Subscription Box Answers

A Simple Framework For Growing Your Subscription Box This Q4 (Facebook Edition)

• Liam Brennan

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In this new episode of Subscription Box Answers, Liam jumps into a straightforward yet powerful Facebook advertising framework tailored for subscription box businesses. As we navigate the busy Q4 period, this episode comes at a crucial time, offering actionable content to capitalise on this peak season.

Throughout the recent weeks, our podcast has been a treasure trove of do's and don'ts for Q4, and today's episode continues that trend with even more practical advice. We're right in the thick of the busiest time of the year for subscription boxes, making it the ideal moment to attract a wave of new subscribers.

Liam's approach simplifies the complexities of Facebook ads, breaking down strategies into easy-to-implement steps. Whether you're looking to refine your current ad campaigns or starting from scratch, this episode is packed with valuable insights to help you see significant success this quarter.

Also, we're excited to hear from you! If you have a question you'd like answered on the show, join our community in the free Facebook group at www.SubscriptionBoxResources.com.
 
It's a great opportunity to connect with fellow subscription box owners and get your queries addressed in upcoming episodes.

Tune in now to transform your Q4 strategies and end the year on a high note with an influx of new subscribers!

Speaker 1:

Welcome to Subscription Box Answers with your host, liam Brennan. You're no rubbish, no crap. Straight to the point podcast with real, actionable tips, real strategies and insights from the industry which will help you start and grow your own successful subscription box business. You ask the question, you ask the questions, liam gives the answers. It's as simple as that.

Speaker 2:

Welcome back to a brand new episode of Subscription Box Answers. I hope your week is going very well and I hope business is picking up a lot now that we're right in the middle of Q4. Now, when you listen to this podcast, it's going to be sometime in early November and if you've been listening over the last few weeks, you know I have covered Q4 and particularly Facebook ads, in real detail, because I want to just share everything I know to help you have the best possible Q4, because it really can be unbelievable for your business when you get things right. And in today's episode I'm going to wrap it all up with one more episode, kind of a mixture of Q4 and acquiring customers with Facebook ads. I'm doing it because I know there's some people that need to hear this. If you're listening to this podcast, I want to help you right. I want to help you have the most successful Q4 that you've ever had before.

Speaker 2:

If you play your cards right during this time of year, you can actually achieve some serious growth in your subscription box business. I've said it so many times, but it's true. But the key is you actually have to play your cards right, okay, If you want to achieve some unbelievable growth and your entire marketing plan consists of posting some organic posts on your Facebook page. Honestly, you might as well shut up shop and take the rest of the year off. I'm not looking to offend anybody, but what I'm saying is simply the truth. If that's it, if that's all your marketing consists of, you're probably going to be very disappointed with your results at the end of Q4. I want to help you get a lot of subscribers signed up and make.

Speaker 2:

Inconsistent organic content with no results leads to burnout and exhaustion. It's highly unlikely doing this on its own is going to drive any kind of meaningful growth and, in fact, you could actually argue, doing it on its own without anything else settled properly is probably a complete waste of time. Now, how do we actually know this? Well, my company, busterbox, has over 80,000 followers on social media and the amount of sales that we actually get from organic posts is really, really small. If we were just dependent on organic posts, honestly, we probably would have shut down our business a very long time ago. We never would have got anywhere. And why is this the case? Well, organic reach is absolutely tiny these days and only a very small amount of your followers actually see your posts. Now, there are things you can do to warm up your page, to get better engagement, which can help a bit, but really it's not enough to get any kind of consistent and meaningful growth.

Speaker 2:

If you want to scale up your subscription box business or any business for that matter this is what you need, right? You need a profitable, repeatable and scalable way of acquiring customers. That's riggy riggy important, and if you don't have a profitable, repeatable and scalable way of getting customers, everything is going to be riggy riggy difficult. It's going to be really hard to scale up your business around Q4 or any time of the year for that matter If you're dependent on hope as a marketing strategy. That will not get you to the place that you want to go with your business, and the place that you want to go is having a successful business that gives you a great life. Okay, and there are many marketing channels and strategies that can help you achieve a profitable, repeatable and scalable way of acquiring customers, but for the purpose of this podcast, I'm focusing on Facebook ads.

Speaker 2:

It's 2023, soon to be 2024, and Facebook ads are still the best and most cost effective way of acquiring customers for the majority of subscription box companies. We have used so many different marketing channels in Busterbox. Seriously, we've tried everything Google, tiktok, direct mail, affiliates, snap, pinterest, organic you name it. We have tried it in Busterbox partnership marketing as well, and they all work to some degree, if you know how to actually run them properly. Okay, some of them are a lot more difficult than others. Some of them require a much bigger investment than others to actually get movement, but Facebook ads are still our best performing channel. We've actually acquired over 50,000 customers with Facebook ads and, after speaking to so many different subscription box companies over the last few years in so many different niches and these will be big boxes as well, with their revenue ranging from 1 million to over 100 million I would say that 99% of them achieved the majority of their growth using Facebook ads. That really tells you something.

