Tips For Creating Lead Generation Ads on Facebook
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Lead generation ads via Facebook can offer both B2B and B2C advertisers with good ROI and this has been part of the reason that nearly 25% of all digital marketing spend now comes via social media.
In recent weeks Facebook has not had the best of press with the Cambridge Analytica scandal that has been seen and heard in nearly all news channels. This aside though, their advertising platform offers a number of ways to reach new customers and in today’s blog entry I wanted to talk about and cover lead generation ads on Facebook and will try and explain and cover some of the results and behaviors that we have seen here at Herd Marketing.
The first thing to consider when developing ads for Facebook is your target audience or demographic and how you will define them and segment them so that you are only advertising to the relevant people who will want to engage with your company, products and/or service. On Facebook, there are a number of ways to do this and in the most basic format, you simply enter a number characteristics such as gender, age, and location. Then you add further details such as interests and lifestyle choices and as you are doing this Facebook will begin to calculate a potential audience size and can then make recommendations on budget and potential reach of your ads.
In order to really drill down and segment your audience further so that you are targeting people in a more precise way, there are other tools that can be utilised within Facebook’s business management system. This includes creating custom and lookalike audiences within the business manager using existing customer data that you already have. For example, you can link or upload email address from MailChimp or an excel file and the Facebook system will generate custom or lookalike audiences based on this data. This is a really useful way of targeting customers and prospects and when used alongside the regular targeting tools mentioned in the previous paragraph, can offer excellent ROI for advertisers.
Once you have complied and created your audience and saved it you are now ready to start thinking about creating your ads. Firstly, for lead generation emails I would always recommend not trying to capture too much information as people get distracted easily when filling in forms. Keep your sign-up form simple and only ask for what is absolutely necessary to make initial contact with a prospect. One thing to bear in mind when creating ‘lead forms’ within Facebook’s business manager is to make sure that within the forms setting you to leave it as open. This will allow your advert to be shared by people and will help the adverts organic reach on Facebook. One other quick point to consider with forms is to ensure that you get the form right first time, as currently, you cannot edit forms once created. You can, however, duplicate them and then makes changes, but from experience, I would always try to ensure that you have the form created correctly in the first instance.
When the ad is created it’s important to ensure that you have the Facebook pixel set up and turned on with within your ad. This will allow for tracking and measurement of your ad and is fairly simple to install on your website. It works in a similar way to Google analytics and offers some invaluable insights. Once you have created your ad and set a budget and put it live it will go to review before being put live on Facebook. This can take anywhere from a matter of minutes right through to 48 hours. Once it is live and being shown to users it will start to deliver data and feedback, both within the ads manager and also Facebook analytics.
One the ads are running your ad will start to develop a relevance score between 1 and 10 – with 1 being the lowest and 10 being the highest. From experience, it seems that the longer the ads run the higher the better the quality score seems to be and as time passes you seem to get a better ROI and more for your money. I am keen to hear readers thoughts on this and if you have had similar results/feedback on your advertising accounts?
The lead generation ads can be delivered to you by way of inbound calls or via a downloadable spreadsheet with prospects names and details in. This is something that is defined by you when you create the ads both offer a good ROI from my experience.
I hope you have enjoyed today’s blog entry on Social Media lead generation ads, if you have any questions, thoughts or ideas then please leave a comment in the box below and we will look to answer it in future blog posts or on own social media pages.
