For this case study, I worked with Julie Hunter from Atlanta/Chattanooga. Julie has a boudoir website that doubles as a blog, where potential clients can check out her work and book a session with her as well.
My initial goal for this case study was to provide her with 30 solid market qualified leads in 3 weeks with $250 ad budget and hopefully, she can walk away with 1 customer!
This was my game plan:
Table of Contents
Understanding The Boudoir Audience
Truth be told before I reached out to Julie I didn’t even know what boudoir was and I’m pretty sure to this day I’m pronouncing it wrong. So I had to do research on the said subject and pick up everything and anything about it.
The topic revolved around empowerment and self-love. The job of the photographer was to capture those true moments of subject being true self!
So, I went about putting together a rough draft of our audience.
If you’re looking for granular data of people’s behavior for free, then Facebook is your best bet! There are plenty of companies that’ll sell you the actual data of the personel but it costs money and we won’t be needing that at this moment.
We will jump onto facebook’s audience insight and layout a broad net with there parameters:
- Atlanta Locals Only
- 25 or Older
- Interested in Boudoir
Initial Audience Insight:
Three things caught my attention
- Demographics
- Location
- Activity
1.Atlanta Boudoir Demographics:
The majority of them were women between the age group of 25 – 55,college-educated and single or married.
2.Location:
Initially, my ads were going to be specific to 5 miles within Atlanta metropolitan city but after seeing a split, I decided to play it by county and not the city.
3.Activity:
If you’ve ever played around with Facebook ad’s then you know what this is. Activity basically gives you an idea if this selected audience will click on your ads (Ad’s Clicked in the last 30 days). Although it’s not 100% accurate, it will provide you a sort of foresight about the market.
Understanding The Boudoir Market
From our initial audience analysis, I knew I would be preparing a campaign with Facebook ad’s but I wanted to explore other markets as well.
Traditional Photography Route:
This includes usual “referral” work, organic traffic from your website/blog, social media, presenting you work/talent at networking events, branding efforts etc…bascially showing you’re the authority and these are also crucial to growing your business and audience.
This takes time, effort, blood, sweat, and tears…but I got three weeks and $250.
3 Weeks Expedited Route:
This includes the brute force method of finding clients that are ready to book a session or at least on the fence and need a small nudge. So no time to nurture the leads, they need to be hot/warm leads. The only way to get 30 solid leads is via paid ads.
Facebook Boudoir Ads:
Yes! from the above analysis it’s a must and within our budget.
Google Boudoir Ads:
We got Facebook Ad’s and the obvious next step was to check out local Google Ads and most importantly our competitors!!
To do this I use a free plugin called Keywords Everywhere, what this does is provide all the words that people are lookup, frequency and how much would it cost for you to advertise ( all of these metrics are estimates, take it with a grain of salt).
This process is more of a research and follows the breadcrumbs kind of work. Initially, I’m interested in boudoir related terms in Atlanta. So I typed in ‘Boudoir Atlanta’ and here’s what I got,
As you can see from above, we’ve got 210 people googling “Boudoir Atlanta” and it’ll cost us $1.65 a click to advertise. Next, we’re going to jump on related keywords and people also search for on the right-hand side.
As you can see these are interesting words we can advertise on like ‘pin-up photography Atlanta’ and ‘boudoir photography information’. But before we dive into it we need to understand if there is a need for it.
Here’s one of the indicators: COMPETITORS AD’s, that’s right you got ATLboudoir, Edgeboudoir, Moments by Meers Boudoir….all of these people/companies are paying ~$1.65 a click to gain a potential client.
That means if they get about 150 of those 210 people, then they are paying around 150 x $1.65 = ~$247.5 /month on this keyword (this number probably off by 25%, google uses bidding system based on demand).
Let’s say they are converting about 10% of them then they got 15 clients booked for $500 session then they made $7500!
This is fantastic right?! but I decided to go against this because of two reasons:
- ‘Boudoir Atlanta’ is not 100% buyer intent keyword, which means the person who typed in that term might be looking for a photographer or photographer themselves or someone interested in it or a model…etc. You get the idea, they aren’t ready with the credit card or cash in hand to book their session.
- I got a $250 budget and I don’t intend to put all of my eggs in one basket. Don’t get me wrong, you can rake in tons of clients with google ad’s but you also need a decent budget.
