My goal with this post is to convince you that you should be advertising on Facebook & Instagram – and more specifically be running lead ads – for any business other than small dollar ecommerce businesses.
A little background first… Lead generation is a Facebook advertisement objective available to businesses utilizing Facebook’s Ads Manager. The forward-facing ad is a lead ad – a newsfeed ad that pre-populates consumer data that Facebook houses. That data is inputted by people when signing up for Facebook – they must provide a name & email at a minimum – and many individuals fill out their place of employment, job title, current home location, and more. When someone clicks the call-to-action (CTA) on the lead objective ad, this information is pre-populated for submission to the business requesting the contact information.
Visual creative for a lead ad can be photo or video; the lead form populates on button-click & is submitted with one button click.
So when and why would a business utilize lead ads?
When: Facebook lead ads should be utilized at the middle or bottom of the sales funnel. These two areas of the sales funnel can be categorized as Consideration or Conversion – not at the top of the funnel, known as Awareness. Once a potential customer has become familiar with the business’ brand via watching a video, visiting a website, messaging the page, or engaging with content – then it becomes appropriate to retarget in the consideration or conversion phase with a lead submission ad. One exception to utilizing lead ads at the bottom of the sales funnel is small-dollar ecommerce businesses. When a direct sale can be achieved via a website and doesn’t require thought, optimize for the conversion instead of lead acquisition.
Why: Lead ads show specific intent, meaning your potential customer is genuinely interested in what the business is offering. Lead ads allow a potential customer to submit their contact information to be reached out to – all the work rests on the business’ shoulders! Lead ads allow for cross-platform retargeting – when a potential customer submits an email & phone number, this information can be utilized for email marketing & direct phone sales calls. Lead ads integrate with most CRMs – meaning that when speed of responding to leads matters or easy of inputting leads into a CRM matters, the leads are inputted automatically and instantly!
In summary, lead ads are useful for most business types. B-to-B businesses, large-ticket purchases (like bookings), and service industry businesses will benefit most from running Facebook Lead Ads. Lead ads should be executed at the middle or bottom of the sales funnel. Lead ads are effective and show customer intent.
Of course, if you need help in executing a lead ad strategy or setting up the social sales funnel – be sure to reach out to the social media advertising experts at Venture Creations! hello@venturecreations.com.