How To Use Facebook Lead Ads To Grow Your Business

By Andy Chu

30 Dec 2020

Businesses that are actively looking to acquire leads are well aware of how crucial lead generation is. Having leads means nothing but having the opportunity of landing potential customers. It usually begins with you offering a free service or resource in return for the information of your audience. There are more than 1.6 billion people who are connected to small businesses on Facebook around the globe.

Facebook Advertising has become increasingly popular because more than 2.7 billion people use Facebook daily, and that includes all your existing as well as potential customers. Moreover, if you want real results and want a marketing strategy that boosts profits, you can call a marketing agency that can show you the difference fast.

However, if you are not sure where to start? You must incorporate Facebook leads Ads in your marketing strategies as they are both mobile and cost-friendly, and have more than a 9.21% conversion rate, which is higher than ads on other platforms.

Now, this means that Facebook Leads Ads will allow you to be within budget and help you connect to your target audience while they are on their phones (where most of the customers are all the time).

However, more leads don’t mean you get better leads. By following a few steps, you can effortlessly ensure that your Facebook leads ads not only attracts leads but converts them into new customers. But, before diving into the tips to improve the quality of your ads, you must know about the basics.

Facebook Lead Ads & How It Works

Facebook leads allow users to remain on the platform while you are completing and submitting your lead form. This means that users are not redirected to any landing page to fill out the form, and they can fill it out on Facebook itself. When audiences tap on the ads, a form pops up automatically, and it takes just a few moments to fill up. Now, this helps businesses to gather information about the audiences because you are alluring people who are ready to leave what they are doing to fill out a form to avail of your offer.

According to statistics, 93% of Facebook’s advertising revenue comes from smartphones. Therefore, as FB lead ads are optimised for mobile, it becomes easily accessible to anyone and everyone. Besides, Facebook ads experts show another benefit of Facebook lead ads which is that they can be synced directly with your company’s customer relationship management (CRM) system. This allows businesses to keep track of and efficiently follow up with leads, which is crucial for closing any deal.

The working of Facebook Lead Ads is similar to other paid ads. First, you make use of the Facebook Ads manager to set up your ad by customising targeting features, creative assets, and budget to ensure that your ad is targeted toward the right audience. The ad is shown in the user’s feed like any other post but is labeled as a “Sponsored Post”.

Additionally, when a potential customer comes across an ad and clicks on it, Facebook displays an auto-filled form which reduces the friction during signing up as there are fewer form fields to fill. Next, your Facebook ad will send the code to the app, or email along with a thank you message, which depends on how you choose to generate the lead flow. This is termed a Facebook Lead Form.

Why Facebook Lead Ads Are Popular

The ease of use of Facebook along with the ability to get screen time from your lead is what makes Facebook Lead Ads popular. But, the primary reason to use Facebook Lead Ads is that you learn a whole lot about your audience. Facebook Lead Ads helps you collect required information about Facebook users which allows you to build customers and target your audience with improved ads. Having said that, it is not an easy feat to gather the user’s personal information for your company, so your sign-up process needs to be extremely simple.

This made it even more convenient because Facebook provides auto-filled forms and reduces the efforts to be made by the user in filling out the form. Therefore, a Facebook Marketing company doesn’t disrupt the audience’s focus by keeping your lead on Facebook only, and users are not redirected to your website.

Reasons you need Facebook Lead Ads for your campaigns?

Optimised for mobile:

A report published on Statista.com revealed that 95% of Facebook users connect through mobile devices since Facebook Lead ads are optimised for mobile. Now, these pre-populated forms make data submission efficient and easy, allowing potential customers to share their details quickly and securely. Therefore, rest assured, that your lead ads will be easy to access no matter the device used by your audience to view the form. All this ensures that signing up is as easy and convenient as possible.

- Simplicity results in more conversions: The user-friendly nature of the lead ads guarantees that more audiences are likely to finish it and send forms. Therefore, a Facebook Ads Agency uses lead ads to get a higher percentage of people to retarget.

- Reach audiences that matter: By keeping track of the people who have submitted the forms earlier, qualifying as a loyal audience, retargeting is done and prospects for conversion are determined.
- Customised forms to get attention: As a business, you require only specific information from your audience, and this is accomplished by customising your questions which should be carefully curated to your advertising goals. Every question should take care of the user’s needs alongside making them see the worth of signing up. This can help entice Facebook users to enter their information in a more ready manner. Here are some of the reasons why a Facebook Marketing company uses lead ads to streamline its sales process and identify high-quality leads effortlessly.
Advantages go beyond converting leads:

As Facebook Lead ads are customisable, you can use the format for multiple purposes. For example, you can use it for event registrations, acquire a newsletter distribution list, manage quote requests, or book callbacks. This reduces the time spent on generating forms, so there is time for creativity and lead generation.

