Subscription Box Answers

Supercharge Q4 Sign-Ups with This High-Performing Meta Ads Strategy!

• Liam Brennan

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In today's episode of Subscription Box Answers, I'm sharing what’s currently working well for us on Meta. We're seeing great results with a combination of Advantage+ audience targeting, lookalike audiences, and engagement strategies to boost social proof. I know several brands using this setup, and it's working exceptionally well for them right now. Of course, this is just one piece of the puzzle when it comes to running successful paid traffic campaigns—you still need a compelling offer, a high-converting website, and creative content that resonates. But definitely give this strategy a look, especially with Q4 just around the corner, as it can help you reduce your CAC.

If you have a question you want answered on the show, head over to www.SubscriptionBoxResources.com and join the FREE Facebook group.

Subscription Box Founders Launching September 30th - Join The Waitlist at www.SubscriptionBoxFounders.com

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 questions, you ask the questions, 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. As always, I hope you're having a really good day. Now, on today's episode, we are back talking about marketing, and I want to share with you a campaign setup we're currently running on Meta, aka Facebook Ads, which is working really well for us. Now, we all know Q4 is fast approaching, and I don't need to stress how important this period can be for your business. If you play your cards right, you can get a lot of people signed up, but it can also be a pretty challenging time because it's so competitive, and it can be be a pretty challenging time because it's so competitive and it can be so expensive as well and so noisy, and it can be difficult to grab attention. There's still a lot of opportunity, though, because consumers significantly increase their spending. So if you have your marketing dialed in, you can do really well, and the point of this episode is me sharing something which is working quite well for us at the moment, so you can hopefully take that and apply it to your own subscription box business and get a lot of people signed up. Okay, let's jump into the campaign type. That's working pretty well for us at the moment. So what you want to do is you want to go to your meta ads manager and then you want to select the option to create a new campaign. You then want to select the sales campaign objective. Okay, you'll select that and then it'll bring you to a screen which gives you the choice of choosing between advantage plus shopping or a manual sales campaign. For the purpose of what I'm sharing with you, you will go with the manual sales campaign. Then, on the next screen, you will obviously name your campaign and you'll turn on your advantage campaign budget and you'll put in whatever your daily budget is. On the next screen, you're obviously going to optimize for purchases and then you're going to scroll down to audience controls and you're going to put in the country you're targeting. So, obviously, for us, we either go with Ireland or the UK.

Speaker 2:

If you're in the US, you're obviously going to go with the US. Then you're going to see a section beneath that which says advantage plus audience. Now, this is Really important, okay. You're going to click the option where it says audience suggestion optional, okay. And then you are going to put in a custom audience and the custom audience you're going to put in is a purchase lookalike audience from one to three percent. That's what we're using in BusterBox at the moment and it's working really well for us. Now let me explain to you why this is really important. Now I'm going to pull exactly how this works directly from meta. Let me read it out.

Speaker 2:

Audience suggestions Criteria that you add here helps our system understand the type of people that you want to reach. When your suggestion is accurate, it can help find your audience faster. If you're not confident about the audience for this campaign, we recommend not adding an audience. Okay, the reason why this works so well is right. We all know nowadays that facebook's ai and algorithm is pretty powerful compared to a few years ago. So in a lot of cases, you can go with open targeting and you don't need to put in any audience recommendations at all. And Facebook's algorithm is so powerful it will go out and find your ideal customer. But in this case, if you put in your lookalike audiences your purchase lookalike audiences what happens is Facebook uses that data to find your ideal customer as well as using their powerful algorithm. So it's taking some information from your ideal customers who have actually bought from you in the past and it's mixing that with its own powerful algorithm and then it's own powerful algorithm and then it's going out to find customers who are likely to sign up to your box. Now a great thing about it is it actually starts advertising To your lookalike audience first, so it will try to hit that audience first and get as many people signed up as possible, and then it will expand Out to other people who may not be in that audience but who have similar characteristics as people who have already signed up to your box. We've been running this for a while in BusterBox and it's working really well.

Speaker 2:

Now, will this work well for you? You need to test. Potentially it will work really well for you, but there are some variables here. Number one the quality and quantity of your lookalike audience. So for us, we have thousands of people who have bought from us. In our lookalike audience, you may get away with a thousand customers. I have seen some accounts get away with 500 or even 200 in some cases. It all depends on what niche you're in. There's also some other variables at play, such as your offer, your creative, how well your website converts. All of that stuff still needs to be dialed in. What I'm sharing is just a campaign type that's working quite well at the moment it's not a magic bullet or anything like that, but you should definitely give it a go, because if you have the other stuff dialed in, I think this will work very well for you.

Speaker 2:

Now, something else we're actually doing as well is we are also adding a engagement campaign to the mix. So how it works is we're launching our conversion campaign using the campaign structure which I just shared and then, once it's launched, we are then launching an engagement campaign on a low budget and we are pulling the post IDs from the original ads into that engagement campaign and we're running all of this stuff together. And how this is helping us is the engagement campaign is driving a lot of social proof to the ads. We're getting comments from our customers. We're getting people asking about the product. All of this stuff which helps boost the ads in the algorithm, improve our social proof and reduce our customer acquisition cost.

Speaker 2:

Now I've shared that strategy a few times in the past and I've got lots of questions about is it still working? The answer is yes, it is still working. It's working great for us and it's working great for a lot of other brands I know. Now, one thing seems to have changed with it recently. I don't know if this is just a glitch in our account or is everybody experiencing this, but in the past, to set up this engagement strategy, you would usually set up the engagement campaign first and then you would pull the post ids into the conversion campaign. Nowadays, for us at least, we need to set up the conversion campaign first and then pull those post ids into the engagement campaign, otherwise we come across where glitch and it doesn't work correctly. So if you're experiencing the same glitch, try that and it should solve it for you.

Speaker 2:

Now, before we finish up, I have a very exciting announcement I want to make. On the 30th of september I will be opening my brand new subscription box membership, called Subscription Box Founders. I am doing it with Lo Hickson from Passion and Growth and we're really excited to launch this. This membership is designed to help anybody at the very early stages of their subscription box journey. So if you're in the idea stage or you're planning to launch or you have just recently launched, this membership is for you. I've had so many people reach out to me over the years asking could I make a program for people in the very early stages. I'm delighted to announce we have the program made. The membership comes with over 65 training videos. There'll be new stuff added to it all the time. You'll have a 24-7 community and there'll be live calls as well, and we're also hosting it on school. This is a fantastic platform which makes everything easy by keeping it all in the one place.

Speaker 2:

The subscription box business changed my life many years ago, and now we want to help more people experience the benefits of launching their own subscription box business, and we're going to give you all the knowledge and support you need to build your dream subscription box business. Now, this is basically going to be designed like the Netflix of growing a subscription box business. You'll be able to access all of this stuff for a very affordable monthly fee, and the first 250 people who join will get access to a lifetime founding members discount. If you're interested, head over to subscriptionboxfounderscom and join the wait list now. We'll be opening on the 30th of September. Now we'll be back next week at the exact same time and, as always, if you have any questions you want answered on the show, head over to subscriptionboxresourcescom and join the free facebook group and post your question there. Thanks very much and chat to you next week. Bye.