Storytelling with Facebook Ads

What is up App Nation? Welcome to another virtual summit where we got some amazing amazing guests really walking us in detail on how they've been able to achieve their success. And today I got a friend of mine, he's all the way in Ecuador. His name is Francisco Cornejo. He's the co-founder and marketing director at Sailor Bear. And you can check out the website Sailor Bear. And we're Francisco Francisco is going to talk all about how he's been able to achieve over 30,000 paying These aren't just downloads. Paying customers using this storytelling Facebook hack that he's discovered. Okay? It's going to be amazing amazing action packed with screenshots with screen share everything that you want. But without further ado, Francisco, welcome to the summit.

Hey Steve, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to share this piece of knowledge and advice. And as always I I'm always checking on your tips and and hopefully this will be helpful for your community. So let's start. So I put together a couple of slides to show you exactly what I've done. Um Yeah, well you already introduced me. So not much about me as I told you we founded the this company in Australia. So most of the stuff I have like the currency we're using on on our Facebook platform is in Australian dollars. So I'll show you that in a second. This is the app pretty much.

It's a simple app, but it's really powerful. It combines three things which is bedtime stories, relaxing music, and infant massage. And gives the parent as guide that's super easy to use guide on how to share a couple of minutes with your child before bedtime or um I don't know after a nap. Super short. This is how it works. I don't want to to get too much into detail. But I love this man. This is good. I bet you didn't know this.

That's yeah. That's cool. It's it's easy it's easy to use, but the effects are are really strong. That's why we have so many reviews. If you check our App Store page you will see thousands of reviews. But let's get to what's interesting. We have a story and every one of us has a story. Um I mean when you start an app a business and startup there's a lot of struggle you had that aha moment. Everyone has a story. So we decided to share our story. And this is pretty much it. This is my wife Daniela and my oldest kid and on the left side. And here you can see them having a coffee. Um and I think it's all about that. It's something that everyone can relate. It's something simple. We This is actually our actual story on Facebook. You can see we posted it from her Facebook page. We didn't use the brand for that.

And those are the keys to to connect with people. So I'm already throwing everything in, but that's pretty much it. It's as simple as as telling your story. So we found out that we were not the only parents who were struggling to get their children to sleep. This is actually 80% of parents go through that hassle between 0 to 12 years old. So um we weren't the only ones and we shared that story and and this is something really personal. She felt that she could help other people by telling how our life changed at some point when we went to Australia with our one-year-old and three-year-old by the time. And how they they putting together these elements which later resulted in the app helped our family and changed our our life pretty much our our dynamic in the in our relationships.

I don't know. It was really really powerful for us. So she she wrote this story. We put it on Facebook. We put it on Instagram. And it went viral almost immediately. We pushed it a small amount with social media ads. But the virality was amazing. As you can see we have with this particular story 30,000 shares. 11,000 comments. Hundreds of thousands of the reactions. But and you can check the story. I can send you the link.

Check it out later. And it grew from there. We put it these in English and in Spanish and in Spanish worked better mainly because we knew how to talk to that audience. As I told you Mexico was one of the countries that worked most. But this there was a collateral to this. We not only get our app out there in downloads, but we also got super high engagement with the person. So as you can see her page and this is actually not updated.

We created this from scratch. There was nothing before. We put that story there and after eight months now she has 140,000 followers on Facebook. And that was a collateral. We didn't expect that. It was people reading the story reading about how the app was created. And obviously they get interested in the app. They went and downloaded the app, but also connected with us. So the relationship we have with our users is is amazing because now they know the person behind. And and if we release in-app content they are keen to buy it because they feel a connection with Daniela who is my wife. And she's often making videos talking about the app and how to improve the benefits of the app.

And also writing other stories about some other times in her motherhood. Which could be useful for someone else. So this is pretty much everything. It's It's not something complicated to do. You need pretty much four things. The first thing you obviously need is an app. But the key thing here is you have to have Facebook SDK integrated within your app. That's the only way you can measure if that particular is working or not.

Um This is not necessarily something you need to do, but I really like this kind of communication when a person is talking to you and not a brand. So we get blasted with tons of ads throughout our social media. And yes, you can check them out. Sometimes you have really cool ads engaging ads. But if that comes from a person it's much more personal. It's much more relatable. And I think people want to hear people talking about stuff not brands talking about stuff. So that's why we created this Facebook page of Daniela. Then you obviously need a story. As I mentioned we all have stories to tell.

What you you said Steve is it's the main thing. You have to find who is your target and what talks to them. What's relevant to them. As it was an easy guess for us. We went through went through that. Our children were terrible sleepers. And the app really helped helped us. So we tell that story about how we struggled and how when we discovered infant massage everything changed for us and how we put that together into an app. Hoping that somebody else will be needing it.

And to our surprise it really grew from there. And the rest is testing. Because as you saw here the picture we used if this is not a photo professional picture. At the time I took the picture I never even imagined it would be ended in 10 million people I don't know devices. That was a super natural picture. We were having a coffee. I think that was Mother's Day somewhere 2015 2014. But we tested the picture. We we tried a couple of pictures. We tried the one on the left. We wanted something that didn't feel like brand was talking to you but a regular day-to-day person. Because again this talked directly to our audience. If your audience is a business person you probably need or an industry or you're selling B2C products you probably will need some other kind of approach. But again I love when people talk to you and not brands.

So um And testing. We did a lot of testing. We tested first the story. We tested the picture. We tested the audiences. And we tested the call to action. At the end we asked people if you like this story please try try the app. And then we added if you like this story please share it and try the app. And then we added last week and let us know how it went if you after you tried it. And that helped a lot because it grew the virality and a lot of people seek this social validation. So when they saw the comments about people saying you made me cry. I'm going through the same. I tried the app and the app is amazing. Or I started using the app and my kid sleeping from day one.

They felt comfortable and went and buy the app because it has a price. So, it's even harder to get downloads, but with the story we managed to tackle a lot of things and to get a lot of gains in one go. So, I can show you how my um Facebook campaign works. Yeah, let's All right, guys. If you want to see the rest of the interview along with Francisco walking us through exactly how to set up that Facebook campaign so that it tracks properly, well, go register for free by going to appmasters.com/summit.

You'll be able to access all our summit videos. And if you're watching this way into the future, well, you can get access to the past summits as well just by going to appmasters.com/summit. And I'll see you on the next video. Click the top video if you want to see how to actually spy on your competitors' Facebook ads, and click the bottom video if you want to see how to make Apple search ads work for paid apps.