If you’ve run a few Facebook campaigns but haven’t tried Facebook Lead Ads yet, now is a great time to start. Facebook Lead Ads are a powerful way to connect with customers right on Facebook, without interrupting their browsing experience or making your team build yet another landing page. But they are also a little more challenging to set up. We’ve created this introduction to Facebook Lead Ads to guide you through what you need to know, and how to setup your first Facebook Lead Ad campaign.
Determine Your Offer
Once you’ve decided that a Facebook Lead Ad is right for your business, you need to create the hook for your potential customers. What are you offering them? Knowledge, like a free eBook or webinar? A complimentary consultation for services? Or a discount on their eventual purchase? Make it compelling enough for them to provide their personal information up front.
Build Your Lead Form
What do you need to be able to deliver on the promise of your offer? Email address? Phone number? First and last name? The information you are asking will be shown on the lead form once the user clicks
Image credit: Facebook
your initial ad screen. Facebook will pre-fill any fields they have data for, and the user can edit those or add any additional information needed. Just keep in mind that they did not seek you out, but were served an ad. Be respectful of their time and privacy by keeping the form brief. Once you start talking to them outside of Facebook you can always gather more data.
Develop Creative
Now that you know what you are offering, you have to determine how you are going to offer it. Remember, you need to convince someone to click your ad from the crowded Facebook Newsfeed and then convince them to give you their email address or other information. So it better be good! Video works best for attracting attention and telling the story of your company, but high-quality still images in a carousel can work as well. The key is to visually tell as much as you can and keep the post copy short. You can always add a Context Card for more information once they click, but the initial view has to hook them fast.
Build a Facebook Funnel
Now that you have everything ready for your Facebook Lead Ad…run a different campaign instead. No, not really, but you do need to warm up those leads with an awareness campaign before you bring out the lead form. Keep your offer and Facebook Lead Ad creative in mind and work backwards to create an educational campaign with a similar look and feel but a more introductory approach to your brand. This will prime your audience for the Facebook Lead Ad and make them more likely to convert.
Create Custom Audiences
Start by uploading your current customer email list and using it to create a lookalike audience of similar Facebook users. (You can also create a lookalike of your current Facebook fans.) Then, create saved audience segments based on interest and demographics. You can get very precise with Facebook’s targeting, layering interests and demographics together to create narrow segments that must match all criteria. You can also exclude certain interests. These audiences will be used for both your awareness and lead campaigns, but you can also create another group based on the engagements from these campaigns to keep adding new prospects to the pipeline.
Set Your Budget
Finally, you need to know what you want to spend. It’s hard to say what makes sense early on, before you’ve seen a return, but too small a budget will hinder your results, even with the best creative and targeting. Utilize the audience features to refine your targeting and keep an eye on Facebook’s recommended size. This will help you to find your sweet spot of enough budget for enough prospects and keep the ads from under-delivering due to low budget.
These are the key things to keep in mind when building your Facebook Lead Ads campaign, but of course there is a lot more to learn. Keep reading, and always keep testing those Facebook Lead Ads!