Here’s how I took a small events business from selling just 5 event tickets per event to being fully booked within two weeks with a low CPC and a reasonably high CTR.
I used these five strategies to focus on a localization campaign through Meta ads and an A/B testing approach:
Target a Specific Audience: Narrow down your audience based on location, demographics, and interests. Use retargeting to reach people who’ve already interacted with your business and create lookalike audiences to find new customers. For this campaign, I stuck to a 5-mile radius and used similar interests to target potential customers.
Optimize Ad Placement: Use automatic placements across Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms. Mobile ads tend to have lower costs, so prioritize them if your audience is mobile-focused. As a content creator and analyst, I tailored the video content specifically to the platforms they’d show on. When filming, I framed it for mobile, desktop, and any other format where it would be seen.
Test and Improve Ad Creative: Continuously A/B test different ad creatives (images, copy, headlines) to identify what works best. Eye-catching visuals and clear CTAs help lower your costs per click. This means gathering all the content possible in advance to have flexibility for adapting later.
Leverage Organic Growth: Engage in local Facebook groups, regularly post valuable content, and grow your brand’s presence organically. Boost high-performing posts instead of creating new ads from scratch. Paid advertising wasn’t the only tool—attending public events helped immensely too. The client even called me urgently to say they’d been recognized from the Meta ad, exactly what we wanted; the localized targeting was working!
Track and Optimize Regularly: Monitor ad performance closely. Pause underperforming ads and adjust based on conversions—not just clicks—to get the most out of your budget. With a limited budget, we focused on maximizing every dollar by scheduling ads to run at optimal times.
Overall, we achieved almost a 1000% ROI, and these customers have since become repeat clients. This isn’t a one-off; it’s about planning for long-term marketing success. Remember, there’s no such thing as instant results!
These strategies maximize results while minimizing ad spend to get the outcomes we need.
One final note: for those who are interested in the numbers, we ran this advertisement for only 3 days over a month, and it exceeded venue capacity, leading the client to consider expanding their business. While these are positive results, be sure you can handle a rapid increase in demand for services!
