Kickstarting With the Walrus Part 2 - Tuning the Funnel

Welcome back! For those of you who haven't read my first post in this series, you might want to go do that, as I'm just picking up where I left off and updating people on what's been happening.

The Funnel

OK. The first thing you should know is that we think of marketing in terms of a funnel. Everything we're doing is happening at some stage of this funnel.

At the top is the thing we initially do to grab your attention. Whether that's a blog post, a newsletter, an ad--whatever it is that first catches your attention as a potential customer. At the bottom is...well, whatever behavior we want to elicit.

At this point in a Kickstarter campaign, our goal isn't sales--it's followers. There's a button on the Kickstarter page that says "Notify Me On Launch." Right now, if someone clicks that and gets signed up for a notification, we call it success. Eventually, those notifications will begin their own funnel, but as the Kickstarter isn't live right now this is as far as we can go.

Now, for every step in between the top of the funnel and the bottom, we're going to lose some people. Not everyone who looks at an ad is actually going to read the text. Not everyone who reads the text is going to click the link. Not everyone who clicks the link is going to read the page it links to. Not everyone who reads that page is going to click the "Notify Me" button. So the shape of our audience at any given stage is smaller than the one before it--hence, funnel.

Ultimately, we have two goals. First, our funnel should be as wide as possible--we want to lose as few people at every step as possible. Second, our funnel should be as short as possible. The fewer steps between being noticed and the ultimate behavior, the less chances we have to lose someone.

Fine Tuning the Funnel

So, before when I was going over our assets, I mentioned that we have a mailing list and a social media following. Neither of these are as big as we'd like them to be (and that's a separate marketing struggle). But they do exist.

We know that if we're going to get the number of followers we want for this thing, then we're eventually going to be doing paid marketing. We also have our wild card out there--Paul Jenkins. We have no idea what sort of attention he can bring to this thing. We also have our other authors. All of these are tools in our pocket to widen the top of the funnel--to get more people into the funnel to begin with.

But before we start doing that, we want the bottom of the funnel to be streamlined. So our meager mailing list and social media following provide us a test audience--a beta-reader for our marketing materials, if you will. The last month has been us putting out a post and then checking the numbers all the way through to see how many of the people at the top of the funnel made it to the bottom.

For those of you who've been watching that page for the last month, you probably noticed it going through several changes. All of that was in response to data. Kickstarter lets us see (1) how many people are coming to the page, and (2) how many people are clicking "follow." Our initial version of the page was getting around a 10% conversion rate. That's...not great. For every ten people who came to the page, only one clicked the link. We want more than that, so we tweak. We changed the language of our pitch. We tried multiple graphics.

Now, our total follower count is still low. As of this moment, we only have 56 people who have signed on for notification. That's OK. The top of our funnel is not very wide at the moment. This last month's goal has been making sure that the bottom part of the funnel is streamlined as well as we can make it.

Next Steps - Working the Way Up the Funnel

Next up, test ads. Small-scale ad buys of both video and graphic ads on a single platform. This allows us to check what sort of ads are doing the job of getting people to the page without spending too much cash. We've already started those. For instance, a one-week run of the following book trailer just finished its run on Facebook:

https://youtube.com/shorts/1rrwvR-vCtc

The Glen Must Die Book Trailer

Seems like a pretty good video, right? I mean, I worked hard on it. Got some amazing authors, including Paul himself, to appear in it. Really spent some time on Adobe Premier to put it all together.

It's crap.

We had 838 unique impressions of that ad. Of those...3 clicked the link. 3. That's a 0.35% conversion rate. Most (68%) of them stopped watching in the first four seconds. Now, go back and watch the first four seconds of that video--half of it is just our logo. That means that 68% of people to see that video judged us not worth watching based on our logo and a single panel of text. It fades from there. So, we paid $35.00 to Meta to learn that we do not want to use this video as a paid ad. There's other places we can use it--including here--so it's not like I'm tossing it away. But for now, it's crap.

Next step? Testing graphical ads. Maybe those will be better, who knows. They're faster, that's for sure, and that may have more value in terms of mindshare than anything else. Once we get our best ads dialed in, then the bigger ad spends will happen. So, that's where things stand. The plan is to tentatively test some ads, see what works, then do a bigger ad spend simultaneous with releasing the potential kraken that is Paul to do some marketing for us. How's that all going to work out for us? Stay tuned, and I'll let you know.