You're listening to the Art Marketing Podcast. Today we're going to be talking about a free print giveaway, $150 in ad spend, and 400 Messenger subscribers, all in a week. Not just that though, there is way, way more. When I say more, I mean more spelled M-O-A-R, all caps, which is many of you know, is actually a combination of more, plus roar. What's the too long didn't read it version? I'm going to be talking about running a free print giveaway contest, with Facebook Messenger and ManyChat. Posting that contest, on both Facebook and Instagram. Backing those posts up with an ad spend, and all the glorious results that follow.

You ever seen the movie, Dances With Wolves? Kevin Costner, Plains Indians, great movie. It's just an epic, incredible movie. It's getting a bit old now, but there's this profound scene in the movie in which the Indians, with Kevin Costner, come up to a herd of buffalo, and they've been slaughtered by white hunters. Read, they killed the Buffalo, they took the coats, and literally left the rest of the buffalo there. Now, this is a travesty for the Indians, as they know how to use every part of the buffalo. Is this wasteful? Hugely. Disgraceful? Perhaps. Why the buffalo were almost extinct? Most likely.

That's not how I saw it though, and that's not to take away for me. What I took away was, is that the white hunters in the movie, were likely lousy marketers, and the Indians were geniuses. Let me explain. All that time, energy, effort to travel, track and hunt, and finally kill these wonderful animals. They're putting up their camp, and taking camp down. I mean, you ever moved? They're dragging the tepees across the plains, and going up and down hills, the whole thing. Tremendous amount of work to put yourself in a position to be able to hunt these amazing creatures, and feed your family.

Now to go through all of that, all that time, energy, effort, work, and to just take the coat, and not realize how much they on the table on doing that, is ludicrous I tell you. In hindsight, I have to imagine that I've always been a marketer, because that literally the lens that I saw this through. Even when I was a child, and I watched this movie. As marketers, we expend such an amazing amount of time, energy, effort and yes, dollars. Whether we're talking about art shows, or running ads on Facebook, or email marketing, whatever.

Getting people to check out our art, or software in my case, is really, really hard. It takes a tremendous amount of work, and energy to get them there. Once you do get them there to your website, you really do have to understand, how to fully capitalize on it, to be successful. It's why we hammer things like the fishbowl technique, and all it entails, so when you're doing local art shows ... Episode number five by the way, I'll put it in the show notes. Or, why we recommend pop-ups on your website, so you can capture an email before they leave. There's a whole bag of tricks that help you do this. But you need to do all that you can, all that you have in your power, to continue the conversation with these Website visitors, because they come, they leave, they're gone.

The case study/tactic that I'm going to cover today, I think is without question, one of the most amazing techniques I have literally ever seen. Talk about using every part of the Buffalo, I think this technique we do the Plains Indians proud. The seer amount of moving pieces in this thing is just staggering to think about. I might even go as far to say that this is the most powerful list generating plus, plus, plus, more on that in a moment, activity for artists, that I've ever seen.

The craziest part about it is, what perhaps I like more than anything, is it solves for the chicken and egg problem, i.e., I'm just getting started. I don't have an email list. I've exhibited and sold for years, but never gathered emails. How do I get some momentum going? I just started. I just launched my website. How long does SEO take? I have no traffic. All of those, it solves for all of these. How to get started driving traffic to your websites as quickly, and as effectively, as possible, and social sites, everything for that matter.

You can be an artist that just got started yesterday, run this technique a few times, and in a few months, have a solid, solid list, to market and make sales with. All without leaving the comfort of your studio, which is even more amazing. Even better, is that there is now just an absolutely great arbitrage to run this technique. Not everybody has figured it out. Once everybody does figure out, it's going to lose some of its effectiveness. You, loyal listeners, you get in early, at the running. Think Bitcoin, around the $5 mark, oh yeah.

For this particular episode, I knew I needed an actual case study. I had to put my money where my mouth was. You didn't want to hear about how we at Art Storefronts use this to hock software, which by the way, we literally just did. Contest ended a couple days ago, and it was a home run. But anyway, so what we did, grabbed an artist that's on the Art Storefronts platform. Incredibly talented artist, I should say, named Mathieu Laca. He's from Quebec, Canada. In addition to being just an absolutely remarkable painter, and nice guy ... Most people flip out when they see his work. I certainly did. Link in the show notes to it.

I don't even want to describe his style. It's just insane. But also, the dude is just an absolutely straight hustler when it comes to his marketing. By which I mean, there are only two kinds of people in this world, lifters and leaners. This dude is a lifter. He really partnering with me on this project, and did a tremendous amount of work, and I can't underscore that enough, to get the results that we ended up getting in this particular case study. Again, I'll put a link in the show notes to see his work, so you can check it out. I highly recommend you do that.

