We recently wrote a piece highlighting the number one reason Facebook ad campaigns fail.

Since then, we’ve continued to refine our ad offer on several campaigns. And today we’re going to spend a bit of time talking about one in particular:

Free lunch.

Yeah, they always say “There’s no such thing as free lunch” but who’s going to turn down a plate of wings?

Offering food in exchange for a lead is a highly effective strategy, one that still works wonders in digital marketing. It certainly worked for our client – let’s explain why.

Last time, we talked about how important it is to find the right Facebook ad offer for your campaign. The worst thing you can do as a digital advertiser is to sell a service without an offer at all!

Enter our client. They were relatively inexperienced with digital marketing, and their initial results were lackluster at best.

But those were just growing pains. The client offered amazing services as an insurance sales agency, and they were popular with local customers.

They just needed to find the right way to sway their audience. The challenge for insurance is that most people already have it. How do you convince someone to keep looking?

We had discussed several methods to use for their campaign, including:

• Targeting real estate brokers who might offer their insurance services as an add-on
• Offering a discount to prospects who signed up online
• Giving the client a gift card to local retail outlets or restaurants in exchange for a quote

Ultimately, we decided on the last option. The client would “Take their customers out to lunch” as long as they agreed to receive a quote from their insurance agents.

More specifically, customers would receive a $15 gift card to a very popular local restaurant.

Facebook was our preferred platform for this campaign. Targeting features ensured we could reach people in the right locations at the right times and for the lowest cost.

And so we had our Facebook ad offer, our audiences and our client’s approval. All that was left was to get started.

It’s insane how much goes into creating one tiny ad.

You need great copy, great imagery and a solid offer.

All for an ad that – if we’re being honest – most people will not read. That goes for good or bad campaigns made by amateur and experienced digital marketers.

When we started our campaign, we wanted to craft an ad that signaled “Free Lunch!” immediately. Knowing that too much text is a one way road to ad throttling, we couldn’t overwhelm the viewer with the phrase “FREE LUNCH!”

We also knew that the restaurant on offer was famous for their wings, so naturally, we picked a base image of delicious wings.

Pairing this image with a subtle “Free Lunch” in the background and our client’s branding, we had our creative taken care of.

Next up was the copy.

We tend to write a lot of longer ad descriptions for Facebook. Now normally, you’ll see people writing about Facebook ad offers advising to keep the text short and sweet. And that’s great.

However, we’ve had a lot more success in the past with longer descriptions.

For this Facebook ad offer we tested out three variants of copy:

Two short and one long.

This became a bit of a “competition” between my ads (the two shorter ones) and the longer one, written by our CEO Spencer.

I’m sad to say, however, that the longer copy outperformed my own.

(But not by much!)

Funny enough, our client had been expressing concerns about a lack of leads coming from our ad campaigns before we really went all-in with this new Facebook ad offer. This is primarily because their last campaign lacked an offer to begin with.

But within an hour of turning the campaign on, they had already received three leads submitted through our landing page!

At the time of writing, the campaign results are as follows:

• Ad Set 1: Lookalike audience targeting people who had viewed the client’s previous ad campaign video
• Ad Set 2: Audience who had viewed the previous video
• Ad Set 3: Men & Women 25+ in a 25 mile radius around Daytona Beach with an interest in boating, home improvement or motorcycles (three varieties of insurance the client provides)

Results

• Ad Set 1: 67 Landing Page Views @ $2.35 per view*
• Ad Set 2: 43 Landing Page Views @ $3.07 per view
• Ad Set 3: 167 Landing Page Views @ $1.86 per view

*Further breakdown as follows:

• Ad 1: 18 LPV @ $2.40 per view
• Ad 2: 33 LPV @ $2.48 per view
• Ad 3: 16 LPV @ $2.05 per view

Final Numbers:

277 LPV

32 verified leads

Conversion Rate: 11.5%

It’s worth pointing out that we received a significant amount of engagement from customers – including likes, shares and comments. One ad even received a total of 34 organic shares!

The marketing potential of Facebook as a platform is, frankly, unrivaled in the industry. At the same time, it’s a difficult beast to work with. Finding success depends on getting everything right:

And no aspect is as important as the core offer.

In this particular case, the best offer for our audience was free food. The restaurant selected is popular with locals, and the strings attached were pretty thin:

Submit your name and contact information for a quote, and you get a free lunch. That’s all.

Sometimes, simplicity is the best policy. And what’s simpler than the innate human desire to tear into a plate of tasty chicken wings?

Have you had success with Facebook ad offers? Tell us about your own experience in the comments below!