Whether your business is B2B, B2C, D2C, or some other combination of alphabet soup, driving in new leads is always top of mind. But in today’s ever-evolving ad landscape, it can be tough to know which channel will bring the best results. Many B2B brands instinctively turn to LinkedIn for lead generation. But we often remind these clients not to overlook the power and reach of Facebook’s new lead ads. For example, one of our B2B cable industry clients recently gave Facebook lead ads a try based upon our recommendation, and they were shocked by the results. If you are still skeptical about Facebook lead ads, check out our quick Q&A to learn how they work and how we can help make them work for you too.
What Are Facebook Lead Ads?
A Facebook lead ad lets you create an ad for your product or service, plus a customized form to go with it. For instance, if you want to encourage prospects to download a guide, request a cost estimate, sign up for a product demo, or enroll in a program or an event, you can create and set up a customized form that will instantly collect answers and contact info (name, email address, phone number, and the like) from high-quality prospects who may be interested in your product or service.
How Do Facebook Lead Ads Work?
When a user scrolls through Facebook, sees your ad, and taps on it, your customized form pops up pre-populated with the user’s contact info from Facebook. This makes submitting the form quick and easy for prospects since most of the work has already been done for them. Also, the experience is seamless for users because the form allows users to stay in the Facebook app rather than redirecting to an external landing page.
Why Should You Use Facebook Lead Ads?
Benefit #1: Build Brand Awareness and Reach
Facebook lead ads can help you build both brand awareness and reach at the top of the funnel. You can find the people most important to and most interested in your business and give them what they want: a simple way to respond to your message from any device. The seamlessness of Facebook lead ads helps discourage form abandoners.
Benefit #2: Tailor the Form to Suit Your Brand
Facebook lets you customize the form, too. Capture the contact info most important for your team’s follow-up – be it a phone number, personal email address, or business address. And you can ask your audience custom qualifying questions to learn more about their level of interest.
Benefit #3: Get Your Leads However You Want Them
When users submit the form, you can download your new leads through Facebook or have them sent directly to your customer relationship management (CRM) platform, such as MailChimp or Salesforce, so your sales team can immediately follow up.
How Can Facebook Lead Ads Help You Reach More Customers?
Facebook lead ads help you leverage your first-party data – the customer data gold mine you already own – to the fullest as well as gather the third-party data you need to expand your prospect pool. To make the most use of your first-party data, start with these tactics and expand your reach:
- Use your first-party CRM data, the info you’ve already collected on customers, to build look-alike audiences within Facebook.
- Examine your other Facebook ad conversions and then use those insights to build additional look-alike segments.
- Retarget people who abandoned your lead ad form without submitting it. Retargeting is so effective because you’re getting back in front of people who are familiar with you and who have already shown interest in the past.
Once you’ve squeezed all you can from your first-party data, expand your prospect pool using third-party data to reach similar people who may be interested in your message.
- Take advantage of Facebook interest segment targeting.
- Reach your preferred business segments, such as small business owners. (Our client used Goodway Group’s preferred partnership with PushSpring, a provider of device-level targeting data, to reach these segments.)
How Can Facebook Lead Ads Improve Your Results?
Facebook lead ads can improve the customer experience just like it did for our cable industry client:
Our Client’s Advertising: “Before”
Before testing Facebook lead ads, our client started out advertising with Facebook conversion ads. These ads redirected prospective customers to a landing page where the prospects could share more info about their needs via a two-step validation process. This generated some positive results, but we knew our client could do better.
Our Client’s Advertising: “After”
It wasn’t until they started running Facebook lead ads that their lead generation really took off. Facebook lead ads let our client’s audience avoid the tedious two-step form submission process. And instead of having to leave Facebook to submit the form on another website, prospects could quickly and easily do it within the Facebook site or app. Then, we helped our client set it up so their leads would go directly to the right team for quick follow-up. After making the switch to Facebook lead ads, our client’s lead generation vastly improved:
- They decreased their effective cost per lead (eCPL) by 73% …
- AND they achieved a 6-fold average increase in leads!
Are you curious about what Facebook lead ads can do for your business? Reach out to us today. We can help you build an innovative social strategy and hone your lead generation efforts to achieve more social advertising success.