mateen
Member
Launching a Teespring Campaign Guide
There is a lot of money to be made in Teespring or in the custom product industry in general. The following guide will cover the steps I take to launch campaigns.
Note: Following these steps does not guarantee a profitable campaign, it merely lays out the basic formula to potentially find something profitable. Out of 10-15 campaigns I'll be lucky if even one starts to work, the magic is in the camps that take off. They usually end up paying for the $$ lost in testing and giving you some extra $$ of profit in the bank. Teespring is a numbers game. Keep throwing out campaigns following the below process and you WILL find something.
Step 1 – Research
Most People come up with an idea in their head and just go for it. This is ok and can sometimes uncover great campaigns. What you'll find though, is that the large majority of them will flop. How to do this better is to take a look at what's already working. There was an awesome product that came on the market a few weeks ago. (Social Sleuth). Buy it and take a look at the campaigns people are currently banking with. The idea now is to see what elements of their designs you can vary and make your own.
For example, let's look at this Brulosophy Campaign I stumbled across some time back.
Can we vary this? Certainly.
- brolosophy
- baelosophy
- nanlosophy
- birdlosophy
- dadlosophy
- crewlosophy
- unilosophy
- ladlosophy
- plumblosophy (plumbers)
- manlosophy
- beardlosophy
- Get the idea?
There’s literally 20 I can think of, off the top my head. I’ll probably even get 100 if I were to sit down and properly brainstorm more.
Again, add it to your list and continue your search.
Like this, I will continue to list about 10-20 variations. We’ve already got about 20 for the 2 above so at this stage I might stop and just start designing.
List down a bunch of designs like these and things you can vary/design for and get designing. You don't want to copy but you want to LEARN from what's working and reverse engineer to get something of your own working. The trick here is you're going of a proven design so you know you're not wasting time.
You can also check out ebay to see what people are selling successfully. This means to look for shirt that have SOLD, (check the sold listing box). This way you know people like the shirt enough to buy.
Step 2 – Design
The Design aspect of things is very important. Most people just slap on some text and some pics off google and try sell.
That's NOT how you do it. Sure, simple designs sell, but crappy designs don't.
You need to figure out what demographic you're selling to. For example the above Campaign is selling to gents. In this case we can keep things simple since it's just a text based shirt. 90% of the time my designs have only white in them. Whether it's the text or the picture. Don't use dark grey or anything that's hard to read, you want people to get the idea straight away when they see it on their FB.
- Make sure it's readable and clear
- plain text can be enough here, guys aren't to fussed
Let's go for Beardlosophy
I googled a meme to see what I can add as the text underneath and I got,
'He who sacrifices his Beard for a Woman deserves Neither'.
Great, it's funny, people might buy.
Now go ahead and make the design template. Once you've made the template, you can relatively easily make 4-5 similar design by simply changing the text.
I use Gimp, (free version of photoshop), to design. After using it for a while, I'm quite efficient at it. I'm no pro or even intermediate but I'm quick at doing what I need to do for teespring purposes. I suggest you guys learn it if you haven't yet. Outsourcing design can be a pain sometimes.
Step 3 - Advertising
I use FB exclusively here. it has most of the volume which gives us MASSIVE scaling opportunities. Very powerful stuff.
Making the Ad Image.
I use PPE, (Post Page Engagement), for my FB Ads. I first post the image of my ad, ( a simple red bordered picture of my shirt), on my FB page and select this to advertise through power editor.
With FaceBook Pages, I make a very generic FaceBook Page where I post ALL my designs. The ones that start to pick up and sell well, I'll make a dedicated FaceBook Page for them and restart the FB Campaign. The idea is to hasten the process of designing + launching campaigns.
Targeting
This is one of the biggest factors to getting your Design to work. Most people would put things like 'beard', 'movember', etc for their FB targets for a campaign in the beard niche. This is NOT how to target.
You don't want to be targeting so broad, FB will charge you too much per click and consequently you won't be able to drive enough traffic to the campaign for it to convert.
To target right, do the following,
Go to audience intersect. This is accesable through your Fb Ads Manager. Type 'Beard' in interests. Click the 'Page Likes' Tab and have a look at what people are connected to. There you'll find even MORE targeted pages. Delete 'Beard' and now type in 'incredibeard', (One of the pages this technique uncovered).
Now you'll get EVEN MORE targeted interests! These are the ones you should be typing in as targets.
- Lucky Scruff
- Facial Hair League
- No Shave Life
- Beards Are Best
- etc
If these guys don't buy, no one will.
Once you've set your targeting, selected your page & post you want to promote, set your budget and remove right column ads, (uncheck it).
You're good to go. Press upload to power editor, and wait till your campaign starts.
Step 4 - Scaling
I used to have a lot of trouble with this. Let's pretend you have a campaign that's bringing you a profit. Scaling isn't usually as simple as upping the budget. To scale right you need to dig a little deeper within your audience and find exactly who's converting.
Create separate ad sets, by age, intervals of 2 to 5, for your campaign. Add a conversion pixel to each one. Let it run for a couple of days and see which ad sets bring the most conversions. Now simply, up the budgets of the ones that convert best.
For example imagine the following scenario, (xx-xx - represents age filter),
Ad set 20-25 [2 conversion @ $30 spend]
Ad set 26-30 [1 conversion @ $30 spend]
Ad set 31-35 [4 conversion @ $30 spend]
Ad set 36-40 [5 conversion @ $30 spend]
Ad set 41-45 [3 conversion @ $30 spend]
I would increase the budget of the last three ad sets to $60 each and delete the first two.
This way your scaling what works and leaving out the ones that are breaking even or bringing you a little bit of profit.
Mind you, FaceBook Conversion tracking is most of the time, inaccurate so it mifght show 3 conversions when in reality you've had 6. Over time you'll learn the discripancy pattern and will scale accordingly.
Lookalike Audiences & Retargeting
For a long time I wasn't using the above FB features for my successful campaigns. Consequently I missed out on 10s of thousands of dollars. It's still a little annoying to think about!
Retargeting
Retargeting is as the name suggests, re-advertising to people that have initially shown interest, (engaged), in your ad. These people have clicked your ad but for some reason haven't gone through with the purchase. They've proven their interested though so you don't want to let them off the hook so easily.
Retargeting utilizes FB's ability to gather these users in a big custom audience pile and let's you select JUST them to advertise to. I always set a seperate retargeting ad at $5-$20/day, their ROI can be MASSIVE
Lookalike audiences.
Another absolute gem of a feature. FaceBook will re-create, using their own database and algorithms an audience that is similar to the audience that is converting for you. Basically it will read up on the data on the user profiles that have converted to a sale and pull up as many other users matching these profiles as it can!
So if your campaign dies, you can give it another shot by making a lookalike audience and activating the campaign!
I've done it many times to earn 10s of thousands of dollars more on campaigns I would have thought would be dead.
Conclusion
Teespring is a numbers game. If you want to make good money in this, you need to be doing things right, and a LOT of it. From designing wearable designs to targeting accurately, if you follow the above steps over and over again, each time learning from your mistakes you're sure to hit something that works.
Don't get too emotionally connected with your design. Test with $30, if no sales, scrap it and start again. New niche, new design.
All the best guys, here if you have any questions, you can ask them here or in my Ask me Anything Thread!
~ Mateen
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