Moreover, there are just so many different moving pieces to this tactic. I figured the plan is to drop this episode, sort of telling the story to the best of my ability, in terms of the case study. Then, in terms of the next episode, I'll bring Mathieu on the podcast. Then let him give the learnings on this from his angle, straight from the artist's mouth, so to speak. In addition to that, my team and I are also going to go crazy on the screenshots, and embeds, and videos, and all the steps that we took to achieve this, so it really will be easily replicable in your own art/ business.

Let's talk about the big picture. What did we do here? What exactly went down? Let me just kind of throw out a rough outline. This whole thing is essentially running a contest. Nothing new there. We used Mathieu's Facebook page, and his Instagram accounts, to give away a free print of one of his works, which is a Vincent van Gogh piece that he's done. Now in order to enter the contest, you had to leave a comment on a Facebook post, or click a link on his Instagram profile. There were both ads on Instagram and Facebook too. Once his followers did that, we ManyChat, plus Facebook Messenger, to handle the rest of the experience.

Now if you have no idea what I'm talking about, probably a good idea to have paws on this thing, and go listen to episode number 18, where I cover Facebook Messenger and ManyChat in detail. Again, Lincoln the show notes if you need to get to it that way. Now, the goal with this technique was to generate as many Facebook Messenger subscribers in ManyChat as possible, so that Mathieu can broadcast to these guys in the future. Why Facebook Messenger subscribers, instead of say, email? The open rates, and the click through rates are insane. The open rates, and the click through rates, it just doesn't even make sense how powerful they are. I'm seeing on some of my broadcast, 80% open rates, and 80% click through rates. I mean, that was email in 1992, '95 maybe.

The goal of this was to get as many subscribers as possible. There just ended up being so much more, which is incredible. What are the prerequisites? What do you need at the most basic level, to get this done? Something to give away. In Mathieu's case, it was a print, "But Patrick, but Patrick, I only do originals. That's the only thing I have to sell." Then give away a T-shirt. The what is sort of irrelevant, as long as it's something cool that represents your art, that your potential customers, buyers, friends, fans, followers, would like to enter a contest to win. You need something to give away. You need a Facebook fan page, a business page for your account. You need a ManyChat Pro account. They start at $10 a month. You need a Facebook ads account, and a budget for the ad spend. You need a website set up to sell art, and you need a desire to hustle. You gotta be a lifter.

Let's go through it. For him, the free print was again, van Gogh. It was a 13 x 19, on fine art paper. We created a Facebook and Instagram post. Both of these are regular old free posts, organic posts. I'll put screenshots both of the Facebook post, and the Instagram post, as well as the ads, in the show notes. We decided for this particular contest, to run from December 7th to the 13th. That was the duration, so six days in total. We stitched the Facebook post too ManyChat, via their keyword growth tool feature.

I'll just read what the post said, just to kind of give you the context, "To celebrate the opening exhibition, Animal That I Am, at the Livart in Montreal," he had an exhibition running that we kind of dovetailed this with, "I'm giving away a free print of By Vincent van Gogh portraits, Size 13 x 19, on fine art paper. All you have to do is enter the draw, is leave a comment, and tag a friend. The winner will be announced next Monday the 13th, at 8:00 p.m. eastern time, on my fan page, Mathieu Laca. Good luck, Mathieu."

There you go. If you tagged a friend, you were entered to win. Brilliant, right? Not only did those that leave the comment, see it of course, but many times, their friends came and saw it, were introduced to his work for the first time, and entered the contest as well, which is amazing. Now, short disclaimer, I still need to get to the bottom of this, but I've since learned this might actually, when I say this, the to order to enter the contest, tag a friend, that might actually be a violation for the terms of service of Facebook.

I need to do some more digging on that. But I've run this same technique a few times now, and even if it is a violation, yes, you might not be able to do the tag a friend part, but you know what, have them answer question. What's better, green or blue? Answer in the comments, you're entered into the contest. I gotta get to the bottom of that, but I don't want to make that the part of it. After they left the comment, they entered the ManyChat bot sequence we created. More on that in a second. Now that's Facebook.

For Instagram, because Facebook Messenger is not integrated into Instagram, we used another growth tool in ManyChat, which allows you to enter the sequence, just from clicking the link. We took this link, we put it in his profile, and we also put it in the Instagram ad. If you clicked it from Instagram, let's say you're on your phone, of course you're on your phone, it automatically just boots up Facebook Messenger, and you're into the sequence. That's how it went for Instagram. For Instagram, there was no tagging a friend, or any of that going on. It's just click, and your in. We have one organic post on Facebook announcing the contest. We've got one on Instagram, and now they've both stitched to the bot sequence. I think he also posted this on his personal profile, as a few Instagram Stories slides that he went in. All of that was running, up and going.

