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EventsUsing Facebook to

Sell High-Ticket

$160k Case Study

Event producers / seminar speakers are continually finding it a struggle to fill their events with high quality participants.

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I f your business puts on live events or is inter-ested in starting, let me show you, step-by-step, the method I used accomplish just that.

Here is how it happened...I recently had breakfast with a buddy of mine

(Giovanni) who has a dream that 'Gifted Entre-preneurs' will change the world. He says that big-hearted, generous entrepreneurs are going to be the chief change-makers, so he started a business called Archangel Academy in order to coach, connect, and foster collaboration between these entrepreneurs to help make his dream a reality. One of Archangel Academy’s trademarks is a series of live events where interested entrepre-neurs apply and become part of a hand-selected group. After several successful events in our home town of Toronto, Giovanni wanted to spread his wings and hold an event in another major city. And in what better city to hold an Archangel event than the city of angels - Los Angeles?

This was the topic of our conversation over breakfast that day.

Giovanni: "I'm holding an Archangel event in Los Angeles"

Nicholas: "Awesome. How can I help?"

G: "I’d love for you to help me with mar-keting the event to find 'Angels' to par-ticipate.”

N: "Great! Give me your contacts in L.A., we'll make some calls, have them reach out to their tribe, and fill the room with the right people."

G: "I don't have any contacts in L.A. and I don't want to leverage my high-end colleagues from around the country. I want to find these angels from scratch. Can you help?"

N: "Okay..." (With a raised eyebrow, think-ing this won’t be easy).

G: "Oh, and they have to either be million dollar earners or have a vast social reach with their businesses."

N: "Okay..." (Now with two raised eyebrows, thinking this really won’t be easy).

G: "And they have to be all big-hearted, social and like-minded. It's important that the 'right' people are in the room."

N: "Okay..." (Thinking this can’t be any more difficult).

G: "I'm looking to pick only 100 people to participate at a $2000 price tag."

N: (Thinking “ONLY?”).G: "Lastly, the event is six weeks away.

Can you make it happen?"N: (Thinking “What!? You're insane and

out of your mind!”) “Sure! No problem.”

Only six weeks later, after receiving over 420 applications, the room was filled with just under 100 big-hearted, like-minded, ‘gifted entre-preneurs’ and the event was a great success.

Of those attendees, 80% of them came from my marketing efforts.

How did we do it? By using very specific marketing strategies on the only advertising platform in the world that could make something like this possible - Facebook.

With over 1.3 billion active monthly users and laser targeting capabilities, the Facebook advertising platform is the most underutilized advertising network in the world with capabil-ities to reach millions upon millions of people at only a fraction of the cost of other traditional forms of advertising.

In this article, I will outline some of the key tactics that we used to fill this event and gen-erate an over 7000% ROI.

Group shot of the participants of Archangel Academy 2014 in LA

6%

0%

1%

2%

4%

3%

5%

- Click-Through Rate (CTR) - Unique Click-Through Rate (uCTR)

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TARGETING

$160k Case Study: Using Facebook to Sell High-Ticket Events

One of the key components in a successful Facebook marketing campaign is targeting, or determining who actually sees the ad. The perfect ad is the right message seen by the right person at the right time.

This was even more important because Giovanni was very specific about the types of people who would be part of this event. Facebook allows you as an advertiser to get very specific with your targeting.

In most cases I suggest starting by identifying the key influencers in your niche, seeing if they

have a strong Facebook presence, and then targeting your ads toward their fans. Generally I like to start with one influencer to test his or her fans response and as the numbers start to come in, I add other influencers to increase reach and scale the efforts. In this particular case, however, we did the opposite. We started with a wide North American audience targeting several groups of key influencers with strong Facebook followings. Regardless of the meth-od, the goal is to identify people whose fan bases include your ideal clients/customers.

Potential Audience for this ad: 3,600.000 people

• Location: -Canada -United States• Age: 30 and older • Intrests: 1 • Language: English (US)

This is an overview of the demographics we targeted, which

gave us a potential reach of 3.6 million people

Potential Audience for this ad: 400,000 people

• Location: California, United States• Age: 30 and older • Intrests: 1 • Language: English (US)

As we approached the event date, we restricted the geographical

targeting first to California, bringing down our reach to 400,000:

Potential Audience for this ad: 112,000 people

• Location: Los Angeles (+25 mi), California, United States• Age: 30 and older • Intrests: 1 • Language: English (US)

And then in the last couple of weeks, we narrowed the targeting to Los Angeles and surrounding areas, bringing down the reach to 112,000:

1 Intrests: T. Harv Eker, mike klingler, Tony Robbins, Entrepreneurs' Organization, Jim Rohn, Jack Canfield, bob proctor, Entrepreneur (magazine), lisa nichols, dr john demartini, Brian Tracy, nick unsworth, exceptional living, Richard Branson, Social entrepreneurship, john assaraf, young entrepreneur, School for Social Entrepreneurs, John C. Maxwell, Female Entrepreneur Association, Female entrepreneur, Centre for Social Innovation, brendon burchard live love matter, danielle laporte, addicted2success or Marie Forleo

With this type of targeting we were able to keep our average CTR (Click Through Rate) quite high:

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When it comes to the ad itself the two elements that carry the most weight in affecting the perfor-mance of the ad are the Post-Text (the copy that appears before the image) and the image itself.

