“A Phenomenal Success”

When conducted correctly, Timeline video campaigns are a flexible and cost-effective way of sending your message to the right people in a way that they like.

We produced this timeline video campaign for the Best of Manchester to promote their limited time offer to a tightly targeted audience on Facebook.

Using the client’s brand assets to capture the friendly personality of the brand, we not only created an integral piece of marketingbut also a seamless user experience from first contact through to the buying process.

Why It Works

Immediately, the audience is asked to self-qualify. Within the first three seconds the video asks, Do you sell to Manchester?

The viewer’s response instantly qualifies them on two levels. First of all, does the viewer run a business? And, if so, do they sell to Manchester?

If the answer to either of these questions is “no” then what follows won’t be of interest, so we can happily let those viewers go because the remaining message is not relevant to them.

Then comes a further, third qualifier: No time for marketing?  If they are a business that sells to Manchester and have a big marketing team behind them, this product isn’t for them. But everyone else should keep watching.

All that has taken less than six seconds.

By now we’ve narrowed our viewers down to our target audience, so we deliver our value proposition: Would they like to reach 40,000 people for less than the price of a coffee a day? It’s not an absurd offer, so the viewer isn’t compelled to question the message’s authenticity. And, once again, if it sounds relevant and appealing the viewer will stick around to find out how.

We’re given the call to action and with added urgency – Apply today, save £100 – followed by a clear, unambiguous instruction to visit a simple URL. Besides this, Facebook also had its own call to action button next to the video for our audience to click to respond.

Finally, there’s a nice, long hold on the call to action. This is important because now that we’ve narrowed down the audience to our target market of qualified buyers and piqued their interest, everyone who’s left watching at this stage is a very warm lead. With nothing left to reveal, the only way to learn more about the offer is to follow the call to action.

Then, once the viewer has clicked through, it’s over to a well-designed  landing page to do the rest of the work.

The Outcome

The Best of Manchester’s franchisees, Ann and Chris Prax, spent just £20 per week on promoting the ad on Facebook. The special offer in the campaign was designed to run for a month.

Almost immediately after they began promoting the ad on Facebook, the Best of Manchester found themselves inundated with new business enquiries.

The campaign was so successful that they had to switch off the Timeline Video campaign after just two weeks. Because the campaign had generated such a response so quickly, they simply had no more time to follow any more leads.

Moreover, because we had got the audience to brutally self-qualify during the opening seconds of the video, Ann and Chris didn’t have to waste time chasing cold leads. Instead, they were able to concentrate their time on the quality leads that the campaign had generated, resulting in a very high conversion rate.

They didn’t share numbers, but they were very happy clients. So happy, in fact, that co-franchisee Chris Prax described the campaign as “a phenomenal success”.