Simplified data collection and CRM integration:

Lead Ads are the best for Facebook advertising as they capture target customers’ information effortlessly. A new landing page or conversion path does not need to be created, and everything you need to get a new lead is available on the platform itself. Moreover, you can sync your lead ads to your CRM for immediate follow-up. For example, a leading personal insurance company in Thailand, Generali Thailand, made a 2.5× sales conversion from Facebook lead ads by integrating their Facebook lead ads with their CRM system(customer relationship management system).

Highly-Targeted audiences:

Facebook Lead Ads help businesses to target potential customers based on their interests, demographics, and more. Once a user has signed up for your service or a service like yours, they are targeted, and the chances of conversion are immediately increased. Now, this means that the leads you acquire from your Facebook Ads are best for your product, and there is a high chance of their conversion.

Since you have a clear idea about the basics of Facebook lead ads, here are some of the tips that you should keep in mind while using a Facebook lead ad so as to increase your lead generation and conversion. But, that is not to say that your competitors are not aware of how Facebook lead Ads work. Therefore, keep in mind all the following tips so that your business can stand out in a sea of posts and ads.

A practical guide to using Facebook lead ads to convert customers

Use Facebook lead form ads for result-oriented marketing:

Facebook ads experts believe that if you start creating an ad before understanding your particular business goal or without having an objective in mind, it can not be as effective as you think it will be. Therefore, once you get a clear idea of your expectations, here is what you can do with Facebook lead ads.

Earn email sign-ups: Once you use lead ads to get more audiences to subscribe to your newsletters and email marketing, you can expand the size of your customer database for remarketing purposes. While you must be paying for leads, once you collect leads, they are yours.
Let audiences fill out inquiry forms: Facebook Lead forms tell you more than just the email addresses of the leads. Once you collect inquiries from your target customers by asking them questions about what they’re interested in, you can learn about the needs of your audience. Now, this will help you to follow up and provide them with the relevant resources or information without them having to look for it on different websites as you will have created ads just to cater to them on Facebook itself.
Entice audiences with deals or promotions: If you offer a discount, special deals, and promotions with your lead forms, you will be able to create buzz and interest in your business. E-commerce companies make use of this strategy, and it helps a great deal in increasing customer loyalty.

Attract audiences strategically

Today 92% – 94% of social marketers use Facebook for advertising. Although, most audiences won’t fill out Facebook ads forms if they don’t receive anything in return. So if you want people to share their personal information with you, you must give the audience a good reason to fill out your lead ad form. Needless to say, this should be done while keeping in mind your budget and most importantly, your exact business objective.

Also, this is important for those businesses that are looking to achieve their objectives faster. And, to get the information of Facebook users to determine your target audience and gain popularity among them, you will have to shed a reasonable amount of money.

A decent incentive implies to customers that you value their personal information, and so, you can kick off with a free consultation or quote offer in your lead form.

Some other ways in which you can entice your audience are:

- Discounts, deals, and offers
- Competition entry
- To enter sweepstakes and other contests
- To gain early access to products or services
- Product samples
- Event Invitations
- The facility to pre-order products
- Test drives
- Studies and whitepapers
Be transparent about what you offer

It is obvious that your audience wants a clear idea of what your business is and what exactly they are signing up for. Therefore, your ad should reflect the message about your brand or company very clearly. You don’t want to overwhelm your audience with useless or random questions, so ask as few questions as possible and let those strategic questions drive a response from your audience.

Now, this is exactly what a Facebook ads agency will offer you help with. They will help you highlight your business goal and help you curate your ad in a way that displays exactly what you are offering.

Do not forget to add an introduction.

Privacy is a prime concern of audiences, and they won’t share their personal information where they do not place their trust. So by using the intro section of your lead ads, you are letting people know about your company and what they’ll receive when they sign up. This needs to be crisp and to the point as this is all you have to explain to your audience about your business or brand model which will decide whether or not they will stay to indulge further. Besides, the intro section allows you to tell your audience who exactly you want to work with.

Further, once you have created your company’s Privacy Policy, it’s hassle-free to add it to your Facebook Lead Ad. You only have to select the “Privacy Policy” tab in the form and give a link to your Privacy Policy. Audiences today know about Facebook’s data collection practices, and so, if you create a Facebook Lead Ad, do not forget to provide a link to your privacy policy.

Remember, audiences are not likely to share their personal information if they don’t feel secure. Therefore, your privacy policy must clarify how and what information they are taking from the audiences.

Optimise your content and formats.

Just like a Facebook ad, a strategic lead ad always fits the message a company wants to deliver. Creativity plays a significant role in this. Therefore, you can use high-quality videos and images for better results. Further, the imagery you are using shouldn’t look just like an ad, so try using something natural that blends seamlessly into your audience’s social feed so that they can avail your offer if at all they are interested without them having to look for it on the internet.

