Glowforge is a Seattle-based startup that created the 3D laser printer. Glowforge’s wireless desktop laser makes it simple for designers, artists, and makers to take products directly from digital design to reality. Unlike 3D printers that use additive technology to build objects out of plastic, Glowforge uses subtractive technology to cut and engrave products from durable and beautiful materials like wood, leather, acrylic, paper, fabric – even chocolate.

Wpromote used a number of potential factors to define a target audience, including data on existing pre-order customers provided by Glowforge, success signals from related products and market research, and internal insights from experience working with other hardware clients.

Next, the team identified the channels showing the most promise for Glowforge’s pre-order campaign: Facebook Advertising and Google Ads.

On Facebook, they implemented a tiered Lookalike Audience targeting strategy to reach audiences similar to people who had already pre-ordered Glowforge products, which allowed Glowforge to reach highly relevant audiences at scale. The team also took advantage of the Glowforge printer’s visual appeal by utilizing high quality images and video ads.

On Google Ads, the team sought to capitalize on branded search opportunities coming from Glowforge’s recent press coverage, as well as the Facebook ad coverage. Additional non-branded targeting captured people higher up in the conversion funnel who were looking for broader terms and related products who might have been interested in the Glowforge 3D laser printer.

We knew that the combined impact of press coverage and paid advertising campaigns would cause a dramatic increase in traffic to Glowforge’s website, so we also needed to develop a remarketing strategy to capture people who visited the site but hadn’t yet converted. The challenge when doing remarketing for popular pre-order campaigns is that they receive a lot of press attention which ultimately attracts a lot of irrelevant traffic visiting out of curiosity about the product with no intent to actually buy.

Finally, the team developed a relevancy-focused remarketing strategy on both Facebook and Google’s display network (GDN) to make sure they were excluding irrelevant site traffic driven by curiosity and re-engaging the highest-quality site visitors to get them to take a second look at pre-ordering during the course of the crowdfunding campaign.