Everkind Digital has lots of experience supporting fundraisers specifically leveraging paid Meta ads. For example, a recent case study with La Vie™ walks through how we raised over €2 million for them using. However, the meta ad budget from Christspiracy was less than $35,000, meaning we had to think outside of the box. We developed a creative omni-channel marketing strategy including Everkind Digital organic activations, advice on Christspiracy’s own email activity along with whitelisted meta ads through the Everkind Digital ad account. Our specifically tailored marketing plan included:
LEAD CAMPAIGN TO CREATE HYPE
Prior to the fundraise launch date, we collected leads via a dedicated landing page. The dedicated landing page contained information that was aimed to build up hype about the film, including trailers. The aim was to give people the opportunity to get ‘early access’ and hear the news about the film fundraiser launch first. We tested multiple interest groups such as those related to conscious living topics such as ‘vegan’ as well as more specific search terms such as those related to Netflix and Kickstarter. We achieved a cost per click (CPC) of £0.06 and cost per lead (CPL) of £0.78. What this meant was that for every £0.78 invested, we achieved a warm lead for the campaign. These leads were then marketed to by the Christspiracy team.
FULL FUNNEL APPROACH
We used paid ads to target a variety of interest groups, as mentioned above. This constituted our ‘top of funnel’ strategy not just for leads but also for the conversion campaign once the Kickstarter began. We also targeted the Everkind Digital audience as we know this group would be highly engaged. Prior interviews on the Everkind Digital platform with the director Kip Andersen about Cowspiracy for example proved this. Put simply, we knew our audience would love the idea of this campaign, which was confirmed when they generated the lowest CPLs. Furthermore, Christspiracy gave us access to various other audiences including the ‘What the Health’ and ‘Cowspiracy’ audiences, which they had access to.
WORLDWIDE FOCUS
We targeted multiple English first countries such as the UK, US, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. We experimented with ads in Germany and Spain but these did not perform as well as the others, so we quickly reduced and then eliminated budgets here. Our Director of Ad Ops and her team were in the ad account every day making optimisations and providing reports back to Christspiracy. We effectively became an extension of the Christspiracy core team, involved in daily communications and weekly meetings.
CREDIBLE CREATIVES
Our creative team were given access to the film early, and we immediately came up with short cut downs as teaser clips for ads, which the Christspiracy team approved. The Christspracy team also gave us access to pre-edited trailers, which we adapted. We worked with the Christspiracy team to develop angles for ads and articles on plantbasednews.org. For example, we produced credible journalistic ads such as: ‘Christspiracy Directors Turn Down Netflix In Stunning Move’, which was a similar headline to an article we did, and proved highly successful. This is because whitelisted ads from our news platform allow us to easily provide our stamp of approval in a credible way.
POWER OF WHITELISTING
It was a no brainer for us to whitelist the Everkind Digital ad account, which regularly sees dramatically increased advertising efficiency and conversion rates. As such, it was not a surprise that we immediately saw impressive results in both the lead and conversion campaigns before and during the Kickstarter campaign, respectively. With an impressive average CTR of 8.81% and an average CPC of £0.20, we managed to drive over £106,828.09 with an average contribution value of £132.23 resulting in a 5.65 Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). It’s important to note that we did see a drop in performance between the Black Friday and Cyber Monday periods as consumer behavior drastically changes during this period, and is more geared toward finding exciting discounts on products. In light of this, we had reduced budgets during this period. Nonetheless we saw an immediate bounce back after this.
ADVANTAGE+ CAMPAIGNS
Advantage+ campaigns had recently been launched by Meta. These rely on Meta’s ability to use data with it’s AI driven Machine Learning capabilities in order to target winning audiences and find winning ads if the campaign is set up correctly and fed properly with assets. The best creative was a video our founder Klaus recorded about the upcoming Christspiracy fundraiser with a staggering 40.14 ROAS.
INNOVATIVE ORGANIC ACTIVATIONS
Everkind Digital boasts over 3.6 million core supporters, and as such it was crucial to engage this audience. We had done various interviews with the directors of Christspiracy before, as part of the release of their previous film Cowspiracy for example, so we knew our audience wanted to hear about this new Christspiracy film.We crafted multiple organic activations. For example, the campaign started with a youtube live titled: ‘Is There a Spiritual Way To Kill An Animal? Christspiracy Documentary Q&A’ which received over 500 kickstarter links. We also put out a variety of articles on our website, including one article titled: ‘Christspiracy: The New Documentary From The Co-Creator Of ‘Cowspiracy’ which achieved 19,493 unique visitors on our website plantbasednews.org as well as hundreds of thousands of impressions across social media. Some of the content pieces that did well were street interviews from Everkind Digital Founder Klaus Mitchell asking: “is there a spiritual way to kill an animal”. Klaus’ experience in 2023 asking COP28 delegates “what is more effective to save the fish: cutting out plastic straws or stopping eating fish?” was an example of a viral video he conducted that stood him in good stead for this Christspiracy campaign which was at times equally divisive. Of all the social posts, the most viral was a repackaged documentary trailer clip, which included a super titled: ‘Are you ready for Christspiracy?’. This led to 1.62 million views, 37,652 likes, 6,741 comments and a staggering 11,828 shares. But the question remained, how could we translate this engagement and interest into eyeballs on the Kickstarter page, and ultimately investments, especially in light of the fact that instagram is notorious for making it hard for users to leave their platform. As a result, we decided to integrate a chat marketing service on this post (as well as others). Our caption included: ‘Comment below with the word 'christspiracy' and we will DM you a link to the article where you can find out more!’ This innovative approach spurred users to comment ‘Christspiracy’. It led to 2,387 people receiving links, with 1,862 clicking through the fundraiser page. Our paid ads team collaborated heavily with our social media team to make sure the most successful posts, including the one mentioned above with 1.62 million views. A Meta audience with this video as well as other videos was set up to target users who watched it. This is a good example of the synergy effects between organic posts and paid media. Other synergy effects explored were those between the whitelisting Everkind Digital ad account and the Christspiracy ad account. We initially provided guidance to Christspiracy until we were quickly promoted to manage their ad account. Usually the strategy we find that works best is when the Everkind Digital ad account focuses on top of funnel (as well as marketing to the Everkind Digital audience), then the client account remarkets to those that have already clicked on the landing page to give the user the final push over the line to convert.
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