We were approached by our client, who wanted to generate more leads for their seasonal sessions. They were doing mostly traditional advertising, local newspapers, magazines, etc., and were interested in exploring digital advertising.

To begin, we divided their target audience into two segments, teens and parents of children 13 and younger. We recommended a social media campaign because, based on their demographic, they were most likely to be on social media. Another reason we chose social media was this was more of an impulse decision. Having the ads come up in their feed would result in a more targeted click-through. Also, if you searched “modeling agencies near me,” you would find them in the local search, so the need for an SEO campaign wasn’t necessary.

Based on demographic information, we decided on Facebook for the parents and Instagram for the teens. Our daily ad spend was $5 per day because they were starting, and we wanted to make sure the system worked before we spent the full budget. We set up our ads and launched the campaign.

Once the campaign started, the teens showed results right away. The parents’ ads, on the other hand, were lagging in click through rates. Even though our demographic was spot on for a Facebook campaign, Instagram was becoming a more popular platform for the 35 to 55 women demographic we were targeting. We switched the campaign to Instagram and immediately saw results.

The campaign has been running for a while now, and the teen ad has averaged a 4% conversion rate, and the parent ad nearly 7%. We have seen months with conversion rates as high as 14%. One thing we do is regularly change the image, and that usually results in an uptick in conversions.

We could have continued to tweak the Facebook campaign to try to get better results because, according to the demographics, it should have been a home run. What we decided to do was not dig our heels in, but rather, make a quick pivot before we spent too much on a campaign with lower than expected results. The results spoke for themselves.

The moral of the story is that you need to be flexible with your campaigns. Just because your gut tells you this is the right way to do it, doesn’t mean it is the right way. Sometimes you have to, dare I say it, think out of the box to get better results.