want to burn audience out by running it too often).
Third, I picked a new test. The hypothesis: By creating an emotionally evocative ad against Mothers I can drive enough orders to recoup the cost of an ad. For the creative: I’ll experiment with an image (easier lift) and a video (much harder lift because I don’t know how to do it yet).
However, this test was not the priority. Instead, what I focused on next was:
- Building back up my organic posts
- Getting new assets for organic posts (alcohol specials)
- Finishing fixing the website (which has been a work in progress)
- Exploring working with influencers
I worked on these activites over the next six months, before putting ending this marketing project (as covered here).
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Photo: Shogun Albany
