Richard Canfield coaches entrepreneurs to optimize cash flow by using the Infinite Banking process. A student of Nelson Nash, Richard teaches others how to use whole life insurance policies as a means to become one’s own banker, leveraging the policy’s cash value to finance personal and business expenses.
Recently, Richard began his new YouTube show and wants to generate more traffic and hype for these videos. Knowing Richard’s goals, we want to utilize our Dollar-a-day strategy to find winners which lead to more YouTube views and engagement.
Our strategy is a cost-effective and highly targeted approach to digital advertising, primarily on Facebook, but it can be adapted to other platforms as well.
The core idea is to spend just one dollar per day on highly focused and specific ad campaigns.
The first step was finding 5 – 10 pieces of short form video content to promote.
Fortunately, Richard has already been repurposing existing longform videos into YouTube shorts. Using YouTube downloader tools, we can take these short videos and post them on Facebook.
We wanted to specifically test shorts with Dennis Yu and Kary Oberbrunner since they both have large audiences already.
Whenever we tag someone in a Facebook post or mention their name, that’s another signal to Facebook for the types of people we want to watch our posts.
After we post each video, we’ll boost the post for $1/day targeting our ideal audience. For targeting Facebook gives you a wide variety of options to choose from. You want to pick whatever audience best aligns with your goals.
In the case of Dennis, we targeted ages 25 – 65 who are in the top 10% of household incomes in the US and are interested in digital marketing.
We started testing with 6 posts, 4 featuring Dennis as a guest and 2 featuring Kary. The reason why we’re testing multiple ads is because we want to see which video hits our metrics for engagement before putting any more than $1/day into them.
What are the metrics we’re looking for?
With dollar-a-day there’s a rule of 10%. We’re looking for a 10% engagement rate which signals high relevance for the audience.
The reason why this matters is because the higher the relevance, the cheaper our cost-per-impressions and therefore conversions usually will be. Knowing Richard’s goal of building a following and generating hype for his YouTube channel, this includes clicks and watch time.
The rule of 10% also applies to most ads we test, since 1/10 are almost always winners in any given experiment.
This is also why we’re boosting multiple posts, since we have no idea which will perform the best or the worst until we go live.
What were the results of our experiment?
After $42 spent $1/day for 6 campaigns for a week we’ve found that Kary Oberbrunner’s video on why it’s never too late to get out of a slump had the highest engagement rate of 54%.
On top of the impressive engagement rate, we also have clicks for $0.09 to visit the full YouTube video from the post.
Interestingly, every post we had rocketed past our goal of a 10% engagement rate – with the lowest being 18%. If we had gone with our assumption that Dennis’ video would’ve performed better than Kary’s, we’d never have been able to get almost a 55% engagement rate and dirt-cheap traffic. This is why it’s so important to test and find winners before you blow your budget on videos.
What’s next now that we’ve found a few winning posts?
The next steps are to put more money behind the winners and stop promoting the losers. In our case, the winners in this test would be Kary’s video and perhaps 1-2 others.
From there, we can slowly start putting more money as long as the videos reach the goals of Richard and are growing his brand.
This is like finding a slot machine which you’ll always win when you play. Why wouldn’t you put more money behind something you know already works?
Since YouTube growth is a key component to our strategy, we should also begin testing dollar-a-day directly on Richard’s channel, which we’re about to do this week.
Dollar-a-day is a testing strategy and we’re so excited to see how far we can take it for Richard.