INTRODUCTION
Social media marketing has paved the way for many B2B marketers over recent years, adding a new dimension to their digital marketing strategy and helping B2B organisations generate highly targeted, qualified leads.
Facebook’s indisputable improvements to usability, data accuracy and creative variety are key components driving its success, and more and more businesses are becoming familiar with social marketing technology and its place in their digital marketing strategy.
SO, WHAT ARE LEAD ADS?
In 2015 Facebook launched Facebook Lead Ads – an ad format enabling advertisers to promote their business in the Facebook feed using all the same targeting capabilities as standard ad formats, but what’s different is an intuitive 3-step form that encourages prospects to enter their personal details using a series of pre-defined or custom questions aimed to provide rich lead information and removing a website visit from the equation.
Completing a lead form couldn’t be easier. A study conducted by salesforce in 2015 found that a new contact / lead can be created in as little as 6 unique touches. Even websites boasting unrivalled UX would struggle to achieve that!
The ad format comes with customisable call-to-action (CTA) buttons, default questionnaire fields and thank you page confirming that user details have been received.
This ad format is perfect for targeting busy prospects on the go and is mobile first due to its intuitive native format – a huge advantage if your website landing page isn’t optimised for mobile visitors.
WHO CAN I TARGET?
Lead ad formats harness all the same targeting options as with other Facebook ad formats. Use your buyer personasto develop your targeting criteria and look at things like:
- Job roles
- Interests and media consumption
- When your potential buyers are most active on Facebook
- Buying behaviour
- Industry
- Education
- Location
It’s crucial that your targeting is built to attract your key audience. This will help avoid hemeraging budget on users who don’t match your buyer persona. It’s even possible to upload your CRM contacts to visually remind existing customers of new services and products or allow Facebook to find new prospects that have similar online behaviours and traits as your existing customers.
WHAT DO THEY LOOK LIKE?
The ad can appear in the Facebook news feed using a range of ad formats including image and video. Once the user’s attention has been caught, clicking the call-to-action button will push users straight to the form.
The stages of the lead ad should follow these steps:
Step 1: Context Card (optional) – The context card is an optional stage that allows advertisers to give a quick breakdown of highlights and benefits of filling out of the form. This is a great chance to provide 4-5 short bullets that sell your offer.
Step 2: Form – This section is made up of auto fill fields for basic personal information such as name & email address aling with optional multiple chioce questions and answers so users can quickly describe things like intent, job role & business size. One important rule of thumb when deciding what to ask is make sure that amount of information requested matches the value of the content or product on offer. For example, don’t ask for every single peice of personal information if all you’re offering in a exchange for that information is a one page checklist download.
Step 3: End Card – This section is designed to notify users that their information has been submitted and gives an opportunity to thank them for their interest. It’s also recommended that you an include a link back to your website so then can read more about your products or services
CRM INTEGRATIONS
As a B2B marketer or sales person, you’ll know that a healthly, constantly updating CRM database is the lifeblood of your business, and it seems without the detailed personal information it produces, your sales team would have a hard time personalising their communications and fundamentally closing deals.
Having the correct social targeting in place could see your database brimming with fresh, in-market leads that are synced directly with your CRM database.
Forming a link between your Facebook lead campaigns and CRM is becoming a common technique used by many B2B marketers, but the level of sophistication is still growing. Marcus Andrews – Product Marketing Manager at Hubspot announced yesterday the role out of their new and improved integration with Facebook, allowing marketers to create and publish lead ads straight from Hubspot creating a slick, automated lead generation cycle.
REPORTING
When it comes to reporting, it’s straight forward to quantify results with marketing suites and tools such as Hubspot. Use your channel reporting to analyse the number of leads and customers generated through lead ads, and compare metrics such as interactions, submission or download rates to other marketing activities. We’re confident you’ll be impressed with the results!
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