As of Q3 of 2020, Facebook reported that it has 1.82 billion daily active users and 2.74 billion monthly active users. That’s a lot of people who are viewing Facebook ads every day. Furthermore, as many as 1.6 billion people around the globe are connected to a small business on Facebook.
If you are a business owner who has just started a Facebook page to promote your business… you’re already late to the party. For marketing to work effectively on Facebook today, a combination of creative messaging, clear audience targeting, and timing is needed for you to get your brand out there to be seen. While there’s a lot of science that’s involved, it doesn’t mean art no longer plays a part.
Here are 5 Facebook ad campaigns that have gone viral, and that you can learn something from.
#1 GoPro: Million Dollar Challenge Highlights Ad
Company profile: GoPro is a camera manufacturer that produces small and rugged outdoor cameras for sports enthusiasts or content creators to shoot outdoors.
Why it’s impactful: The montage of stunning mini-video clips filmed by GoPro’s broad base of users creates a powerful impact on the viewer. From off-road racing to deep-sea divers, this clip demonstrates the versatility of the GoPro that empowers its customers to film and document exhilarating experiences under the harshest of conditions.
Campaign: Social media contest with a million-dollar prize to generate awareness of the brand.
Results: Within 80 days, more than 29,000 people from 125 countries submitted their HERO9 Black video clips. Ultimately, the brand compiled 56 of those submissions into “2 minutes of what it means to be part of the #GoProFamily.” Then, they published the final cut on YouTube and then Facebook, and the video now has almost a million views.
#2 The Teaching Company
Company profile: The Teaching Company is a leading developer of educational courses. In the early days of COVID-19, the brand wanted to capitalise on people’s growing ambitions to learn something new online and decided to create a simple Facebook ad campaign to promote their courses.
Why it’s impactful: This campaign demonstrated that you don’t need fancy creative or gimmicks to achieve your goals. Straightforward, targeted ads placed during opportune moments will convert customers.
Campaign: Facebook image ads expanded to reach UK, Canada and Australia to convert more international customers.
Results: Between March 15 – April 30, 2020, the campaign generated 5,540 subscriptions and increased the total average monthly subscriptions by over 10x, compared to the previous year.
#3 MobileMonkey
Company profile: MobileMonkey is a Facebook Messenger chatbot service that helps to integrate a chatbot on your website without any prior technical knowledge required. With the rise of Facebook Messenger as an alternative way for brands to market themselves, MobileMonkey decided to unveil its campaign to generate leads with ads.
Why it’s impactful: A psychedelic palette, alongside a strange metal unicorn with an attempt at gamification, this ad certainly stood out from the other dull, monotonous ads that were shown.
Campaign: Facebook to Messenger ad campaign type, optimised for messages. Once users clicked on the ad, they were taken to a Facebook Messenger chatbot for conversions.
Results: In the past with regular conversion campaigns, they were experiencing a cost per lead (CPL) of $150. With this campaign, they managed to cut the CPL down to $5. That’s a 30x reduction in CPL.
#4 Grammarly: Write The Future
Company profile: Grammarly is an auto spelling and grammar checker for students, writers and publishers. This series of videos was posted on YouTube and then shared on Facebook thereafter to generate brand awareness.
Why it’s impactful: To meet their goal of branding, they’ve had to design the campaign in a way that would appeal to a large audience. They chose to use the storytelling approach.
Creative-wise, they’ve gone for a series of videos, while keeping it to an optimal 2-minute length (1:52 to be precise). Each of these videos tells a story about a customer archetype using Grammarly and how it changed their lives dramatically.
The video finishes off with an empowering call to action “write the future”. It certainly inspires us to take action and correct our grammar and spelling on their website.
Campaign: Video ads on Facebook to generate brand awareness across a wider target audience.
Results: This campaign reached more than 5+ million people.
The CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions) decreased by 76% compared to direct response campaigns. A part of that is that the audience was bigger, making the CPM more affordable, but most importantly the good engagement rate played into the decrease in CPM.
The video-view rate increased by 33% when compared to sales campaigns. Cost-wise, they landed on $0.02 video views and $0.59 video completes. Though their main goal was video views, they also landed on a reasonable CPC (cost per click) of $1.87.
#5 Dollar Shave Club
Company profile: Dollar Shave Club is a subscription-based service that mails men’s grooming products to subscribers regularly. This campaign focused on generating greater brand awareness.
Why it’s impactful: The company was smart in pitting itself against the “Goliath” of the industry Gillette and generating curiosity for the ad. It had the brand’s signature touch of humour and successfully painted itself as the “David” of men’s grooming.
Campaign: To get more people to subscribe to its online membership in a quick and efficient way, Dollar Shave Club repurposed some existing creative along with assets from its website landing page to create a full-screen Canvas in conjunction with an ad in collection format in News Feed.
When people clicked on the ad, they entered Canvas’ seamless and interactive full-screen experience. This allowed Dollar Shave Club to engage with potential subscribers and acquire new customers by merchandising its subscriptions.
The Dollar Shave Club team targeted this dual ad format to men in the US aged 18–65. Using the same creative, it then tested and compared the collection ad format and Canvas against its traditional link ads.
Results: Dollar Shave Club’s joint ad unit—using the collection ad format and Canvas—created a uniquely immersive experience that successfully attracted new club members and encouraged them to sign up.
The campaign ran from May 15–30, 2017, and delivered:
– 1.5X increase in subscriptions, compared to traditional link ads
– 30% decrease in cost per subscription, compared to traditional link ads
– 1.6 million people reached
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