We'll talk about the image in just a second, but let's start with the post-text.

The two keys to making post-text work are:1. Starting with a question and...2. Speaking to the needs/wants/desires of

the ideal clients without sounding like a brand looking to promote, but instead like a human looking to connect.

Let’s focus on starting with a question:Which headline do you think is more effective?

1. Don't Make These Facebook Ad Mistakes2. Are You Making These Facebook

Ad Mistakes?

The mind can't resist a question mark. When you see one, it forces you into super-curiosity mode, where you need to know the answer. With any kind of marketing copy like a Facebook ad, response rates can drastically improve if you switch the headline from a statement to a question. One of our Facebook campaigns for this event featured the headline "Are You A Big-Hearted Entrepreneur?" which was much more effective than "Attention Big-Hearted Entrepreneurs..." would have been.

THE AD

Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3

Perhaps the most influential part of any Face-book ad is the image.

Aside from some best practices, such as using smiling people in the images, the most important part of the image is its ‘story.’ They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so you want those words to tell the story and resonate with the viewer.

Like any Facebook marketing campaign, you always need to test the images. This (Fig. 1) is the first image we used, which ended up being the highest responding image of our set.

I believe this worked for many reasons, but in short it told a story of entrepreneurs connect-ing towards positive change. We tested other images (Fig. 1 & 2) that also responded well.

THE IMAGES

The Copy used for the main ad

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$160k Case Study: Using Facebook to Sell High-Ticket Events

Because of the people we targeted, many of our ads went viral, meaning that there were many comments and even more shares. People we had never met were becoming our evangelists.

VIRAL ADS

THE FUNNELAlthough not specifically related to the ads themselves, I think that the success of this campaign was also largely due to the funnel:

1. The ad drove the prospect to the event web-site. (www.archangelacademy2014.com)

2. The videos, the copy, and the layout were designed not only to share the vision of the event but also to pre-qualify a person. By clearly indicating who the event is NOT for, it creates a bigger draw for who it IS for and the exclusivity made it that much more appealing.

3. The prospect was asked to request an invitation (which captured a lead) and then was taken to an application page. This way, if we had chosen, we could have followed up with the applicants via email with some more information about the event.

4. The applicants were then sorted based on their applications and those who met the criteria were contacted further.

By having a carefully crafted funnel, with these several key elements in place (highly targeted ad with precise targeting, benefit driven page speaking directly to the needs of the visitor, ex-clusively), we were able to have a very success-ful event with all the 'right' people in the room.

This is how Archangel Academy ended. With a big group hug

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1. TARGET EFFECTIVELY Work backwards: Start by identifying your ideal customer/client and targeting them by identifying who they currently follow on Facebook. Who are the key influencers in your niche with followings that match your target market? Target them and then expand your reach.

2. BE HUMAN Sound like a human, not a brand, in your advertising copy. The truth is that people are on Facebook to connect with other human beings rather than brands. In fact, in all of our tests, the response rate was drastically higher when we ran ads from a personally branded page as opposed to a company-branded page. Your ad copy needs to sound like you’re a human who cares and is speaking directly to the person on the other side of that ad. The more personal you are, the better the response that you'll receive.

3. IMAGE IS EVERYTHING Select images that tell a story - your story and the story of your ideal target. The more someone can connect to that story by viewing your image, the better the response will be.

4. UTILIZE THE POWER OF THE QUES-TION MARK Whether to pique curiosity or pre-qualify a prospect, use a question to grab your prospects’ attention and lure them into your conversation.

5. 'REJECTION MARKETING' The clearer that you can be about who your offer is not for, the better the response you will get from the people it is for. When you realize you are not everyone's solution, you will both get a better response and also get an army of loyal advocates.

6. HAVE THE RIGHT FUNNEL Many people tend to forget that the ad is only the begin-ning of the process. What happens after is just as important and will determine the failure or success of that campaign.

7. TEST EVERYTHING Testing is crucial for effective Facebook ad campaigns. Test the target audience, copy, images and the funnel. Test each element one at a time and scale what works and tweak or drop what doesn't.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Nicholas Kusmich is one of the most sought after and highest paid Facebook Advertising Strategists and Marketing Consultants in the world, working exclusively with successful A-List "Expert Industry" Clients generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for them. I

Learn more about how Nicholas can poten-tially help you at nicholaskusmich.com"

720 Bathurst Street Toronto, ON M5S 2R4

To whom it may concern,

RE: Nicholas Kusmich

I originally retained Nicholas in March of 2014 for his marketing services in order to help fill our live

entrepreneurial event, Archangel Academy. His strategy and implementation exceeded all of our

expectations and was responsible for 80% of the ticket sales which returned for us a considerable ROI.

Because of those results, we have brought him in as a strategic partner for all of our marketing

endeavours for each arm of our business. He now plays a significant roll in the growth and expansion of

our business.

Nicholas is also much more than a service provider. He is a strategic thinker and heavily invests his time,

energy and marketing prowess to all of his projects. He is also the most skilled and gifted experts that I

have ever come across when it comes to Facebook marketing.

We now refer to him as our "Facebook ninja".

I can whole heartedly recommended his services, without reservation, for any business who is lucky

enough to qualify to work with him.

For any further questions, please don't hesitate to reach out to me.

Sincerely,

Giovanni Marsico Founder | Producer Archangel Academy