Influencer Marketing with Famebit – The Results

Our February Famebit campaign has ended and the results are in! 4.7x ROI

We planned to spend $5500 on FameBit on 10-12 sponsored videos by YouTuber’s who had a subscriber reach of around 1 million subscribers which would yield us 150k views (15% of subscriber base) and 22.5k clickthroughs to our landing page (15% of views).

We started the campaign in mid January and had hoped to have the first series of video’s released by the 1st of Feb. Too aggressive, they normally work off 30-45 day schedule, to their credit they were able to get the first ones out by the second week of Feb – 3 weeks in. There were a few hiccups along the way, we lost one of the YouTubers who we’re in the process of replacing, and another YouTuber I asked to redo the video to make it even better. (She charged me double to reshoot, however) There were three or four others that I asked for changes, which delayed them, and you can see that in how late the dates were when they were released.

Here are the results –

1. Famebit – 912k subscribers, 164k views (18% of sub’s), 13k clickthroughs (8% of views). Campaign was successful in hitting the views goal of the video’s, but the clickthroughs were about half of what we expected. (Total sessions from all traffic sources was 19k – still not quite there, although there are still 3 video’s to go for this campaign)

1. Conversions – We spent $4,255 and made $4,860 or about breaking even. In terms of conversions, we were hoping for a 5x return on our spend and, according to Google analytics, we about broke even. However, that’s a little unfair because as we discovered, there were many sales that didn’t happen directly from clicking the link. I know because customer’s would have an issue or question come into our customer service email saying “I saw your video on x channel, signed up for your email list, and didn’t get coupon, then would click through a link in an email or go straight to the site to complete purchase.” So I broadened the results to the website revenue in general.

Like I said in the original post, we put our entire marketing budget into this for the month so our revenue numbers are fairly attributable just to FameBit advertising. Organic, direct, and social media traffic all spiked at the same time the videos were coming out. Although I am sure there are some sales attributable to previous email efforts, non-YouTube video organic search, and direct traffic- I’m fairly confident this campaign is responsible for the lion’s share of our website revenue for the month. With that being said, we actually brought in $20k top line on only the website, which when compared with the amount spent on video’s that were released in February – $4,255, the campaign resulted in a 4.7x return versus a planned 5x. Close enough.

Overall, there were a lot of lesson’s learned and it was definitely a much longer process than many of the other traffic generation strategies I’ve heard of. A few of the key takeaway’s I got from it:

• Biggest benefit we got was content generation – a lot of the videos were done so well that we can actually use them in our email autoresponder sequences and on our blog. We’re even planning to add some of them to our product pages for their corresponding colors.

• Biggest learning – negotiate! The account manager when in the brand campaign does a lot of the negotiating, but when I was accepting proposals on my own in the interface I pretty much took the estimates at face value. When I saw the account manager bringing bids at a cheaper price from the same YouTuber’s that had quoted me a 30% higher proposal, it became clear there is wiggle room.

• Cheap click through – I haven’t done much PPC, but when I look at the traffic that was brought to my site from the videos, it was basically .32 cents per click. I’m assuming that’s a pretty decent cost, especially adding in that its much warmer traffic, and the added benefit of the video content that’s generated for me. (Although I do recognize this is tempered by the 3-6 week lead time…)

• Long tail revenue – The bulk of the video’s were released within the last week. The benefit of this traffic source is that it lasts as long as the video is up. I fully expect to continue to see sales from these video’s going forward. We’re still getting sales from video’s that were released last October!

Where do we go from here?

• I’ve increased my campaign amounts, it is clear there is a direct correlation between revenue and subscriber base. Instead of 10-12 video’s, we’re going to attempt 5-6 videos with YouTuber’s who have subscriber bases over 300k. As long as we can do that within the same 5k budget, we’ll have a reach of 1.5 million to 1.8 million at the same cost. We got 13k sessions or a 1.4% click through rate with the 912k subscribers at $.32/click, so hopefully this strategy at the same click through rate will lower cost to $.23-$.20 per click.

• Making our own video – The sponsored video’s don’t exactly match what we want to say about our product, and with good reason, those YouTuber’s know what works for their subscriber base and want to sound authentic. However this leaves gaps for the viewer between what they see and exactly what we want them to see. We plan to fill those gaps with our own video. Added benefit is that it will also allow us to try launching video ads on the YouTube platform and see how that works.

• Reaching out to YouTuber’s directly – cost has been a factor working with the FameBit platform, however it allowed us to quickly get videos made and traffic coming in. We’re going to add in reaching out to YouTuber’s directly and seeing if they’ll work with us. Hopefully this will bring cost down while keeping revenue/traffic steady.

Hopefully this experience is able to help someone else! Here’s the link again to the raw data used in this summary: Famebit Results