Now for the bot sequence itself, and again, it will help a bunch if you actually been through bot sequence on Messenger, so you can understand what this experience looks like, to really taste it, and feel it, and touch it. It is really, really cool. But here's what we did for his. We split folks into their desired language. This kind of threw a wrench. It was complicated, because the official language of Quebec is French. That's his primary language, so we had to split the French speakers, and everybody else. We did that with the bot sequence. We provided a video of Mathieu saying some words. We let people know they were subscribing.

I get this is a podcast. This is insanely difficult to visualize. But don't worry, I got you covered. ManyChat actually lets you embed into a webpage, what these bot sequences look like. They're essentially mind maps. I don't know if you're familiar with a mind map, but that's what they look like. They look like a mind map, where all these relationships are put together. There's little arrows, and you can go here, there, everywhere. It's really cool. Don't worry, it's going to be in the show. You're going to be able to look at this in detail. I'm just sort of lightly brushing through it.

That was the sequence that we used, and you can see it. At the end of the bot sequence was a link back to his website, so it was not a dead-end. We asked users for one more step. This is a really cool step, so it's worth mentioning. Never have a dead-end. I mean, at the end of this whole sequence, we asked folks to do one last thing, and they did it in droves. The numbers, I think were well over 60, maybe even 70% I think, that ended up checking out his website, and the show he was having. You're going to be able to see it, if you look at the sequence in the show notes. But we had a link that went and he talked about his gallery show that he had going on. It was in a dead-end at the very end of the sequence. It wasn't just like, "Hey, thanks for entering the contest. You're awesome." It was, "Hey, go check out my website." There is one more step at the very end of it.

Let's talk briefly about the ad spend. Now in terms of the ads, the total ad spend was $150 US. I ran a few different campaigns. To briefly sum them up, I ran ads only to warm traffic. What is to warm traffic? We covered this. Listen to episode number three, link in the show notes. But not all traffic is created equal. Warm traffic means these people already knew Mathieu. In this case, it was a combination of his email, his remarketing audience, so visitors to his website, and fans of his Facebook page. I used the exact same targeting for both Facebook and Instagram.

For Facebook, I set the campaign objected to page post engagement, because this is a contest. All I wanted people to do was leave a comment. So page post engagement, or page engagement is what I think they call it now, was the best campaign objective. What that allow me to do, being that that was my campaign objective, is went on, made an organic post on Facebook, a regular old post. Regular post, and we turned that into the ad. So we didn't even have to create an ad for Facebook. It was literally just turning that post into an ad. You can just as easily do this with the boosting post feature, depending on your level of sophistication and understanding with Facebook ads.

For Instagram, I did create a specific ad though. He had the organic Instagram post, where we had to play that little game where, check the link in my bio. We did that for the organic post, but we had to create a separate ad in Instagram, which is what I recommend doing, because then you can create a CTA, click, Learn More. You put that on the ad copy, click, Learn More to learn about it. So there was a separate Instagram ad. I think all in, we averaged about a $25 a day spend. Again, all the traffic was warm traffic, people that knew him. But, but, but, because we were asking folks to tag their friends, at least on Facebook, we got a ton of folks that were introduced to Mathieu's art for the very first time, so awesome, awesome.

But let's talk results. Over the six days, running this contest ended up generating 400 ManyChat Messenger subscribers he can now broadcast to. If we take the cost of the print, plus the shipping, plus the ad spend, I mean the print was $40 shipped, the ad spend was $150. All in, we'll call that 200 bucks, $200 US in. We're looking at about a 50% per subscriber cost, 50 cents per subscriber. Now keep in mind, a subscriber in Messenger, given the open rates, and click through rates, at least as it stands right now, early 2018, is many, many more times more valuable in my estimation, than an email subscriber, because it's easier to get their attention.

You look at those numbers alone, and this exercise looks like a worthwhile endeavor already, just based on the ManyChat subscribers. 50 cents per subscriber, I'll take that all day long. How long does it cost to exhibit in an art show, let alone your time? Or to run a paid campaign and a bunch of traffic at your website? Or even the fishbowl? How long is it going to take you to get to 400 essentially, email subscribers? But better than email subscribers, 400 is a great sized list. That's a great kick starter. You're rolling with 400 subscribers. The fact that we were able to acquire those for 50 cents each is just profound. It's amazing. In this particular case, was that the objective? Yes it was. But what I'm here to tell you, it was not even the most valuable part. Remember the buffalo, the lame buffalo story? That was literally just the coat.

