This is a guest post from Jennifer Spivak, who is a Solo PR Pro Premium member and a digital marketing specialist. She is also a marketing instructor and curriculum architect at the Startup Institute and an adjunct professor at The City College of New York. Jennifer has been recognized by PR News' Digital PR Awards and PR Daily's Social Media Awards.
Have you heard of Facebook Lead Ads? Are you using them for your business and/or for your clients? If you’re not, pay attention! Facebook Lead Ads are a huge deal, and although they’ve only been around for several months, the results are in: implementing this new ad format as part of your paid Facebook marketing strategy can boost results by 50% or more.
Plain and simple, Facebook Lead Ads allow you to generate leads without taking users away from Facebook. Up until now, using Facebook Ads for lead generation meant users would be brought to a landing page after clicking on an advertisement, where they could then opt to fill out a form and subsequently become a lead. With Facebook Lead Ads, users can submit their information and become a lead, all while staying within the Facebook platform – thereby streamlining and simplifying the entire lead generation process.
A Lead Ad looks no different than any other advertisement on Facebook. Here’s an example:
The difference? When someone clicks on this ad, they’ll remain within the Facebook interface, and a pop-up will appear that looks something like this (depending on the fields you set up when creating your form), with fields pre-filled by Facebook:
Need to provide a bit more info? Facebook also offers an option to add something called a Context Card before the lead form (which will appear as a pop-up within Facebook). Think of this as a mini landing page, which can look something like this:
Facebook Lead Ads can either be integrated with common CRM/email marketing platforms like InfusionSoft or MailChimp, or you can manually download the leads directly from Facebook in a .CSV file. For more information on how to set up a Lead Ad, check out Facebook’s Lead Ad Help Center.
Now that you get the logistics of this relatively new ad format, let’s talk about why Facebook Lead Ads are a major development within Facebook’s set of marketing tools and solutions.
- Facebook Lead Ads bypass the need for a landing page, including any complicated web development or pixel placement. Up until now, these were required for a successful Facebook lead generation campaign, limiting those businesses that may not have the time, expertise or resources to build custom landers for each initiative. Take this out of the equation, and suddenly getting a new campaign up and running – and quickly –becomes a much easier feat.
- Facebook Lead Ads dramatically improve the user experience vs. driving people to a landing page – especially on mobile devices (see #3). Look, no one is on Facebook to buy your product. They’re there to share memes, look at baby pictures and laugh at funny cat videos. So even if your ad is extremely well done and well targeted, it’s still an interruption. With Facebook Lead Ads, this interruption is much less significant because users don’t need to leave Facebook to become a lead, and because their information is already pre-filled in your form. This makes the lead gen process much smoother, and ultimately lowers the barrier to entry.
- Facebook Lead Ads are extremely well optimized for the 1.4 billion users who access Facebook via a mobile device each month. Between slow mobile page load times and the annoyance of filling out a form on your phone, trying to generate leads from the large majority of users who view Facebook via a mobile device can be an uphill battle. In fact, improving the user experience of mobile users specifically is one of the reasons Facebook introduced Lead Ads in the first place. The Lead Ads interface and functionality on mobile is truly seamless and gorgeous, which drastically reduces the drop-off rate from ad click to lead submission.
- Facebook Lead Ads can dramatically improve campaign results. A B2B lead generation client I recently began working with was seemingly stuck at a Facebook cost-per-lead of $18. Keeping all ad copy, creative and targeting the same but changing the ad format to a Lead Ad almost immediately decreased the CPL by 50%. More recently, with additional optimizations, this cost has dropped to just $6. This makes sense given that more than 85% of ad impressions for this client come from mobile users.
Facebook Lead Ads are easy to set up, cost about the same as any other ad type and make the entire lead gen process so much simpler. Why wouldn’t you want to make it easier for your target customers to connect with you?
Jennifer is a digital marketing specialist with 7+ years of experience driving digital campaigns for brands and individuals looking to sell products and services online. She is a marketing instructor and curriculum architect at the Startup Institute, an adjunct professor at The City College of New York, and has been recognized by PR News' Digital PR Awards and PR Daily’s Social Media Awards. Merging her background in PR and love of analytics, Jennifer specializes in creating engaging, on-brand Facebook Advertising campaigns that drive cost-efficient results and positive ROI.
Well written Jennifer Spivak. It is to the point and precise. Having managed a couple of Lead Gen Ad Campaigns on FB, I can say it is a good read for any Facebook Advertiser who has not tried out the Lead Generation Ads so far.
Well it’s a great article , but in fact am using the Facebook lead ads for more than a month for my business. Am running institute providing different types of courses. I have got a great number of leads which’s over 300 leads, but by the end of the day the conversion rate is barely 1%.. Am not sure is it beacuse of the efforts of my sales team??? Or i just need to test another mechanism while launching the ads???
It seems to be a great tool for ads, i will try it in my bussiness.