Results from our marketing campaign - See what worked and what didn't

startuper

I recently launched a new skin care line that is pretty innovative and uses pre-biotics to help treat skin conditions like acne. The products are all brand new and had 0 brand recognition when we started our marketing campaign. We only wanted to do marketing that had a solid ROI. We didn't want to spend money on marketing that didn't at least help us turn a profit. That turned out to be much harder than you would think. It was easy to generate facebook likes, but they didn't turn into sales. It was easy to generate Pins on Pinterest but that too didn't turn into many sales. We listed our produts on Amazon and got a few sales but are so far down the search results we may of well not even been listed. Here is the results of each marketing medium we used:

Facebook: Budget $10,000
Facebook generated a lot of activity like likes and social sharing but we didn't even generate one sale with our ad spend. We only spent $4k of our budget as it was pointless to waste more money.

Pinterest: Budget $10,000
We were able to generate 2200 re-pins of our products which continues to drive new traffic to our site. Our campaign only generated $445 in sales however so the ROI was still very poor.

Google Adwords: Budget $5,000
We had better luck with our Google Adwords budget but still only generated $779 in sales.

Ebassador.com: Budget $10,000 p/m
We chose to run three campaigns on eBassador. The first was a spokesperson contest where we had 2500 people compete to be our spokesperson. Part of the audition process was creating a video about our products and posting it on YouTube. Most of the eBassadors who participated ended up buying the product from our Amazon listing to use in the video even though this wasn't required. This generated $23,800 in revenue before the actual campaign even started... Now i knew we were on to something. We had hundreds of people create videos about our products and then post them on YouTube. They then added the video link to our campaign contest page and then shared the link on their Facebook page to get their friends to vote for their submission. To vote, their friends would have to "Share" our products on Facebook and like our Facebook page. This generated tens of thousands of shares over our 3 month campaign on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.

We also ran a "Product Review" campaign. Each of our eBassadors who bought our product were invited to write a review of it on Amazon. This shot us up to the first page of the Amazon search results for our products and continues to generate new customers for us daily.

In total, our campaign cost $30,000 to run but has generated over $92k in sales and counting. The best thing about this campaign is the long term benefit of having hundreds of product testimonial videos on YouTube sending more traffic and representing our products in a good light. The new social followers we obtained also helps us spread the word about new things we are doing.

eBassador recommended that we supplement our budget with Facebook paid marketing to extend the audience reach of our eBassadors. We didn't choose this option for our campaign but instantly regretted it as I know it would have produced infinently more engagement and better results. We will be using eBassador again for our next campaign in a month from now.

jimmy johnson

thanks for sharing these insights!

Ryan O'Bleness

Interesting findings, @startuper. I'm not too familiar with eBassador, I'll have to look into it. 

startuper

I won't use another marketing platform. Our sales have actually increased to $180k now from that one campaign.