Table of content
Campaign Objective
Sell an artistic photography ebook
My goal was to sell a narrative photography ebook: “The Night, from Sunset to Sunrise.”
It’s an ebook whose quality I know well, and I’m frustrated to see it remain invisible.
To gain traction and generate sales, I found myself with no other option but to run an advertising campaign.
I chose to run this campaign on Facebook and Instagram.
I set myself a relatively small budget of €60–100, hoping to get some initial results.
I’m not a marketing professional. It’s not my field to begin with, but I studied the topic quite a bit before getting started.
The Advertising
I made sure to present the ebook as honestly as possible: I didn’t want people to click and then immediately leave because they had the wrong idea about the product.
A side note on Meta’s ad interface
The interface for creating ads is awful. It feels like a poorly designed government website.
While offering such a clunky interface shows how attractive it still is for advertisers to run campaigns on Facebook and Instagram, it also says something about Meta’s standards toward its clients.
Choosing the Audience
It’s important to define your audience properly in order to reach people who are likely to buy the product.
In my case, I targeted people in France most likely to be interested in art, photography, and ebooks, resulting in an audience of around 100,000 people.
The Strategy to Convince the Audience
The landing page
Rather than sending users directly to the product page, I felt it was necessary to create a promotional page, or landing page.
The purpose of this page is to clearly explain what the product is and convince the visitor to buy it.
You can see the landing page here:
Campaign Results
A complete failure
While I wasn’t expecting amazing results at first, I have to say I’m completely disappointed.
Not a single sale, and not even one person read the free sample chapter.
Clicks, then nothing
Meta reports that 785 people clicked the link; however, none of them took any further action.
And yet, the ad clearly explained the nature of the product.
My Interpretation of the Results
People who use Facebook and Instagram don’t know how to choose
That’s the very principle of these social networks: to make you scroll without thinking.
From that perspective, if you offer an unusual product, it becomes much harder.
That’s the case with this ebook. There are countless ebooks that teach photography, but an artistic narrative photo ebook is unusual.
Meta and art: two opposing concepts
Promises of immediate results—like becoming a better photographer, losing weight, or making money—are more appealing; they offer a clear and instant benefit.
Cultural enrichment is less instinctive, less primal.
You only need to scroll for five minutes and look at the proportion of shallow or trivial content on Instagram or Facebook to realize that this isn’t what Meta’s audience primarily seeks.
Yes, people may be curious and click, but in the end, they don’t understand what a narrative photo ebook can offer them.
Can persistence work?
If someone sees the ad repeatedly, can they develop genuine interest in the book?
I won’t find out—my budget doesn’t allow it.
But it now seems obvious to me, given the unusual nature of my product, that the ad would need to be shown multiple times to the same person for them to understand it and feel motivated to take action.
Conclusion
I attribute this failure more to the nature of my product than anything else.
I think an ad campaign on Meta can work when the user immediately sees a clear benefit in what’s being offered.
For an unusual product, or one that requires thought, the only viable option I see is repetition—showing the ad multiple times to the same users.
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