Keep in mind that the formats should fit with your objectives too. While, for showcasing multiple products, you can use a carousel format, a short video will be apt for increasing brand awareness. A video is proven to be more effective than images because research has shown that 54% of people prefer to watch videos over other content. Further, you can also add a CTA button to grab more attention.

Your lead form should be simple and user-friendly.

The audience doesn’t have the time or patience to fill out a complicated form, so it’s smart to keep it simple. The easier your Facebook lead ad form is to fill out, the higher your chances of getting more forms filled in a short span. Besides, your Facebook lead ads must be optimised for devices of all kinds so that it’s more user-friendly for different audiences.

Always ask what’s right.

Facebook provides a huge number of default questions that you can choose to include in your lead form, but those questions don’t need to meet your business needs and expectations.

Therefore, for making your Facebook advertising fully proof, think about the questions that will work for your business and create your queries based on your business goals.

A short answer and multiple-choice questions are other options you can alternatively opt for. Moreover, you can use Facebook’s rubric of business goals for finding relevant questions or add Store Locator and Appointment Scheduling fields in your lead form as well.

Target the right audience

Facebook Ads Experts say that the audiences you target should align with your business and simultaneously with your lead ad’s goals.

You can choose from:

Target people who are like your current customers: To improve your customer base, you can target and use lookalike audiences. The lookalike audiences will be those who have similar interests and buying patterns as your current customers. For example, the LA Auto Show saw a 37% boost in online ticket sales after creating a lead ad campaign that targeted lookalike audiences. Besides, they also offered a ticket discount offer for those who submitted the Form, which proved to be an intelligent step.

Find people who are near you: By using the business locator feature, you can target ads to potential customers who live in the range of your stores. Moreover, you can not only target audiences based on their demographic information, interests, and behaviour but exclude a few based on some criteria to save your time and an ad.

Retarget loyal audiences: You mustn’t forget about those audiences who have subscribed to your newsletters earlier and are your recent site and app visitors as they are loyal audiences and precedence ensures that they may want to avail your resource or service again in the future.

Plan to follow up and review your analytics regularly.

Your work doesn’t end if you have already set up your ads. You must monitor how your ads are performing regularly and keep track of how your target audiences respond to them. Now, this will help you to adjust your campaign if needed and secure qualified leads.

Besides, if you have a tight budget, a quick follow-up can help you to stay on the right path and improve the chances of a conversion efficiently. It is said to be more effective if the follow-up is done sooner rather than later.

More importantly, research shows that timely follow-ups impact conversion rates significantly. Therefore, make sure that you quickly respond to your leads. Besides, you can schedule your lead ad campaigns during business hours so that your audiences can receive follow-ups instantly after filling out their forms.

Test and optimise.

If you want your lead ads to be the best of all, you need to keep testing and fine-tuning them on a regular basis. Just creating an ad and then publishing it won’t work as generating an ad is only the outset of your marketing journey.

The situation is more tricky If you are running two lead ads simultaneously. Therefore, once you gain a sufficient understanding of what your potential customers are looking for from tracking how your ad is running, you can analyse, test, and optimise them for acquiring qualified, high-potential leads.

Stay ahead of your competition by tracking them.

Your competition can have more creative ways of targeting your audience, but that doesn’t mean that you have to give up. If you notice your competitor using engaging video ads to engage prospects, you can consider using such an idea for your ads as well. There is no need to imitate what other companies are doing; you must be aware of how your prospects are being targeted and use the same strategies if required without blatantly copying them.

Determine how much you can invest first.

With the number of monthly active Facebook users reaching 2.45 billion, Facebook ads can help you to connect on a global level and expand the scale of your ad campaign fast.

However, you should keep in mind not to overwhelm your team, think about your budget, carefully plan, and respond to audiences who show their interest in your company promptly. Later, if you realise that now you can manage a wider audience, you can think about increasing your budget and expanding.

Be practical and customise according to your and the audience’s interest

If you customise the screen your potential customers will see after submitting the instant form, it will motivate them to take another action. Therefore, keep testing the efficiency of your Instant Form as well as the page later. You can also do an A/B test and get a better idea of your completion rates, cost per conversion, cost per lead, etc. And make sure that your lead ad form is meeting your business goals or not.

Lastly, if you think only a FB ads agency can use Lead ads, you are mistaken because Facebook lead ads are not only for ad companies anymore. However, it is not as simple as just posting ads on social media sites, as a few of the tips mentioned above could work for your business, and some may not.

Although, if you’re starting to implement all the correct ways, you can leverage this tool and make your business grow fast. Remember, if you continue to enhance your ad performance after becoming familiar with lead ads, you can reap the benefits of these Facebook marketing techniques effortlessly.

Additionally, you can enhance the performance of your Facebook Ads by revising your budget, creative and pixel placement, audience size, and targeting. Now you can implement all these tips to ensure higher conversions, better overall lead generation, and more sales.