Facebook’s lead generation capabilities are powerful. With the right strategy, you can drive warm prospects to landing pages, registration forms, or checkouts for no more than $1.
And yes…
… it’s possible.
Tip 1: Get your plumbing in place.
What’s Plumbing?
It’s the term we use for tracking. This includes analytics and tracking pixels aka “tags” that you can add to your site using Google Tag Manager.
Without tracking, there’s no attribution of conversions to specific ads or landing pages. This means lost revenue, since you’ll be paying for ads without knowing which ones are driving sales.
Plumbing is critical for analytics, driving more revenue from abandoning audiences, and for creating lookalikes (to find similar customers). By putting users into buckets you can remarket to them, creating a personalized customer experience – a step in nurturing folks through funnel logic.
Pro Tip: Use the Facebook pixel instead of the Conversion Tracking pixel, since Facebook has shifted away from it.
We have a do-it-yourself guide with checklists to help with implementation.
Tip 2: Boost to audiences that are warm.
Use custom audiences (your email list or your website traffic). They’ve already opted in and consume your content, so they’re more likely to want to hear more or buy.
You can build lookalike audiences from these lists to find similar customers too.
Website Custom Audiences (WCAs) are retargeting audiences who have visited other pages, but have not ended up on your “success page”. This “bucket” is typically full of folks right at the bottom of your funnel who need only a nudge to convert.
You must have plumbing in place first– otherwise Facebook can’t do the targeting for you.
Tip 3: Create similar ads to choose “winners” and boost evergreen
Ads manager allows you to “create a similar ad set”. When targeting audiences, start off with interest, workplace, and even behavioral targeting, but don’t do these all at once. Create similar ads with a few specific interests and boost them all at once.
Once the ads start picking up traffic (over 500 impressions), pick out the interests that are performing the best (low Cost per Engagement (CPE), high relevance, high engagement).
Start combining effective interests together to start building saved audiences that you can boost to directly from future posts.
This “scientific method” of targeting is great for discovering ad/audience combinations that can be boosted evergreen.
When a piece of content drives consistent engagement at a CPM of $2 or less, set it as “ongoing”, so it can continuously push traffic through your funnel (this can be done on Twitter and LinkedIn too).
Alison Herzog is an expert marketing strategist, thought leader, and figurehead for women in the workplace. We promoted an article about her on our Facebook page using this method.
We promoted against 5 different interests and compiled an ultimate “engagement” audience, which made a massive jump from a max of 27 engagements to 119. The relevance score sat at 8 for some time with a CPE of $0.17 (before the audience started to burn out), indicating that goals, content, and targeting were all aligned.
Tip 4: Video. Video. Video.
Have you scrolled through your news feed lately? Video is hot on social and with Live being Facebook’s latest release, it gets favored in the news feed.
Use every opportunity to create video content, because it will drive excellent engagement for a fraction of a penny.
Tip 5: Micro-targeted ads
Some of these companies that are spending 20k a day target broad audiences and lose money doing spray and pray advertising.
Facebook lets you micro-target using the Dollar A Day strategy– the biggest bang for your buck on social.
Hint: you can do this on Twitter and LinkedIn too!
Because you’re targeting audiences of less than 1,000 people, you stretch your ad spend for maximum impact – hitting just the influencers.
Do you have complaints about the new iPhone? What would you like to say to Tim Cook?
Or perhaps you’d like to avoid the round and round with customer service like we did with Uber.
We have a guide on this featuring stepwise checklists, so you can do it too. This is the ultimate form of lead generation, since you incept the executives and influencers at the companies that you’d like to work with.
Who’s your dream client? Write a blog post or article on a high authority site and micro-target them.
Then let me know, so I can applaud you for it!
Have you used Facebook for lead generation? Let me know how in the comments below (tell me about your saucy lead ad tips).