After using MMM marketing strategies with paid facebook ads for a year, I thought I'd share this -

We have a good sales funnel that works, but our conversion rate and cost per subscriber has slowly gotten worse as time passed. We tried a few things with lookalike audiences and a simple squeeze page alteration. Here's what we did:

1. we advertised to a lookalike audience based on our facebook fans (we have about 6000, so on the small end it generated a list of about 350,000 people). Did not bother with custom audiences, they were too small

ads did not so well, converted at a 10% or under rate, cost per website click really high.

2. thought the audience was too broad - so narrowed that lookalike by adding interests. These interests were more specific than just "a band that sounds like us" (which we've done many times), they were related interests we found by using audience analytics - clothing company brands, magazines, etc.

ad did even WORSE.

3. added one extra line of text at the heading of our squeeze page - after the emotional description of the music and band, it simply stated "You need to hear this."

conversion went up slightly, like back up to 10%

4. Got rid of the interests and went back to the larger lookalike audience with the new squeeze page copy

Conversion rate went up to 30% within a couple hours and started to see a new subscriber every 5-10 minutes. The most IMPRESSIVE change I've seen in our advertising in a year and a half. Subscriber cost is almost at an all time low for us now. Time to start investing more daily $ in the ads!!!

John advised me to start with the larger audience and not narrow it down to start, he was right. But I think the obvious call to action right in the squeeze header made a difference that never occured to us before.

Just wanted to share so everyone else can try it!

mike- will post some specifics when I get the time in a day or two- crazy busy weekend!

Here is how I narrowed our lookalike audience - but just to be clear, it did not seem to work as well as I hoped, but I think it's worth trying. It was better in the end to keep the lookalike audience unaffected, but we changed up our squeeze page a bit. The reason we tried it was because our past experience was that advertising to an audience of just under 100,000 was more effective than a larger one. There are logical reasons for this that I feel will not apply to more mainstream artists.

For example - we are a theatrical gothic art rock band, and an enormous chunk of our fans "like" Tim Burton movies. But of the millions of Tim Burton film fans out there, few of them will be interested in our music, so it does not help to use "Tim Burton films" as an interest. We use interests that narrow the general facebook audience of one country down to just under 100,000 - here's an example of how:

We have an electric cello player in our band, and we are often lumped in with heavy metal, so we try using "Apocalyptica" (an extremely well known heavy metal band of all electric cellos) as an interest for an ad aimed at the United States. We get an audience of 530,000, but it performs very, very poorly.

We try an ad with a different artist, not quite as well known, that also features electric cello  (we've done this with several artists, so we'll call it "Artist X"). We get an audience of about 60,000 people. This group responds to the ad FAR better. In both cases the ad features a picture of our cellist to grab the attention of people interested in that instrument.

Bottom line, Apocalyptica is just too damn popular with too many different people. Not all of them are going to be potential fans of exactly what we do.

Our problem - we want to advertise to a larger audience, but an audience like the one we get when we use "Artist X".

Here was my way of creating that audience: First, we created a lookalike audience based on our facebook fans in the United States. We get 320,000 on the short end (you can find out exactly what I mean by that by watching JOhn's training video and creating your own lookalike audience based on your facebook "likes').

then, we went to "audience insights" and under "interests" we entered "Artist X"

Then click on "page likes" to see what other interests fans of that group had in common.

We found a few interesting things - the top "interest" of this group was "authors" - and it gave us a few names - Neil Gaiman, Edgar Allen Poe, etc. It also gave us a few other other more independent-type musical artists that we had never heard of.

SO....we go create a new ad aimed and choose our lookalike audience for the USA.

THEN we added a few of the interests we found from audience insights. We didn;t just use "Artist X" because we thought we would have been re-targeting the same people we did before. Some of the interests make a difference, some don't even show up as being available to use in your ad targeting. So we use a magazine, an author and a couple other artists. It narrowed our audience down from 320,000 to about 100,000.

I think to really see if it works for you, and assuming you are getting audiences about the same size as the ones I'm talking about, you need more than 24 hours to see if it works or not. A few days at a $20 daily budget is what we do.

John suggested starting with the whole 320,000 member audience and start narrowing it down after the ad ran for a bit. We probably should have, because we found that we did narrow it down too much.

So our strategy was to start with the full size lookalike audience, and if the ad performs poorly, slowly ad one interest at a time (from the list you made from audience insights).

we also used the audience insights to inspire a slight alteration of our squeeze page headline - you might to seriously consider that - because it seemed to make the biggest difference. We tried a few variations, we always use a TON of social proof (we get a lot of press), but combined it with the idea of "entering another world" since our fan insights revealed that creepy literature is very important to them.

hope this is useful!

I am also very curious to know if this helps anyone else who is having problems narrowing down their audience

Hey Xerxes - thx so much for your in-depth reply! Tons of actionable stuff in there, and I'm looking forward to putting it into action. Again, thanks for taking the time - really appreciate it.