Hi, John, and hi all!

How are you guys doing?

We at Imperial Age have decided to focus on our core market - which is the UK - and to book a show in London and other cities and to pump the heck out of it. I would also recommend this strategy to others but if you live in a proper country you should first focus on your back yard, i.e. your domestic audience. So if you are from LA and play metal, go and sell out Whiskey a Go-Go first. We, however, live in Russia, where its too hard to grow as a domestic band (due to national mentality issues - everything western is amazing (even if its shit) and everything domestic is shit (even if it sells beautifully in the rest of the world - many local brands pretend to be German or Italian in order to sell properly, while many not-so-big Western bands pull huge crowds in Moscow for this very reason (but in the regions metal is dead for everyone, but that's another story...)...)), so we focus on the West and it works. So for us the back yard is the UK, maybe also due to the fact that I grew up there 🙂

So now what I have done is that I have pointed my funnel to the UK only. Which works fine (50% of sales have been coming from there anyway).

But the moment I focused on London only, my subscriber price rocketed up. I am used to getting subs for anything between 0.3 to 0.5 USD. But here its from 1 to 2 dollars! Which more or less renders the funnel unprofitable. Also I see my usual squeeze page conversion rate of 33% drop to 15-20%.

My hypothesis is that this is due to a) a significant decrease in audience (from 150k to 40-50k) and b) a significant increase in competition (everyone is promoting something in London because its London). 

I have tried numerous ways of reducing this price and the only one which worked is simply targeting all heavy metal fans int he city, which is around 200k people. Its impossible to segment them out because the audiences become tiny and overlap seriously, so I have to pile everything together.

But even with this in place, I know it will burn out in a month or two and we will be back to 1-2$.

I have not tried Lookalikes yet, but 1% of UK gives 420k people (because the population is 60mln and out of those 42mln are facebook users). And when we target that to London we are back to an audience of 50k people...

So can anyone advice me anything? ))

Im gonna try Kevin's idea with videos, but I have a suspicion that the reach will be too small for us - we need some massive coverage.