A Facebook Lead Ad is a powerful marketing tool. This self-contained lead form and ad unit in one can be the cornerstone of a lead generation campaign and is a highly effective method for lowering cost per lead by gathering leads without landing pages. But you have to use it effectively to reap the true benefits. There are a few mistakes that are easy to make, but even easier to correct, once you know what to look for.
Facebook is known for offering advertisers a lot of data to choose from when targeting potential customers. Think about it: the social network knows every piece of content a user has interacted with, every friend they are connected to and every word of every status update they post. It’s a data goldmine! And your Facebook Lead Ad Targeting can take advantage of all this.
There are many different components to a Facebook Lead Ad: the initial ad creative a user sees in their Newsfeed; the Welcome Screen they first see when they click the ad; the lead form itself; and the confirmation screen. And each of these screens has a number of interchangeable, customizable pieces and features. It’s a lot to test! We find that it’s best to break things down piece by piece and optimize one at a time.
The Facebook Lead Form is one of the places it’s easy to get off track. The Facebook Lead Form makes more than 20 questions available to ask, plus a custom field to enter your own. So before you even look at the Facebook Lead Form creator, write down the information you need from customers. Then, take a long, hard look and determine what you really need, and what you want.
The digital landscape is constantly changing. Every year there are new trends to try and best practices to adopt. As marketing strategies evolve, some mainstays of traditional advertising fall by the wayside. And it looks like landing pages might be one of them. Think about it: direct mail paved the way for email, which has been steadily taken over by social media. And as user-generated content spreads across the internet, landing pages are on the decline.
The internet has grown to include webpages about anything and everything, becoming a far more cluttered landscape for advertisers to navigate. Users have access to more information than ever before, but many actually visit fewer sites, sticking to content aggregators like Facebook. Good news for Facebook, but bad for your website. Or is it? What if you could put a small part of your site right into Facebook? With Facebook Lead Ads, you can.
A Facebook Lead Ad can be a pretty powerful lead generation tool, when run effectively. But there are a lot of moving pieces in each Facebook Lead Ad Campaign. How can you be sure you’re optimizing for the highest quality leads and lowest cost per lead? The key is to break it down piece by piece and optimize step by step, continually testing along the way. To start, let’s tackle the Facebook Lead Ad itself: the creative.
As with any type of advertising, your Facebook Lead Ad headline needs to entice users to click. Highlight the key selling proposition of your company, or the main benefit of your lead generation offer. The Facebook Lead Ad headline is the largest text they’ll see but space is limited, particularly on mobile devices. Keep it to 40 characters or less. Think short, sweet and to-the-point. It’s OK to be direct and somewhat salesy here; your supporting copy and Context Card can tell more of the story, but your headline is what will convince users to read on and continue clicking. Your headline is one of the easiest items to test and highly correlated to clicks, so be sure to test multiple headline variations of your Facebook Lead Ad.
Your headline and visual will do most of the heavy lifting in your Facebook Lead Ad; if a user isn’t interested in those they will quickly move on. A video will naturally attract more eyeballs in the crowded Newsfeed, so if you’ve got one, use it. Video not in the budget? You can create a moving slideshow right within Facebook to still include motion in your Facebook Lead Ad. In some cases a carousel of static images may be preferred; just make sure there’s no text in the image and that you elect to have Facebook show the top-performing graphic first. The visual creative is not quite as easy to swap in and out as a headline, but it is the most powerful part of your ad, so experiment with a variety of ad formats, media types and visual look and feels to find the one that works for your business.
Once your catchy headline and compelling visuals have drawn in users, your Facebook Lead Ad copy comes into play. If they’ve read this far, you can do a little more storytelling here or expand on the key features of your offer, product or service. But keep it short! Think of this as the caption for a Facebook post. Aim for a maximum of 130 characters; 90 is even better as it presents best for mobile viewing. (And Facebook Lead Ads are extremely powerful on mobile, where users are less likely to browse away from Facebook.) This is the most complex part of the ad to test, so you may want to save it for after you’ve optimized all your other Facebook Lead Ad components.
The final piece of your Facebook Lead Ad is the CTA button. Facebook has pre-selected a set of Call-To-Action buttons for use with a Facebook Lead Ad: Apply Now; Get Quote; Download; Learn More; Sign Up; and Subscribe. Your business may more closely lend itself to one over others, but test different CTAs to see what works. Again, these are very easy to swap but can have a large impact without a lot of overhead.
While you’re testing, keep in mind that there is no one right answer for any piece of your ad. Each one interacts with the next, and the right combination for once audience may be very different than another target. Got your Facebook Lead Ad in a good spot? Then it’s time to improve your Context Card and Lead Form.
One of the key components of Facebook Lead Ad optimization is split testing. Also known as an A/B test, split testing entails splitting an audience into two random segments and showing them creative that differs in one key way. This can be your Facebook Lead Ad copy, imagery, offer, CTA or any other element of your ad. The key is to test one item at a time, keeping all the rest the same, in order to find the variable that works best.
For years a landing page was the gold standard in online ad destinations, particularly for lead generation. For some a lead generation landing page was simply a destination url, an existing page already part of their site navigation and merely assigned as the designated landing page for an ad without any changes or optimization based on the campaign. But many marketers would spend countless resources crafting unique landing pages for each campaign, and sometimes for each piece of creative in that campaign. What started as a way to more easily track and convert customers could quickly become unmanageable. We’ve all been there. And you know what we say? Skip the landing page! Here’s why:
Congratulations! Your Facebook Lead Ad Campaign has concluded and the Facebook reporting statistics looks promising. High reach in your desired target audience and a low cost per lead. So…now what do you do? Start over with more of the same? Try something different? Or just take a nap? What you do after running a Facebook Lead Ad Campaign may actually be more important than the ad itself. It takes work to turn these leads into customers! Here are a few things you need to do to get started on your Facebook Lead follow-up.
Your first Facebook Lead Ad Campaign can be quite a learning experience. There are more parts to a Facebook Lead Ad than most other advertising types, making more pieces to create and manage. So once your Facebook Lead Ad is up and running, it can be tempting to sit back and just let it go. But you can learn a lot from your Facebook Lead Ad Campaign quite quickly, and it’s in your best interest to fine-tune as the ad runs. But that doesn’t mean change everything all at once! Here are a few places you can make small tweaks for big results:
Facebook Lead Advertising allows you to generate leads completely on Facebook. Their targeting capabilities are second to none, and their Lead Ad placement doesn’t require a user to click out of the Newsfeed. In fact, Facebook even pre-populates the Lead Form with the user’s supplied profile information. This makes users much more likely to provide their valuable personal data to you. Everything is handled right on Facebook, so there is no landing page to create. Sound like an effective and efficient lead generation strategy? It is! So let’s set a budget and get to work.