Because of these two reasons google’s paid ads are out!
BING Boudoir Ads:
But you might be wondering, what about BING?! Since there aren’t many analysis tools, its almost like google ad’s but there was no competition. So the CPC bids are going to be cheap and I was curious as well. We did run the Bing Ad’s and results are shared below.
Pinterest Boudoir Ads:
Although this seemed like a great idea, I ended up scrapping it because there is no free tool to survey the Pinterest market and people don’t just usually browse through other people’s boudoir picture unless you’re a photographer/model looking for ideas (at least that was my train of thought).
On the contrary, this media outlet kills it with organic traffic in a various niche, just haven’t tested it for boudoir niche.
Boudoir Campaign Materials
Now that we have picked the medium to advertise on, let’s pick our advertising template and sales copy. I went back to Julie and got feedback about how she books her leads. Based on her feedback I decided to go ultra-aggressive on the campaign.
Generally, you’d collect a lead by asking them for their contact information (name, email, and phone) and once they are done providing you the info, your page says thank you and follow up a day or two later.
Now imagine if you gave them a serious one time offer after they provide you with contact info with no upsell. But the catch is they have to call/text the studio to redeem now!
That was going to be the approach for this campaign. Julie was running a summer special of $100 off for new clients and we decided that it would be the hook for our campaign.
Julie already had a boudoir blog, but in order to implement the above strategy I needed a separate contact page, thank you page and inbuilt tracker to see which traffic source was doing well.
Since it was a 3-week case study I didn’t want to alter her blog, so I went with Clickfunnels to create my landing pages and Fiverr to get a solid logo and ad copy.
Boudoir Sales Copy
A sales copy for an ultra-aggressive campaign needs to pack a punch and has to convince readers to click the ad and enter their info.
Here’s how I prepared the instruction for the sales copy:
- Analyze and see what working with the competitors: You can always see what ad competitors are running by checking out their Facebook page’s Transparency. It’s time-consuming but worth it!
- Bite the big dog’s leg, check out ad-expresso there are plenty of example ad’s to get ideas.
- Cant be a video Ad, since I was using Julie’s work I didn’t want to plaster her clientele all over Facebook.
- Cant do NSFW as it’s against FB’s ad policy.
- Plus we are in a niche, where word of mouth and privacy have to go hand in hand. So why not leverage previous clients’ reviews.
- Initially, price was not included but after getting some feedback from Julie, I decided to add it (more on it later).
- Looooongggg ass writes up, every ad in FB has details, details, and details…..gone are the days of few chicken scratches for ads.
Final Copy:
P.S : If you need the ad copy template, just email me at [email protected] and I’ll hook you up!
Boudoir Landing Page
This is our hook, if this sucked then we get no leads. We have to nail it on the head with landing pages. There was initially only 1 landing page but after our initial aggressive one didn’t provided sales qualified leads we decided on more easy-going landing pages.
Boudoir Landing Page:
This particular landing page has two parts.
1. Give Away Optin Page: this landing page is basically our hook,we want potential clients to optin for a summer giveaway and then also convince them that Julie is an authority when it comes to Boudoir work in Atlanta and showcases some of her work, past client reviews/experiences, then her accomplishments and awards. Because once they optin they are shown to our next page.
2. One Time Offer Page: This page basically shows that the potential client has won the giveaway and if they give us a call/text right now, they can redeem the offer.
(If you want the template of the funnel, just send an email to [email protected]. I’ll hook you up! )
Boudoir Campaign Setup
Running Facebook Campaign:
If you’ve never used Facebook advertising, then I’d recommend you get a crash course on YouTube because we are going to deep dive into this topic.
This is basically the heart of this campaign if you don’t pick the right audience it’s going to cost you more and renders the campaign useless.
But before you run any kind of ad on Facebook, here are my golden rules to get the best out of it(more like Facebook rules).
- Have your Facebook page completely set up before you dig into the ad’s. Some of the Ad’s will pick up data from the groups.
- Try to make sure all your ad’s are under the same campaign and adset. Multiple ad’s (4-5) on multiple adsets in different campaign is not efficient unless you have the budget for it. If you do have deep pockets, go nuts!
