Lead generation is, to marketing and sales, what a dashing knight marrying a beautiful princess is, to fairytales. Without this all-important element, you will develop huge holes in your advertising budget, diminished website traffic, and precisely zero sales. You’ll be wasting all your time, bringing in disinterested clientele, and paying for clicks on ads that don’t convert into sales. And all because the leads you’ve generated weren’t interested in making a purchase to begin with.
Your greatest aids in lead generation are, without a doubt, Facebook™’s advanced targeting options for preparing an ad campaign. The potential to target people who share the characteristics of your ideal buyer are huge. You can target by marital status, by income level, by whether they still live in their home town or are expats working abroad for a large company; you can target people who have just had a baby or bought a car, or who have just received a promotion to a managerial position. You can develop your campaign with laser precision.
That being said, however, targeting is only the first step in effective lead generation. After you have defined your Custom Audience in the Facebook™ ad editing panel, it is time to prepare the path of breadcrumbs, leading them from being mildly interested in your product, to becoming loyal customers.
Here are a few effective ways to do this by using Facebook™ ads:
1. Promote Free Content Available by Subscription
Give away content your clients actually want. People are wary of giving away their email addresses for simple or novelty items. Free ebooks or videos don’t hold much in the way of social capital with users, and it’s easy to understand why. The email address is just as much a part of our identity as our home address. Therefore, the freebie you promote in your ads must be of actual value and interest to your target audience. What you don’t want is to lure people into providing their email address to download a how-to guide or tutorial, only to realise it is something sketchy and without actual value. You might think of it as a mission accomplished, but mostly they’ll just end up immediately unsubscribing.
Being upfront and providing useful and helpful information for free to your Facebook™ prospects is the first step in converting them into qualified leads. Continue to target captured leads with interesting ads, engaging them further with your business, until the moment is right to promote a sale.
2. Create a Video Ads Funnel Strategy
The funnel strategy in creating and promoting video ads is probably the best way to nurture leads to becoming customers. This is a strategy which takes time, lots of A/B testing and careful audience targeting, but yields great results. It works like this:
Create a Top-of-Funnel Ad (TOFU)
The TOFU ad is the first step of the process of gaining leads. It must be short, meaningful and impactful. Keep it to the barest minimum – under 20 seconds if possible. Ask yourself: how much time would you spend watching a Facebook™ ad from a company you’ve never heard of?
In this video ad, your main goal is to familiarize the audience with your business and products. It has to appeal to people at a personal level, by showing that you understand their needs, problems, and demands. Show how you can provide relief to them. There has to be no mention of the words “sale”, “buy”, or “offer”. You are simply showing people that you offer a solution.
Create a Middle-of-Funnel Ad (MOFU)
The MOFU ad is going deeper in the process of getting user attention, stirring emotions and interest, and gaining trust. This is where you begin revealing your solution to the audience’s problem, and offer proof that it works. In order to achieve maximum impact, your proofs should be in the form of testimonials. These must be authentic, to-the-point, and focused precisely on the benefits of your products or services. Once again, you will not attempt any sale in this ad.
Create a Bottom-of-Funnel Ad (BOFU)
This is where you go in for the kill (figuratively speaking). Here, your leads are at the critical point where they will make a purchase, if the price is right. This is where you present your offer, give a discount, if you want, or offer a few extras for the price of one product.
At the end of the campaign, draw the line, do the math, and you will undoubtedly notice a significant increase in your sales and customer base.