In addition to the subscribers in Messenger, this tactic achieved, he generated a number of new Facebook fans for his Facebook page, 308 to be exact, which is a pretty good number. He got 150 new Instagram followers, also pretty good. In addition to those followers, and as a result of the bot sequence, we drove traffic back to his website. Remember I said the bot sequence was in a dead-end at the very end of it? We asked folks to go to his website. Well, people did that in droves, as I said. On his website, he had a lead capture form, so a pop-up enabled. What ended up happening is that drove about 50 additional emails to his list, so he added 50 new email subscribers. Let's sum that up quickly. 400 ManyChat Messenger subscribers, 308 new Facebook fans, 15 new Instagram followers, and 50 emails, all for whatever I said the spend was, 200 bucks. That's insane. That's amazing, right then and there.

But guess what? There's more. There is more. We haven't even covered the biggest win from all of this. What? Yeah, no kidding. There's an even bigger win. I think the biggest win, by far in my estimation, yes, I thought this would be a nice benefit, but was totally blown away by both the quantity, and the quality of the conversation that he had with potential buyers, collectors, and his first time fans, and buyers. This was quite literally the most amazing result. It kind of just blew me away. It was staggering really. It was almost like just looking at it, and watching the whole contest thing go down. It was almost like he was on some sort of digital speed dating session, with his customers and potential customers. It's like he opened a text message conversation with 400 of them over a week.

Now some of the conversations were just emoji based. Well let me just say, by entering the contest, in addition to going through this whole Messenger bot flow, which is all automated, with no human touch, you also have the opportunity to have a conversation with them in there. A lot of people started conversations with them at the end of the bot sequence. Again, the easiest way to think of it, if you're not introduced yet, and you haven't listened to the ManyChat, or gone through a ManyChat bot sequence, is it's sort of just like opening up a text message chain, with your potential buyers, collectors, fans, and customers. That was amazing.

Now a lot of these conversations were just like text messages, simple, and emoji based. They said something like, "Thanks, I love this contest. This is awesome. I'm so fired up to enter." Mathieu just responded with a thumbs up, or the pumped bicep, or the hands praying. The standard emojis that we all see in our text message chains. But a few of the conversations ended up being rather more than that. I mean, these are back and forth conversations. He was getting to know his fans, his collectors, his buyers. In all cases, these customers and potential customers, strengthened the bond, and emotional connection, they now have to an artist that they follow. This part was just so profound, watching this go down, because these are a lot of people that have been maybe sitting on the sidelines, and followed him for a while. Being Facebook fans and Instagram followers. Now the digital divide had been broken down, and Mathieu was actually having conversations with them.

One conversation I saw, and I'm not going to go divulging the details, but I saw he had one conversation with a collector. When I say collector, that's how he thinks about his fans and followers. I read out of that situation, a high net worth individual, interested in originals. This is the customer everybody wants as an artist. I see that him and Mathieu are chatting it up, going back and forth. I mean, this message chain is 30, 40 times. I mean, it's like they're sitting down, having a beer in a bar, just talking things through.

The collector sent a photo, said "Hey, here's what I look like. Hey, how you doing? This is great. Oh, I'm interested in this. Oh, Are you interested in this? Are you interested in that?" Heck of a conversation. The very end of which, essentially this collector said, "Hey, you go ahead and paint this thing, I'm in. I'm ready to buy it." I'm watching that conversation go down, and I'm going, "What? This is insane. This is amazing." There's no way he would have had a conversation, that easily. Running this contest, getting into this sequence, just triggers this chain of events. It's an example of when you execute, great things start happening, "Fishing for a good time, starts with throwing in your line," the Tom Waits line, I love.

I thought that was impressive. Now earlier, I have to say, I mentioned the hustle. The lifters and leaners part, and Mathieu is a lifter. Don't think you can just run a contest like this, and sit on the sidelines. He did some lifting on his part, to get this conversation rolling, and going. Obviously, on the next episode, I'll really drill into all the various different things that he did. But let me just say what he did. He responded to every single solitary comment he got, on both Facebook and Instagram. This is 500 plus comments in his case. He was responding to all the chat bot conversations. Again, some of those chat conversations were just emoji, but some were legit back and forth conversations. There is a pretty serious workload on his part, to keep this whole thing going. From some of our back-and-forth conversations during it, he's like, "Oh man, this thing has got to end. I got to get back to my studio, get back to painting." But he did a lot of work, and so I wanted to mention that. I think it's important to mention it.

