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Facebook Ads + Landing Pages =LEAD GENERATION!

Use Facebook Ads For Lead Generation

Using Facebook for lead generation has almost overwhelming potential. When you feel like you’ve tried everything but pulling leads out of thin air, Facebook (and its mountain of consumer data) is just a click away.

In fact, last fall, Facebook added lead-generation ads to its stable of ad types. Whereas previously its default ads focused on getting viewers to perform actions inside Facebook or click through to a website, this move acknowledged that not all businesses are just looking for traffic when they run ads.

That’s because some businesses are wise enough to know their ideal clients aren’t going to make a big investment directly from a Facebook ad. They know that they need to cultivate a lasting relationship that goes beyond the boundaries of Facebook.

These businesses are looking for leads.

Here are some do’s and don’t’s for your first and future campaigns to come:

 

Do: Spend time defining your ideal audience. (They may be closer than you think.)

Facebook allows you to target your ads very strategically, taking advantage of consumer data that was previously only available to those with big-agency budgets.

But with all that data available, some businesses can miss the prospects right under their noses.

Build your custom audience, you consider adding:

1. Your Facebook fans. It’s sad but true: only a tiny percentage of your business’s Facebook followers will ever see any given post you make. To reach these people and turn them into leads you can contact outside of Facebook, add them to the custom audience for your ad.
2. Your LinkedIn connections. Not many people realize this, but you can export your connections from LinkedIn and upload the file to create a custom audience on Facebook. If you’re a B2B business or you think you have lots of prospective customers among your LinkedIn contacts, consider this option.
3. Visitors to your website. If you place a Facebook retargeting pixel on your website, you can display ads to people who have visited your website
4. Lookalike audiences. This is a way to reach new people who are likely to be interested in your business because they’re similar to your current customers. You can base a lookalike audience on a variety of existing audiences, such as people who have liked your page or visited your website.
5. Facebook users based on demographics and behaviors. Who is your typical customer? Male or female? Millennial or baby boomer? Business owner or college student? Are they likely to subscribe to certain magazines? Have they recently bought homes? Using Facebook’s very specific targeting categories, you can make show your ad to people who are certain to be in your target market.
6. A partner’s mailing list. If you run any joint marketing efforts with a partner business, you can display your ad to their mailing list (without mailing people who aren’t expecting to hear from you). Your partner can export this list from their email service provider and let you upload it to Facebook.

To cut down advertising costs, you can also choose to exclude certain groups from your custom audience. If your Facebook Ads campaign is focused on generating new leads, you can upload your existing email list and exclude those people from your ads’ audience. That way, you’re not paying to convert people you’ve already converted.

To learn the nuts and bolts of building a custom audience, download our free Facebook advertising course. (We cover setting up custom audiences like these in Modules 4 and 5.)

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Do: Take advantage of Audience Insights and Page Insights.

Audience Insights allows you to review trends about your current and potential customers across Facebook—you might look up data about the online purchase behavior of people in your service area, for example.

Page Insights provides data about the people who interact with your page via likes, comments and shares.

For example, let’s say that I want to generate leads for my women’s fitness studio in Minneapolis.

Using Audience Insights, I would research my target demographic—women ages 25–40 in my area. I could find out:

• How many female Facebook users in this age range live near my gym
• Their average income levels
• Their family structure
• Their online interests

When I research this group on Audience Insights, I might learn that the majority of women in my target market are married, working, middle-income mothers who tend to look for health information online.

Armed with this information, I can devise and target ads speaking directly to working mothers. For instance, I could generate leads by offering a free video series demonstrating workouts that are easy to fit into the smallest amounts of time.