Facebook Lead Ads are a very powerful product that allows you to capture a potential customer’s information quickly and easily, without the hassle of building a landing page or interrupting the customer’s day by requiring them to click off of Facebook. The lead form is contained within the ad for easy completion and data transfer.
Sounds simple, right? And it is—when executed correctly. But a Facebook Lead Ad can’t do all the work on its own. For the best performance at the lowest cost, you need to build a lead funnel using additional Facebook advertising products and content tactics.
Cultivate Warm Leads
You probably are familiar with the idea of warm leads and cold leads: a warm lead knows your brand and has likely expressed some sort of interest in you, or a particular product or service. A cold lead doesn’t know your offerings, and may not know you. They probably fit the customer you are looking for and could use your services, but they may not know it yet. A lead funnel turns cold users into warm leads and helps you convert them into customers.
Utilize Organic Content For Page Fans
Before you start paying for Facebook Lead Ads or other advertising, look at free opportunities to warm up current fans or re-engage old ones. Increase your posting frequency and vary your media types by posting videos, asking questions and prompting users for likes, comments or shares.
The more these fans engage, the more they (and their friends) will see your content. This is how the Facebook Newsfeed algorithm works; it looks at interactions and engagement as a measure of interest and shows more content from those people more often. This will keep your brand top of mind for these fans, warming them up for the lead ads to come, and helping to create custom audiences and lookalike models based on their interaction with you. (More on that in a minute.)
Run Awareness Advertising Campaigns
Once you’ve got your organic strategy humming along, it’s time to switch on paid. Start with a soft sell through awareness-based ads: video works well here. If you don’t have an actual video you can create a slideshow, but the key here is to utilize movement to capture the most attention in the Newsfeed and see who is responding to your ads so that you can retarget them with specific messaging later.
Image credit: Facebook
Test Budget and Targeting
You want to cast a wide net at the top of the lead funnel and then narrow your targeting and fine-tune your creative as they move closer to conversions. Think of some broad interest categories as well as competitors and similar companies. It helps to brainstorm these lists outside of Facebook, and then use their Audience tool to match to your original intent. Facebook will also recognize patterns to your targeting and suggest additional interests; at this stage, it only helps to include as many people as possible within your budget.
Vary Your Creative
For our purposes we are exclusively educating users on your brand and priming them to move through the funnel. So there is no real call-to-action. You do not need or want to pay for clicks to your site, unless your offering is so complex that they need to read more.
Videos naturally attract attention and allow for more remarketing options after viewing. Include subtitles with your video, as autoplay is muted. Tell the 30 second story of your brand through the video and brief caption.
If you don’t have a video, create one using Facebook’s slideshow feature. You’ll need high-quality still photos, and your caption will have to do more of the heavy lifting to tell the story. You don’t want to put too much text in the images as that will limit your paid promotion.
Implement A Retargeting Plan
Once these awareness ads start running, you can use the video views to retarget a second message to the most engaged users. Create a custom audience off those who watched or interacted with your video, as well as a Lookalike Audience of that group. Facebook will find those with similar profiles who you may have missed in your initial awareness campaign. Target the Lookalikes with the original video creative, and create a new ad for those that engaged with the video.
If your offering is simple you may be able to skip right to a Facebook Lead Ad with context card here. If not, a Carousel Ad will be the second piece of your ad strategy, providing more information on your product or service and priming them for your Facebook Lead Ad.
Look at Facebook Analytics to see which targets responded best to your initial ad. You’ll want to create customer profiles based on interests and demographics before running Facebook Lead Ads, so that you can match creative to customer intent.
Run, Retarget, Repeat
To keep your Facebook Lead Ad pipeline full and efficient you’ll want to keep running multiple campaigns. Typically you will have three campaigns going at one time: Awareness, Education and Leads. But you may also have multiple Ad Sets within each campaign, representing different target demographics. And those ad sets may also have multiple versions of creative based on interests or for testing effectiveness. It can be a lot to manage, but there are systems and partners who can help. And within a few months you should see your cost per lead go down, and your conversions go up!