Let's recap quickly. Subscriber growth, social following growth, emails captured, actual conversations went down. What's not to like about this? You're probably saying, "Are you finished Patrick? Is that it, because this sounds amazing. I want to go try it now." To which I say, nope. Here's where we break out ye old playbook. If you don't know about the playbook, it's covered in episode 17 and 19, link in the show notes. You should listen to it. But we're going to borrow some of the trade craft. We did borrow some of the trade craft from our holiday marketing playbook. What do we call it ... The Art Marketing ... I don't know, the playbook. We applied it here.

As the contest ends, we're going to have to contact everybody who opted in, and let people know who the winner was. We went ahead and did that, but in addition to doing that, we offered everybody who entered the contest, as a way of saying thanks, and it just so happened that it worked out that this was right around the holiday time, it was right around Christmas, it was just ahead of Christmas, and so we offered everybody that entered the contest a deal. Essentially, hey Tom, sorry you did win the contest. It was this guy, or this gal. I think it was a gal. I'm pretty sure it was a gal. Anyway, sorry you didn't win, but thank you so much for entering. As a result of you entering, I wanted to offer discount, so we're going to go ahead and offer a discount of 30% storewide. Or I think it was just on his prints, 30% on my prints, that expires in seven days. We always put some scarcity in things.

We emailed everybody in Messenger, ManyChat, that that discount was going on. Okay, so how did that go? Actually, it did pretty well for him. He ended up selling 12 prints, to eight people, totalling a little bit over $500 in revenue was the figure. So another nice little bump to close things out on this. What's interesting for him as an artist, is just to go down a little bit of a rabbit hole, is Mathieu is not someone that has a fully developed print business. He's used to selling originals. That's how he's operated his business up until this point, so adding the print business is new to him. It's almost like adding a completely new silo to his business.

What was also amazing about this, is he starts to think more seriously, about that aspect of his business. He's like, "Yes, I'm trying to sell these originals, which over many thousands of dollars. But am I ignoring this other potential I could have in my business, which is selling prints?" It's like, "Okay, if this contest just did $500, how do I take that 500 to 1,000? How do I take that 1,000 to 5, to 10, 15? In my ignoring a serious part of my business?" For him, I think that was a profound discovery, but again, I'll make a note to ask him about that further, to probe him on that in the next podcast episode.

Let's take a moment to take all of this in. I think when you do, it just becomes clear how profound of a marketing tactic, running a free print contest, or whatever you're going to give away, can be when you run these contests on Facebook, and Instagram, and stitch it onto Facebook Messenger, and have a spend in there too. I mean, it's amazing what you can do. Number one, stay tuned for the next episode, in which I'll bring Mathieu on, and we can talk about how this whole thing went on, from his perspective.

Number two, my team and I have really thrown the kitchen sink into the show notes on this one, so be sure to come check out all of the visual references we have compiled on this one. This whole process has got so many moving parts. It's crazy digital. You want to be able to see these resources, and get a better picture. Literally, I mean this is an opus. The post is so long, so I really ... Mandatory, not optional. Mandatory, come check out the show notes. This is episode number 20, art marketing podcast.com, and you can get those there.

Number three, we have some amazing episodes coming in 2018, so please do subscribe to the podcast in iTunes, and give us a rating on iTunes. It really does help us out. Right now, at recording time, we have approximately 42 reviews done. I've formally committed to stop drinking, until we get to 50. Now, when not drinking, I become irascible, and my wife does not like it. There are times when I even yell at the dog for no reason. Please, please, please leave us a review on iTunes. Let us get over the 50 review mark. Let me get my lips around a heavily-hopped, yet refreshingly smooth IPA. Thank you.

Number four, in terms of new episodes, I just say this, believe me when I say it, this will not be the last one on Facebook Messenger and ManyChat. We really do believe in it. We are the eat our own dog food type folks here, so we're ramping up all sorts of implementations of it, and working with it quite heavily. We believe messaging is a form of communication. The world is changing right now, and messaging, text messaging, bots, it's just the future. It's happening. It's going to be more prevalent, so I really want all of you guys to think very seriously about it. Think about how you can implement it in your business. Start to touch it, start to taste it, and get way, way, way ahead of the curve.

I think moreover, this tactic, just represents an amazing way to grow your list. That you can market to going forward. No matter what type of artist you are, and no matter how big your current following, read all of you, can run this. Run the playbook. We're providing it. Just copy exactly what we're doing. It just, just works. Number five, Happy New Year, and as always, have a great day.