Welcome to the first instalment of our Facebook Ads series, where we will be taking you through all the things that you need to know in order to generate leads from a successful Facebook ad campaign. For this first article, we will be exploring why Facebook ads are worth using to generate leads for your business.
Facebook is undeniably the largest social network, with currently 2 billion monthly users worldwide. The social networks which are in close numbers to Facebook are Instagram, and WhatsApp – and Facebook happens to own both of them. According to HubSpot, the average user spends 50 minutes 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.
The best way to generate leads from this huge network is to combine organic efforts with targeted, paid advertising. Both complement each other and undertaking one without the other, may not give you the results that you’re hoping for.
There are various types of Facebook ads you can use, it just depends on what’s right for your business, audience and budget. There are 3 main types of Facebook ads:
Lead ads
Lead ads can not only be 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 Facebook.
Leaving Facebook 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 a lead with a form is extremely convenient through Facebook lead ads because the information about a user held by Facebook 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.
TOP TIP — Link your Facebook business account to your CRM, so you have somewhere tidy to populate all of the data you are collecting.
Link Click Ads
The title may give it away, but Link Click ads are adverts that link you away from Facebook 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 Facebook 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.
TOP 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.
Audience Awareness
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 Facebook, which is a great advantage to those businesses who create ads on the social media platform. Facebook 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. Facebook’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.
Facebook Pixel
Put simply, a Facebook 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. 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 Facebook 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. 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 Facebook pixel working! The Facebook 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 creates 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. Note: I would recommend not using this option for ads which are there to generate new audiences as you won’t find many of them! - Lookalike Audiences
I’ve mentioned this before, but this is an option when creating Facebook ads and is great for saving time and helps prevent you from making risky predictions in targeting specific audiences.
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 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. 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.
Hopefully, you’ve now got a clear idea of why you should use Facebook ads and posts to generate awareness and leads for your business. Next week, we will be investigating the key strategies of a successful Facebook ad campaign, and how to implement these in your Facebook ad account. For more information on how we can help you with generating leads via Facebook, get in touch with us.
