Do you want to transform your business lead generation?
Social media is a fantastic tool for generating leads, and Facebook is one of the best!
Facebook is undeniably the largest social network, with currently 3 billion users worldwide. The social networks which are in close numbers to Facebook are Instagram, and WhatsApp – and Meta happens to own both of them.
According to HubSpot, the average user spends close to an hour a day on Facebook, meaning that there’s a generous amount of time in somebody’s day for you to target your audience with ads, posts or engagement. Instead of waiting for your audience to find you, it can be extremely effective to put your business in front of them, so they can’t resist noticing you.
For this article, we will be exploring why Facebook ads are worth using to generate leads for your business through the 3 main types of ads.
Lead ads – using forms to generate leads on Meta platforms
Lead ads aren’t just relevant to followers who have already identified their interest in you, but can also be key to gathering fresh leads from new people who may have an interest in your company.
Not only are these types of adverts popular among businesses, but audiences seem to like them too, as they can be given access to exclusive content and the contact forms are easy to fill out without having to leave the Meta platform.
Leaving the Meta platform to access content and forms can be a big turn off for followers, especially for those on mobile, which accounts for 80% of time spent on social media. Users don’t want the hassle of switching apps or attempting to fill out a form on a small touchscreen.
Turning prospects into leads with a form is extremely convenient through Meta lead ads because the information about a user held by Meta automatically combines with the information needed for the form. In turn, this gives businesses more information about a user to use for future lead nurturing and campaigns.
Tip: Link your Meta business account to your CRM, so you have somewhere tidy to populate all of the data you are collecting.
Example scenario:
Lisa runs a daycare and wants more parents to know about it. She uses Facebook lead ads. Parents can show they’re interested in Lisa’s daycare by filling in a form using their Meta details without leaving Facebook. It’s easy for them, especially on their phones. Lisa gets their details and can talk to them later about enrolling their child. She keeps everything organised by linking Facebook to her daycare’s records.
Link click ads – drive traffic to your website
The title may give it away, but link click ads are adverts that link you away from the Meta platform once they’ve been clicked on. Clicking on these ads will most likely direct you to a page on your business’ website. On this page, there may be a form for a lead to fill out, more information or an option to contact the business.
The main intention for this type of Meta ad is to generate traffic to your website and to generate leads on your website through forms, information downloads, or instant messaging.
So, if your sole aim is to get people to visit your website, then this is the perfect type of ad for that purpose. The success of such an ad campaign could depend on the cost-per-click, the traffic you get from the ads or how many leads are converted.
Tip: It’s extremely important to understand why you are putting an ad out there and what data you are looking at in order to identify if the campaign was a success or not.
Example scenario:
Sarah owns an online jewellery store and wants more people to visit her website. She uses link click ads on Facebook. When people click on her ads, they go straight to her website where they can see her jewellery and make a conversion. Sarah’s goal is to get more visitors to her site and maybe even make some sales. She keeps track of how many people click on her ads to see if they’re working.
Audience awareness – improve the effectiveness of your ads
In our digital age, people are now putting more information about themselves on their social media platform than ever before. Users don’t think twice about freely adding their phone number, date of birth or location onto Meta platforms, including Facebook, which is a great advantage to those businesses who create ads on the social media platform.
Meta doesn’t give you the information on a user-by-user basis, however, it holds the information and allows you to target people with particular characteristics linked to the information.
Facebook ads aren’t just great for building exposure for your brand and generating leads from a targeted audience, but they are also good for collating data about your audience, which in turn, will help you to create better and more effective ads in the future. Meta’s audience manager tool or also known as Audience Insights, allows you to learn more about your target audience.
Data helps you to develop an idea of the behaviours of your audience (both online and offline), their demographics, locations and various other aspects of their lives. The data collected about users can hugely benefit future ad campaigns and your audience knowledge by helping you to make more cost-effective and informative decisions about ad campaigns.