- Each Adset needs to have at least 15 results (leads,clicks,conversion etc..) this is when Facebook algorithm kicks in and really dials in on the proper audience that converts well.
- DONT PREMATURELY END THE AD AFTER 2 DAYS! Facebook needs time to sort through a lot of data and if you’re not seeing satisfactory results after 2 days and want to end it…then you just wasted that budget.
Ok, now that I’ve gotten off the soapbox, let’s dive into this campaigns process
Once you’re in Facebook Ad’s manager, you have few options to plan you campaign. In this case we have our audience demographics, location and activities. So we are going to start by dipping our toes into the pool and check our work.
I used the same audience for both Facebook campaign, I made sure I removed all the “pro’s” and focused on consumers.
Boudoir Facebook Campaign #1:
This campaign is leads generation campaign straight from Facebook and no landing pages. We would be collecting the leads on the Facebook side and price was displayed on the ad copy.
Here are the results:
Results:
We got 29 leads at $5.96, but the kicker on this ad is the quality of the Ad! It was ranked above average (10/10 relevant score) for the chosen audience. So much so I got a call from Facebook Ad’s people asking if I’m interested in scaling this ad and need their help.
So that was the highlight of the Ad. However the price per lead as you can see is insane compared to the landing page campaign (see below). That’s because after I got the feedback from Julie, I made few demographic adjustment to tailor the ad more towards people making $100K+ annually and adjust the age to the sweet spot I found from the initial case study.
Normally I wouldn’t mess with this but it was week 3 and I needed leads that would book the session right away. This kinda dipped the number of leads per day and didn’t give the FB algorithm to kick in for new changes(also 1 lead cost me almost $26) but given more time I couldn’t have bought it down to probably $2.50 a lead.
Boudoir Facebook Campaign #2:
I decided to run a traffic Ad as well, this helps me understand if I’m aiming at the right audience and check the quality of the ad copy and landing pages.
I ran 5 ad’s under this campaign with various stock photos and the same ad copy.
The Ad’s ran for 11 days and once I found my winner, I decided to shut the rest of them down. At this point, I had a decent audience I could work with and the leads were being generated on the funnel.
This was the result:
Campaign Results:
As you can see from above there were about 206 link clicks and click funnel recorded only 161 unique clicks and among them were about 13% opt-in rate with 21 leads and 8 of them called the number to book a call.
I found my sweet spot with demographics and also checking on leads info provided by ClickFunnels (I cant show you guys the actual leads for obvious reasons, but the lead pages do collect more info than you think) I know how much time they are spending looking at the lead page and what they are interested in, etc…
At this point, we had camping that was churning out leads at $0.33 /lead and the only way to test the quality was to check with Julie.
Feedback :
Julie mentioned the leads were interested but none of them had booked and she was still talking to them. However, she hadn’t received some of the phone calls (which concerned me a bit).
Also, she recommended I add the price point into the existing ads, so we could filter out any flakes.
Boudoir Bing Campaign:
Normally if you aren’t using Google Ad’s then Bing Ad’s are a great alternative. But in this case, it was a bit of a letdown and we had two clicks, no leads generated. You might as well skip it!
Boudoir Atlanta Case Study Results
- Cost of Facebook Traffic Ad: $66.82
- Cost of Facebook Lead Ad: $172.81
- Cost of Landing Page Setup: 2 weeks free trial ($99/month)
- Cost of Logo/ad copy: $5 + $25 = $30
- Grand Total = $269.63 for over 50 leads
( 29 FB leads +21 landing Page + few people contacting directly about package prices/contact info)What’s My Recommendation?
Specific to this case study my goal was to provide Julie with 30 solid marketing leads and that was accomplished. But however, this niche might require a bit of more tweaking and lead nurturing before they’ll book a session.
Which brings me to my next point, it’s about ROI and getting lifetime value out of a customer.
Julie rates start around $1500 for her session, if she has a budget of $250/month for marketing then she can get more than 50 leads a month. If she books 2 sessions a month that $3000 gross revenue plus happy customers that will hire her for other photography work.
It all depends on what your marketing goals are and plan according to it.
As far as Boudoir niche, we will return back to this niche in the next few months and go after those sales qualified leads!
Once Again Huge Thanks To Julie Hunter For Helping Out With A Case Study!