When carried out effectively, Facebook ads can reap tonnes of rewards. However, it is very easy for a Facebook ad to go the opposite way and be unsuccessful. That’s why we have put together our top tips for successfully generating leads from Facebook ads.

If you only take one tip away from this blog, let it be this one! Picking the right target audience is essential for any successful campaign strategy, but especially when it comes to Facebook ad lead generation.

In terms of audiences, there are three main types: custom, lookalike and interest/ demographics. Each of these audience types has a use, and it is essential to note that one isn’t necessarily any better than another. Each contains different levels of conversion intent and user volume. Basically, with a custom audience, you’re defining your audience; with an interest or lookalike, you’re relying on Facebook to define your audience.

What is it you are looking to achieve from your ads? What is the type of ‘lead’ that you are looking for? Facebook offers so many different types of advertising; you must decide on your initial marketing objective from three different categories. These include Awareness, Consideration or Conversions. Below we break down the targeting options under each of these three considerations to help you decide which will work best for your ad campaign:

Awareness

–         Brand Awareness – increase awareness for your brand.

–         Reach – Show your ad to the maximum number of people possible within the set budget.

Consideration

–         Traffic – Send more people to an online destination such as a website, app or Messenger conversation.

–         Engagement – This is divided into a further three subcategories – Post Engagement, Page Likes and Event Responses.

–         App installs – Send people to the Apple and Android app store where they can download your app.

–         Video views – Promote videos that show behind-the-scenes footage, product launches or customer reviews to raise awareness about your brand.

–         Lead Generation – Collect lead information from people who are interested in your business directly from Facebook without having to send them to a landing page or squeeze page.

–         Messages – Get more people to have conversations with your business in Facebook Messenger to complete purchases, answer questions or offer support.

Conversion

–         Conversions – Get people to take actions on your website, in your app or in Messenger, such as going through a shopping cart process or making a purchase. The Facebook pixel and app Events help track and measure conversions.

–         Catalogue sales – For this, you would need to create a catalogue with your products on Facebook. Once the Facebook catalogue is active, you can create ads that automatically show items from your catalogue based on your target audience.

–         Store Traffic – This type of targeting is to increase foot traffic and boost sales at your physical location. With this type of ad, you can specifically target your ads to people within a set distance of each shop and you can also use a shop locator map card with call-to-action buttons such as ‘Get Directions’ to encourage people nearby to visit the closest shop, if there are many different branches.

It is important to note that under some of the different marketing categories, there are also different delivery options available so you want to make sure that you are picking the right strategy for your marketing objective and not just letting Facebook decide for you, with their default ‘Lowest Cost’ option on the ‘Traffic’ consideration, for example. Whilst keeping costs low is, of course, desirable, this doesn’t necessarily mean that it will be the right strategy for your business objectives. Also available under the ‘traffic’ consideration are ‘Cost Cap’ which controls your costs while getting the highest volume of results for your budget and ‘Bid Cap’ which controls your bid in each auction. Under the ‘App Install’ consideration, you also have the option to target for a minimum ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) getting the highest purchase value for your budget and Target Cost which gives you a consistent cost per result.

What type of budget do you have? How long do you want the ads to run for? These are crucial questions that you need to be asking yourself before going ahead and setting ads up. Facebook Ads allow the option to have a daily or a ‘lifetime’ budget.

The daily budget option gives a little more control and ensures that costs will not spiral beyond this. Once your daily budget is hit, effectively your ads will not be shown for the rest of the day and will only be reset for the next day. With a lifetime budget, Facebook will continue showing your ads more frequently daily, although on a similar balanced daily trend. The advantage of both budget options is that you can set an end date for both, although this is not compulsory.

If you want to run your ads continuously with no end date, it is entirely possible to do so although we would not recommend this. We would suggest setting an end date to all campaigns you run to analyse and review objectives were met at the end of it while assessing against historical ad campaigns, to see which worked the best for you.

That said, if the campaign you are running is successful and you are happy to continue, Facebook allows you the flexibility to extend the end date while the campaign is still running or even restart a campaign once it has completed.

Your offer and ad text must match up to your target audience to yield results. Based on where users are in the buyer’s journey should influence what you are offering to them, which ties closely into your audience choice. In simple terms, match your messaging and your offer to where the user is in the buyer’s journey so that it addresses their needs, and you’ll be rewarded with more competitive performance.

Ultimately the end goal is not to solely gain leads; it is to gain both new customers and grow revenue. Having an adequate follow-up procedure in place is essential to ensure an effectively ran lead generation campaign. The last thing you would want to happen is you work hard and pay money into getting new customers to provide their contact details, for you to lose the sale because you did not follow up on the lead!

The ultimate strategy for generating leads through Facebook campaigns lies in creative, productive and targeted ads. Test different offers and solutions to get the users attention. Consider adding SMS and Messenger marketing to your mix. And finally, don’t forget to utilise Facebook’s robust targeting capabilities.

We are here to help with all your Facebook ad requests, so why not get in touch with us today!