Speaker 2:

Now, you can end up losing money with Facebook ads as well if you don't run them correctly, and you can lose money with any marketing channel. If you don't run it correctly. It doesn't matter what the channel is could be influencers, whatever. You can lose money if you don't know what you're doing, and it can take a bit of time to figure out the correct strategy to get the channel to actually perform at the level you need it to perform for your company. But what I'd say to you is, if you want to grow a highly successful subscription box business, that will change your life. It's probably a very good idea to develop your skills and get very good at running Facebook ads. We get a lot of people signed up from Facebook every single day and we're always testing new things, and in this podcast, I'm going to share a really simple setup that you can do in your own subscription box business to hopefully make things easier for you when it comes to running Facebook ads and hopefully put you in a position to get some really good results during Q4.

Speaker 2:

But before we jump into that, I want you to remember a few things. Number one if you don't run your ads correctly, you will get poor results and you will burn money. If you don't run ads, please ensure that you have another repeatable, profitable and scalable way of acquiring customers. Otherwise, you're probably going to get stuck in the mud for a long time. Now there's many ways you can do this. For this podcast, I'm focusing on Facebook ads. If you don't run Facebook ads but you have another way of doing this in your company, that's great. If you hire the wrong person to run your ads, you will get poor results and you'll burn money. There's a lot of pretenders out there these days who literally don't have a clue about advertising and will position themselves as experts and all they'll actually do is send your money up in smoke. But remember, if you do run your ads correctly, you will get a lot of people signed up and essentially change your life. So let's jump into it. This is a simple campaign that we've used to get 50 to 100 subscribers signed up per day from Facebook ads.

Speaker 2:

So the first point offer. Now, if you followed me for a while, you know that I'm always going on about the offer and I actually find it funny because I haven't really done too much about offers on this podcast. But if you read my blog at leanmygabrennancom, you'll notice I'm always talking about the offer, and that's because it's absolutely essential if you want to grow a highly successful subscription box business with a customer acquisition cost that actually makes sense financially. We test a lot of different offers in both their box. At the moment, if you sign up for a six or a 12 month subscription, you will get a free smart doorbell with your first box and we position this as a way to stop your dog from going crazy back in when somebody is at the door, but it's just a really cool product.

Speaker 2:

In general, these days, offers are more important than ever. Because of the way the economy is and the amount of noise on social media, you need to find a way to grab attention, cut through the noise and get your customers to sign up in massive volume for a cost that makes sense, and a good offer will help you achieve this. We lean into offers heavily and this is a big part of the reason why we are the biggest dog toy and treat subscription in the UK and Ireland. There are many different offers you can test and here are a few Double first box for free, free gift, but it has to be something really appealing. A deep discount or a free box negatives and benefits to something like this or free digital products. If you want to learn more about offers in general, definitely check out my blog or my book, the subscription box blueprint, because I go into offers deeply. In that book there's actually a chapter pretty much centered around offers, so definitely check that out. You can grab a copy on Amazon. Your offer is really important, and if you try to run ads with one that does not convert, your customer acquisition cost will be really really high and your volume will be really really low. Basically, you'll burn money. When you get the offer right, though, things will change really quickly and it actually becomes a lot easier to get a lot of subscribers signed up for a pretty low customer acquisition cost.

Speaker 2:

The next point targeting. If you're not targeting the right people, it really does not make a difference how good your offer is or how good your ads are. You'll literally be flushing your money down the drain. A very good example would be imagine you owned a dog subscription box, but you just targeted cat owners who never owned the dog. Is there anything you could do in your ads to get these people to sign up? Probably not, because they don't own a dog, so they have literally no use for your box whatsoever. You need to take this kind of thinking into every single campaign that you actually set up. You have to target the correct people and your message has to be right for them. Correct targeting plus message market fit equals a lot of success.

Speaker 2:

Thankfully, these days, facebook has made targeting a lot easier and if you've been running a while you can test open targeting and it will probably work well for you Not all of the time, but there's a good possibility it will work for you. If you don't know what open targeting is, let me explain. This is when you leave Facebook to do the targeting for you, but you may need to have some purchase data on your account for it to be effective. Other audiences that are very effective are lookalikes. Yes, lookalikes still work well in 2023 and my advice would be to refresh all of your lookalikes for Q4, because teams have changed on Facebook recently enough and if you are still using older lookalikes, the data probably isn't the best and your performance won't be the best. If you're only starting out and you can't use open targeting and you don't have enough data to make lookalikes, then my advice would be to test interest-based targeting. Yes, interest-based targeting is still working very well in 2023.

