Julius Dein

Brand Story

The Internet’s Biggest Magician, Julius Dien was born and raised in London, Julius Dein has quickly become one of the world’s most recognized magicians. Mixing together mind-blowing, interactive and stunning magic with hilarious comedy and travel culture, Julius has garnered over 20 million followers across the internet. Julius has performed magic in over 50 countries and at over 1000 events internationally. In conjunction with being a professional magician, for the first time ever, Julius launched a magic kit box that teaches his top performing magic tricks. After a soft-launch with his in-house media buyers, the marketing campaigns weren’t as successful as they initially expected and  Julius looked for a marketing company to create a marketing strategy that could take his product to the next level. 

The Objective

Following their first launch of the Julius Dein Magic Kit with results that didn’t meet their KPI’s, Julius decided to out-source the marketing to Yado along with new KPI’s and restrictions. The goal was to reach an ROI of 1.8X, meaning $1.80 return on every $1 spent on ads. In addition, because this magic kit was the first physical product that he sold, Julius wanted to exclude his existing followers from seeing his ads and only target pure prospecting (cold) audiences.

Challenges

There were two main challenges that we had to face. The first, being the exclusion of his followers. Normally, it’s not an issue to exclude fans or followers of a specific business. However, the issue here was that when we talk about exclusions we are talking about excluding 26 million existing followers who have a strong interest in magic. Second, in order to meet the campaign goal, we had to improve the existing ROI on the account by 85% to reach an ROAS (return on ad spend) of $1.85X. 

The Strategy

With no time to waste and no extra funds to run thousands of different creative and audience tests in order to reach the desired results, we knew we had to be laser sharp and accurate with our strategy to ensure that Julius maximized his return on investment from day one. 

After analyzing all existing campaigns we noticed that some areas could be improved. First, there were way too many ads running at the same time. Having a bunch of ads running all over the place hinders performance by creating strong audience overlaps and limiting the amount of ad auctions that your account participates in. We knew that we had to minimize that dramatically. 

Second, we noticed that CBO (campaign budget optimization) was rarely used on this account. Without using CBO, you are missing out on the budget optimization across campaigns which basically means that you automate the budget on a campaign level and let Facebook shift spend across ad sets based on best opportunities. Last and most importantly, we noticed that most creatives used one type of promotion video that was geared towards selling the product, instead of showing how cool the magic is, which was what made him famous initially. 

After completing the lengthy audit and data analysis, we decided to create a number of simple campaigns that would simply feature what made Julius famous in the first place, his magic tricks, rather than being focused on selling the product so hard. 

We picked his top viral videos from Instagram and Facebook, and matched it with highly relevant copy that would bring attention to the video, but would also engage the users who are interested in the product. Together, we created more than 20 different high performing ads that would speak to different audiences in different geo locations and demographics. 

We used Facebook automated rules to regulate spend and automated budget. We then used cost controls across all campaigns to ensure the algorithm knows when to deliver our ads and at what cost. Finally, we used the sandbox approach to give the machine learning tool as much freedom as possible to deliver the right ad to the right audience at the best cost. 

The results were so astounding that, even after managing 50 million dollars in ad spend, we were shocked. By the end of the month we finished strong with a 2.25X ROI from completely cold traffic audience while creating an overall lift in ROI of 103% compared to the previous period. 

In the following months we plan to create a dynamic funnel that will feed on Julius’ best creatives and will keep ads fresh while  continuing to provide a better return on investment for every dollar spent.