Example scenario:
John runs a small bakery in Manchester and wants to promote his new range of vegan cupcakes. He uses Facebook’s Audience Insights to discover that there’s a high concentration of vegans and vegetarians in his local area. John creates targeted ads specifically tailored to this audience, highlighting the delicious flavours and cruelty-free ingredients of his vegan cupcakes. As a result, John sees an increase in foot traffic to his bakery and a boost in sales of his vegan products.
Meta Pixel – track conversions from Meta
Put simply, a Meta Pixel is an analytics and remarketing tool, which is a small piece of code that sits on your website and helps you to track the conversions that have come from your Facebook ads, or ads across other Meta platforms.
Along with this, it can be used to optimise ads based on collected data, build targeted audiences to inform future ads and to remarket to leads that have already shown an interest in your company. The ultimate aim of the Facebook pixel is to make your Facebook ads more effective.
Here are some of the key benefits of the Meta Pixel:
Tracking conversions
This helps you to monitor a lead’s journey from viewing your ad to converting themselves into a customer. Pixels can track what somebody does once they have clicked on your Facebook ad. You are able to find out things like; what items are added to a basket, what products have been searched on your site and what device a purchase has been made on.
Some things to consider are:
Does your audience purchase on mobile the most?
Do they click on your ads and then switch to desktop when purchasing?
Tracking conversions is a way to find the answers to these questions.
Remarket to an audience
Have you ever visited a website and then seen that you’re being shown ads from that company on your Facebook page? Well, that’s the Meta Pixel working! The Meta Pixel allows you to show ads to those who have already visited your site, looked at a particular product or those who have abandoned a product in their shopping basket. Essentially, you can remind people about a product that they showed an interest in, to hopefully encourage them to take the leap into purchasing it.
Create lookalike audiences
Lookalike audiences take data from your Pixel and create an audience of users who have similar demographics and characteristics to those people who have visited your site or interacted with your content. This can take some of the guesswork out of creating a custom audience and can lead to highly successful targeted campaigns.
When creating ads on Facebook, there are three main audience types to target:
- Custom audiences: This option lets you target people based on various pieces of available information, such as their demographics, interests, locations and even their political views.
- Pixel audiences: This one lets you target people who have already interacted with you such as those who have visited your website, engaged with your content or used your app. These people have already shown an interest in your business, therefore they could be a high-value audience who are most likely to become leads. It is best practice to not use this option for ads which are there to generate new audiences as you won’t find many of them!
- Lookalike audiences: This option is great for saving time and helps prevent you from making risky predictions in targeting specific audiences.
Example scenario:
Sophie runs an online store and wants to understand her website visitors better. She instals the Meta/Facebook Pixel. Now, she can track visitor actions like product views and purchases. This helps her see what’s popular and target ads more effectively. Sophie also creates lookalike audiences to find new customers similar to her current ones. With the Pixel, Sophie makes smarter, data backed marketing decisions and grows her business.
How do you measure the success of a Facebook ad?
Well, the simple answer is, that there isn’t a simple answer to this!
Different types of campaigns have different costs and marketing goals, and there’s not an exact benchmark for what is considered a good result. It can take a lot of time to fully understand what is working for your business in regards to Facebook ads.
You can ask yourself these questions to help you to figure it out:
- Have people interacted with you in the way you wanted?
- What was the aim of the campaign in the first place?
- What’s the engagement rate?
- Have they filled out a form, downloaded a document or emailed you?
- How much did you spend on the ad, compared to the engagement/leads generated?
- How much is each lead worth to you?
It can take time to fully understand whether you are taking the right steps with your Facebook ads because every time you create an ad, you are collecting more data about your audience; which, therefore, informs your next ad.
Tip: This should be demonstrated in the cost of customer acquisition lowering every time you do a campaign. If your campaigns aren’t generating engagement and your conversion rate is low, something could be wrong and you should analyse the data as well as testing alternative ads and alternative audiences.
Use a Facebook/Meta ads agency for your social media ads
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