Generating leads for your sales team, increasing organic search traffic and building brand awareness should be as easy as taking a Sunday stroll with Ty Webb.
It can be hard to build a brand when you're concentrated on generating more leads to make the sales team happy.
However, if you're a B2B company who wants to do b2b facebook marketing, the two definitely don't have to be mutually exclusive.
You can create an amazing brand your customer's know and love while generating leads at the same time.
What's more, you can even do it with a single ad unit.
Don't believe me? I'll show you how. In this article, I'll review how to optimize ad campaigns to generate leads, build brand awareness and deliver value early in the purchase funnel.
Setting Up a Facebook Ads Campaign
The first step in setting up a Facebook ads campaign is to choose your marketing objective. If you aren't a fortune 500 company, it can hard to figure out where to apply your budget. All the best practices say you would need to create awareness to drive consideration and then ultimately conversion.
B2B Facebook Lead Ads Fill the Sales Team's Pipeline
If you're a B2B business, generating leads for the sales team is a necessity. You may even have an SLA agreement with your counterpart on the sales team on which you have to deliver.
Lead generation ads allow you to bring new prospects into your sales funnel - especially if you're using video. Facebook Lead ads are optimized to attract prospects who are willing to submit their information into a Facebook-based form.
The information these prospects have already put into Facebook may be pre-populated into the form fields, which reduces friction in conversion. Your prospects' contact information is then sent directly into your CRM.
Having the form within Facebook means barriers like page load time and the need for a well-optimized landing page have been eliminated. We have generated B2B leads for less than $10 and in some campaigns less than $5, with a lead-to-customer conversion rate of above 5%.
From an MQL creation perspective, Facebook Lead ads do a great job particularly when you can build a large enough audience based off of job title. Be sure to add in a few qualifying questions into your form to help your sales team assess opportunity size and you can have a campaign up and running in a few hours. (Need some image style examples? Check out Facebook Advertising Examples: 4 Image Styles for B2B and SaaS Companies.)
Facebook Lead Ads Drive Organic Search for Your Company
Facebook Lead Ads Can Help Drive Peer-to-peer Referral
Facebook ads are purposely designed to look like regular Facebook content that would come from your friends or a trusted news source. Just like people would comment on an image or photo album, people will comment on your ads.
Try including a line of copy that prompts your audience to comment or tag friends on your Facebook Lead ad. We used this tactic successfully for a client and we were able to outperform 99% of other advertisers like us.
If you were running Facebook Lead ads for the health club industry, you might include a call to action like this:
"Tag a club owner who needs [insert product name here] in their club!"
Not only will it prompt people to tag their friends, but your cost to run ads will go down as well. This is because engagement on the ad will increase, which tells Facebook that your ad is relevant and appreciated.
Facebook wants their ads to be relevant, not annoying. So as engagement increases, you will end up paying less to serve your ad because it's less likely your ad would contribute to a reduction in time-on-site for Facebook's broader user base. Facebook needs time-on-site to go up so more ads can be served, so more revenue can be made, so their stock price can continue to go up.
Facebook Ads Optimized for Lead Generation Greatly Aid Your Brand Marketing Efforts
Whether you're The DuPont Company and have been in business for over a 100 years or you just got done filing your LLC paperwork, you want customers to perceive your brand as "helpful". When you're being helpful, you're adding value. The earlier you can do this in the purchasing process, the better off your company will be.
A great way to add value in B2B Facebook marketing is with a content offer. Here is an example of a great content offer from Recurly:
In this example, Recurly is providing a resource for a vital calculation to someone who may be involved in a subscription business (me). Even if I don't convert on this content offer, my perception of Recurly's brand has likely gone from, "never heard of them" to "Oh, this is great. This is so helpful. Thanks, Recurly!". I followed the path of Googling them and coming to their site via organic traffic. From an ad that was likely set up for leads.
What Type of Facebook Lead Generation Ads Should I Use?
Traditionally B2b Facebook marketers would run conversion-based ads. But now there are lead ads too.
So, how do you know which one to use? A simple test will tell.
Depending on your business I would wait to assess results between 30 and 90 days after your campaign has started. Compare the cost per lead between campaigns set for conversion using a landing page and campaigns set up for leads.
Ask yourself these questions:
What is the cost difference between leads who fill out a form within Facebook and leads who fill out a form on your landing page? How many of those leads turned into SQLs? How many turned into opportunities?
Keep in mind, it may not be appropriate to assess how many turned into sales in the first 30 days. It really depends on your sales cycle. You should rely on sales funnel metrics and solid forecasting to determine which type of campaign to continue using in the future.
Option 1: Facebook Lead Ads for Lead Generation
Using lead ads will optimize your campaign for leads, which is most important. Only with this ad unit will you be able to use the in-Facebook form to capture important prospect information. There are several creative options you have in your arsenal if you chose this objective. For a complete guide on setting up Facebook Ads for B2B, download our free guide.
What's important to remember about this ad unit is that it is optimized for people willing to share their contact information. This is critical to successful lead generation programs since you have to get people's contact information to create a lead. The only drawback to pay attention to is, are the leads too easy to get? Meaning, when people traditionally find their way to one of your landing pages and fill out a form, they want whatever it is that's behind that form bad enough to fill it out. There is an effort being put in, which indicates a certain level of interest. The answer for your business should bear itself out in the calculations described above.
Facebook Conversion Ads for Lead Generation
If you would prefer to continue using your existing landing pages and forms, which is still very effective, you will want to set up your campaign for conversions.
The ads you run will do so by targeting people willing to submit their information. The difference here, though, is that they will have to enter their contact information manually (unless they've previously converted on your website and you're using a Marketing Automation platform like HubSpot which offers smart forms).
The most important thing to remember is that lead and conversion-focused ads are still ads, and people are still looking at content. So focus on getting one conversion-based campaign to work really well. Meanwhile, you can reap some ancillary benefits.
Choosing a Facebook Ad Format
Both types of campaign will give you several image upload options: Carousel, Single Image, Single Video and Slideshow: Any of these 4 will then send traffic to your existing landing page or form within Facebook.
For a bit more on Facebook Lead Ads, check out our free eBook on how to use Video and Facebook Lead Ads together.
