Can Facebook Ads Generate Leads—YES!

Get the 4-1-1 on how to use Facebook for lead generation

Let’s get a few things out of the way first. We know what you’ve heard, and we want to address your concerns head-on before we dig into how to make Facebook ads work for you.

• #1 Facebook Ads Manager isn’t intuitive. This is true, we’re sorry about that.

• #2 Finding Your Audience on Facebook is Hard. Ehhhht. Nope, it doesn’t have to be.

• #3 Facebook Doesn’t Generate Leads. There are new tools that make Facebook an effective lead generation tool—when you have the right content. 

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s dig in!

2 Essential Elements for Successful Lead Generation on Facebook

First, a PSA: creating ads in Facebook allows you to target on both Facebook and Instagram so we keep saying ‘Facebook’ but all the tips in this post apply to Instagram too. Create a single ad in Facebook Ads Manager and you can serve your content up across both platforms.

Facebook ads can be used for awareness building, driving traffic to your website, attracting likes to your page—and yes, lead generation. Since lead generation is what we do that’s what we’ll be focusing on here.

Lead Generation Forms
Facebook now offers embedded lead generation forms, and if you haven’t tried them, these are key to social lead gen efforts. These lead gen forms allow prospects to take advantage of your offer without ever leaving the Facebook/Instagram platforms. You can create multiple lead gen forms to collect leads for different campaigns.

Here’s a few ideas for campaigns that lead gen forms work well for:
- Newsletter sign ups
- Demonstration requests
- Lead magnet downloads such as eBooks or checklists

Audience Selection
You have a lead form and you have a great ad—amazing job! But if you’re not serving it to the right people you won’t generate leads, or even worse you’ll generate the wrong leads and waste your team’s time and marketing budget. If you’ve done Facebook ads before you might be familiar with their demographic targeting tools. These are good - but using your first party data is better!

What’s that mean? First party data is data that you own—think prospect lists, customer data etc. If you have a few hundred email addresses for customers and prospects you can leverage lookalike audiences to improve your targeting. Here are two tips to identify your ideal audience on Facebook:

• #1 Retargeting
  Upload your current prospect list or current customer list and serve up retargeted ads to these custom audiences.

• 2 Lookalike Audiences
  Create a lookalike audience of your current prospects or current customer audience to reach people on Facebook who behave similarly to your first party database. You can also geo-target these ads based on your campaign.

How Do You Create Effective Facebook Ads (Without Pulling Out All Your Hair)?

So you’ve decided this lead gen thing is for you—now what? You can create ads from either Business Suite or Ads Manager, but go for Ads Manager – the options are more robust. Now, you sign into Facebook Ads Manager and 🤯. Either you look at it and you’re like “this looks easy!” (let me assure you it’s deceivingly difficult) or your look at it and curl up in the fetal position and start singing Soft Kitty.

Here’s how to do it, and what all the terms mean: 

1.     Click Create and select “Lead Generation”

2.     Facebook Business Manager will create 3 assets for you:

• Campaign: The campaign is where you organize all of your ad sets. On the campaign level you can set high-level information such as budgets. If you set your budget on the campaign level it will optimize across all of the nested ad sets.

• Ad Set: Ad sets are where the “audience magic happens”. This is where you can determine who you want to target. Use custom audiences to re-target your database or to create lookalike audiences. If you want to target the same ad to multiple audiences, you can create multiple ad sets within the same campaign. If you plan to use the same ads within the ad set, finish your ad set and associated ads first and then clone the ad set and associated ads to maximize your efficiency.

• Ad: The ad is where you advertising creative goes. You can put up to 5 headlines and 5 descriptions—this will allow Facebook to mix and match your creative to optimize your results. This is also where you create your lead form. Follow the wizard to create your lead gen form.  

3.     Get your hard-earned leads!

This part is trickier than it sounds. Facebook is always innovating, which means things move around a lot. Currently, you cannot access your leads from Ads Manager (yeah, we know, doesn’t make any sense). To see and download your leads, you have to go to the “Leads Center” within your Business Suite Account. (which is under the “More Tools” section).

HubSpot Integration

If you are using HubSpot—great news! You can integrate your Facebook account and it will automatically pull your leads into HubSpot. If you want to do a simpler campaign—even better news—you can craft your entire social media ad directly from HubSpot. You won’t get some of the bells and whistles like the multiple headlines and descriptions but if you’re feeling confident about your message and trying to put something out fast, HubSpot is where it’s at!

If you need any support with Social ads or HubSpot integrations don’t hesitate to reach out to our team!