Speaker 2:

If you're in a very mass market niche, it's probably going to be obvious what interests to test first. If you're not in a mass market niche and it's not obvious, then you'll have to do something which I call the dirty work, and that's essentially getting a survey out to your ideal customers via influencers, instagram shoutouts, posting in groups and using that information to build up a customer profile. Then taking that information to Facebook and building your customer profile there so you can target them, or turning that information into a lookalike audience, which can work really well. There are many ways you can do this, but you have to get your targeting right if you want to get any results whatsoever. The next point structuring your compingue. 99% of the time, you're going to optimize for purchase conversions, unless you're doing a very particular strategy. Any other objective is basically the equivalent of putting your money into a bag, then going to the locker field and setting it up in flames, and honestly, you will probably be better off setting it up in flames, because at least it will be somewhat entertaining for a few minutes. Now look, facebook has made it very clear if you want sales, you go for the purchase converging objective and that's it. This way, you are targeting people who are actually likely to respond to the ad. And boy, facebook collects this information and puts different coins of users into different buckets. Yep, targeting this bucket may be a bit more expensive, but the people in it are actually buyers. You could pick a different objective where the bucket is cheaper but the users aren't buyers and you just get a load of window shoppers over to your website. I know what I'd prefer pay a bit more but actually get sales.

Speaker 2:

As far as ABO and CBO goes, just pick what works for you. Abo is AdSET Budget Optimization, where the budget is controlled at the ad set level. Cbo it's called something slightly different now, but it's still the same. Cbo stands for Campaign Budget Optimization, where the budget is controlled at the campaign level. Just pick what works for you. Usually ABO is best for smaller budgets and testing ads and then when you have a winner, you can go to CBO to actually scale it. If you've been running a while and you know the kind of ads that work, you can just jump straight into CBO so you don't waste your time doing any kind of unnecessary testing when you could be acquiring a lot of customers instead during CBO. As far as the number of adsets go, this depends on your budget and goals. You can't have 15 different adsets running if you're only spending $30 per day. As there won't be enough budget to spread, I'd actually recommend keeping it low enough. Tree to Seek's ad sets these days is normally a good choice unless you're spending a lot of money.

Speaker 2:

The next point write an ad copy that actually converts. Now, I could talk about copywriting all day and give you a million different tips, but let's keep this really simple. Yeah, you can use AI to help you with your copy, but do not be one of these companies where you depend on it for everything and you end up with some vanilla garbage, or it sounds like, or to detail, write your ads. Ai is a tool, a great one at that, but there is so much low quality copy out there these days because people are lazy and depend on it for everything and don't use original prompts to give it some character. That's good news for you, though, because if you put a bit of effort into your copy, you can stand out on the news feed, beat your competition and get a lot of people signed up to your box. Now, we could spend all day on this, but here's a really simple framework to follow.

Speaker 2:

Number one pattern interrupt. This is how you grab attention on the news feed. Now attention, now sale. Number two offer. This is where you hit your customer with the unbelievable offer. Number three explain what you do. Explain what your box does and what benefit the customer will get. Number four culture proof. You need culture, proof to sell things, ongoing Reviews or anything you've been featured in can be mentioned in the ad Call to action. Tell the customer to sign up and create some urgency if possible. That's the framework you can follow. We still stick very close to that framework to this day. I came up with this many years ago and it works. That's why we keep doing it.

Speaker 2:

The next point images and videos that convert. Now, user generated content works really well for images, and you can turn multiple pictures that get sent in from your customers into a collage. The best way to get these pictures is to run a best picture competition with your subscriber base and they'll send them in. Other images that convert are ones with the offering, the text, packed boxes and colorful backgrounds. Colorful background usually means you'll get a higher click tree rate, which will bring down your customer acquisition cost. Now, that's explaining it on a very basic level.

Speaker 2:

Videos can be done in a million different ways. The easiest ones are UGC content. You simply record the box being opened and go through the products one by one and mention the offer. Obviously, that is a simple way of explaining it, but it works, and when it comes to videos, we don't really use influencers anymore. We do use the TikTok Creator Marketplace for specific TikTok content, but normally I just write a script and get somebody with a dog to do the video when I'm in the room to ensure it's perfect. The thing with influencer videos is that send them to you and a lot of the videos will be great, but they may be missing some critical elements that you need to ensure the video actually converts, while if you do it and you write a script, you can ensure the video has everything. We've been doing this for about five years and this strategy has acquired thousands of subscribers and generated a lot of money in revenue. I recommend you do the exact same for your video and image ads for Q4. Now, I'm explaining this on a very basic level, but if you want to hear me explain it in greater detail, I highly recommend checking out my blog or grabbing a copy of my book, the Subscription Box Blueprint, where I cover image and video ads in greater detail. Take this framework that I've just covered and apply it to your Facebook campaigns this Q4.

Speaker 2:

Don't be dependent on organic posts. If you're looking to achieve significant growth, you have to have a way of acquiring customers with a profitable, scalable and repeatable strategy. When you correct that. It's giving you a lot of control in your business to scale as quickly as you want to. Now we're going to be back next week, as always, at the exact same time. If you have a question you want answered on the show, make sure you head over to the free Facebook group at wwwsubscriptionboxresourcescom, join it and post your question there, and it will be answered on a future episode. Thanks very much for listening and see you next week, bye, bye.