A 'runaway try' with this No-Pixel Remarketing Strategy
"Why the rugby theme Stu?"
Nope, this is not some clickity-baitity trick to take advantage of the rugby tournament that advertisers get into big trouble for mentioning by name without paying for sponsors rights.
The real reason is that my best example of using this re-marketing strategy was when working on the Crusaders Coaching Leadership Programme in 2022. I'll get to that in a moment, but for those casual readers, let me start out with a few basics.
What is remarketing?
Remarketing is a term used to describe a type of marketing campaign that takes happens after someone has responded to an initial awareness marketing campaign. I've outlined two examples below to help clarify;
Example One: Website and Facebook
You create an awesome blog article and by sharing it everywhere, it gets a lot of attention and brings a lot of people to your website.
You've got a Facebok tracking pixel installed on your website. As visitors (not all, just some of them who have compatable browswers on their phone or computer), visit your site, they are added to an audience on your Facebook Business account.
You can now run a Facebook remarketing campaign which uses that audience and you can show them lots of ads.
This is useful because you are now focusing your advertising spend only on people who have shown interest in your website.
Example Two : Webinar and Email
You advertise a webinar on a Google Ad. Everyone who registers on your webinar is subscribed to an automation flow in Mailchimp and they get several emails which market your product/services and value.
Yes - example two is remarketing. There are a bunch of other forms of remarketing as well, but this article is about my favourite one, so lets talk about rugby.
How I Got to Work with the Crusaders
If you're not a rugby fan, you might not know that the Canterbury Crusdaers are the worlds most successful rugby club. They've won more major competitions than any other club - ever.
From their on-field success, they have had a lot of people asking them about how they have built such a successful sporting unit and they realized that they had a very special culture and 'system' in which their entire organization used to breed success.
There is a long story behind all of this, but eventually, this realization lead them to partner with Boma Global and create The Crusaders Coaching Leadership Programme. A cohort lead trainng courses that brings the Crusaders winning culture and system to rugby coaches all around the world.
This programme was launched early in 2022 and through a chance DM that I had on LinkedIn in August, I ended up being recurited to the team to help launch their inaugrial cohort of coaches.
Although I'm only a moderate rugby follower - the idea of working with two world class organizations like this was incredible - I jumped at the opportunity.
The Campaign
The campaign that we were running was global. We were looking to identify and then attract thousands of rugby coaches from all over the world. We did a thorough analysis and a lot of testing and found that the most accessable channels were as follows;
- YouTube
- The clubs and organizations around them
When I came on board, the team had received a bit of success on social media mostly due to the Crusaders existing page being supportive and re-sharing a couple of posts to their hundreds of thousands of followers.
The other thing that happened when I arrived was that a new 'sizzle video' had been created. This video was a beautifully put together piece of emotive story-telling. It had cost a fair amount, but for me, it was worth every penny.
Our campaign goals were simple - get as many rugby coaches to register for the course waitlist so that our email marketing drip campaign could help persuade them to sign up to the campaign.
How the Ads Strategy Worked
Instead of just posting this video and then hoping that its creative power would get people to sign up, I instead decided to use it very strategically. Here's what we did;
- We posted it with a 'watch this ...' style caption to the Facebook page.
- I immediately went into Meta Business Manager and added the video post as an audience asset that could be used to track the people who watched it (scroll to the very bottom of this article for a walkthrough of this).
- We then re-shared the video to as many rugby, coaching and sports related groups that we could find. This was not difficult to get past admins because the video was so awesome that people wanted to watch it.
- The video was an anticipated hit with immediate collection of comments and a few-reshares. Its important to note that I wanted for this to hapen - I wanted Facebook to collect useful data about who was liking, who was commenting and who were re-sharing.
- After about a week, I then applied quite a large sponsorship budget to the video and also used geographical, demographical and interest based targeting metrics in the ad campaign. This brought the video a large number of new 'eye-balls' to discover it. The comments started flowing in and the re-shares increased. It was being seen by 10s of thousands of people.
- With 10s of thousands of people who had now watched the video, we created a multi variant ad campaign (thats a campaign with lots of variants of ads, images and mini-videos) that was shown only to people who had watched 75% of the video. This meant that we could not lower our overall advertising spend.
In this campaign, we knew were talking to people inspired and interested. We had gotten their attention so our copy was more deep and focusing on their aspirations as rugby coaches. We were able to drill into thei 'why factor' more. - The results from this campaign created and immediate uplift in subscriptions to the waitlist of the programme that we were marketing and about two weeks before the programme kicked off, we received thousands of registrations and had sold out the tickets.
- The on-going value of this campaign was that a large number of the email registrations who did not sign up, ended up signing up in one of the next two cohorts.
The video that we used is below, it was created by some brilliant video creators based in Christchurch and I strongly encourage you to switch on sound and give it a watch.
Rugby Was the Winner at the End of the Day
I could not help but end on that overused pun, but there is a truth to it. For me, doing purposeful stuff in your job makes you better at it and from the get-go, I saw this as a 'product' that I really wanted to bring to the world.
I see that sporting coaches in my younger life had a massive impact on me. They taught me resiliency, compasion, team-work and being goals focussed. I learned that repetition creates mastery and that great coaching has a ripple effect right into the depths of communities. Coaching matters.
I also want to finish off and talk about budgets.
Doing This on a Shoestring
This campaign did use a budget higher than most small companies would use BUT not exponentially higher. In fact, this campaign cost less than my very first Yellow Pages Ad cost me in 2004 and much less than my first local radio ad campaign in 2006.
You can use this particular remarketing on a campaign budget as low as $50 per month and it will still be a good use of your money.
The key to its sucess is to create an awesome video that, through its content alone, will attract only your target customer and will hold their attention all the way through. Here are some final tips on creating this video;
- Make it between 30s and 180s. It needs to be long enough for you to be able to categorize the people who watch it.
- Don't try and make this video an ad, instead focus on highlighting on empathy of the problem you are solving - you are NOT trying to sell to people, you are simply trying to capture and hold their attention.
- A good option is to completely solve a problem, end to end, for free. The bigger and more annoying and more common the problem that you solve in this video and the more comprehensive you are in doing it, the better.
- You don't need to have a call to action in this video.
- The video should be easily watched on mobile.
- Don't forget closed captions.
- When you think of what topic, think "what can we make that is highly shareable?"
- Go through all of your existing videos, Reels and Tiktoks and you might find something that already fits the bill.
I hope that this blog provided a bit of value in your marketing world!
How to: Create the Audience from a Video
I've captured the 3 steps that you need to do in your Meta Ads Manager to create this campaign. You kick it off by creating a new Audience.
There are a number of settings that you can adjust to your own situation, marketplace and budget so, please, don't take what I've done as necessarily ideal for your ads.
