5 Facts Every Business Should Know About Facebook Lead Ads

Facebook lead ads are an exciting addition to the Facebook advertising suite since they focus entirely on lead generation.

Essentially, lead ads allow you to add a contact form directly on your ads so you can request information without the user having to leave Facebook.

If you’re looking to get sign ups for your content, price estimates from customers, or any other type of business information, this post is for you!

We’ve got five facts you need to know about your next Facebook lead ad campaign.

How Facebook Lead Ads Work

Facebook lead ads make the process of lead generation seamless by allowing interested parties to fill out forms directly on Facebook.

Most mobile forms take 38.5% longer to fill out than desktop forms but Facebook has solved this with their smartphone-friendly form. When someone clicks on your ad, they’ll see a form that’s already populated with the information they’ve shared on Facebook.

Once the person clicks submit, all of their info is sent to you (the advertiser) — making inbound inquiries easier and faster!

Here’s the step-by-step process for lead ads:

1. Visit your Power Editor to create your lead ad
2. Give your form a name and design your welcome screen
3. Click Questions and choose which questions to ask with your Facebook lead ad
4. Save your ad and start your campaign!

Once your ad is running, you can easily download your leads from Facebook, or you can connect your leads to a CRM.

Now that you understand how these ads work, let’s dive into some best practices!

Tip 1: Create An Eye-Popping Welcome Area

By adding a welcome screen or area, you can give your potential leads more information about your business and the promotion, offer or incentive you’re giving away.

Some ideas for your welcome area are:

• A description of your product(s)
• Description of your service(s)
• Telling people what they’ll receive for submitting your info (free offer, incentive, coupon, free consultation, etc.)

While adding a welcome screen is optional when creating your Facebook lead ads, it’s the area that will likely “make or break” your lead generation abilities.

The example below uses the same example of Jasper’s Market above so you can see how Facebook suggests you use your welcome area.

• Area 1 shows how the lead ad looks in the News Feed.
• Area 2 shows the welcome screen for Jasper’s Market. Notice how they use a colorful picture of produce, and make their copy easy to scan by using bullet points.
• Area 3 shows where the user is taken when they click “sign up now.”

Tip 2: Don’t Get Greedy

As you can see in the Jasper’s Market example above, they only ask for two pieces of information, a full name, and a phone number.

Sure, it’d be awesome sauce to know your lead’s name, phone number, email address, birthday, gender, date of birth, and annual household income. But what do you think your chances are of capturing that lead when you ask for ALL THE THINGS?!

Slim to none.

Studies show that the more information you ask for, the more likely a person is to abandon your form.

Ask for only the most crucial information to ensure your lead form is filled about by the most leads possible.

Formstack actually does this automatically with their tool and shows you form field bottlenecks — or areas where users get hung up on filling out your form.

You might really want that name, but if it’s costing you upwards of 40% completion rate you may want to think of another solution!

Tip 3: Consider Your ‘Give To Get’

You need to be crystal clear with your leads; what are they getting for giving you their valuable information?

We often ask our clients to include a “give to get” or an offer with their lead ad that entices users to share their information.

A few ideas are:

• A free consultation
• Coupons for new customers
• Deals that only your list subscribers will receive

Look at the Jasper’s Market example again and you’ll see on their welcome screen that they really underscore the value users get when signing up.

Tip 4: Your Audience Doesn’t = EVERYONE

Oftentimes, clients want to target anyone and everyone on Facebook with their ads. This isn’t the best idea with any ad, including Facebook lead ads.

The more targeted your target audience is the more conversions on your lead form you will likely obtain.

Our suggestion to clients is always twofold:

• Start with a custom audience — people who are already aware of, interested in, or customers of your business. You can do this by using a customer list, your existing Facebook followers, or by targeting visitors to your website (you can use the handy dandy Facebook pixel for easily grabbing those website visitors and uploading them to Facebook).
• Second, use a lookalike audience — people who are similar to those on your custom audience list, but are not familiar with your brand yet (but they’re similar to people who are!).

By using what you have and then targeting people who are similar to the customers you’ve already served, you’ll have a better chance of showing your ad to a high-quality audience. And that should lead to high-quality leads!

Tip 5: Following Up Quickly Is Key

If a lead does fill our your form for something more than a newsletter sign up, you need to strike while the iron is hot.

If you wait around too long to contact your new leads, they may have already been contacted by — and wooed! — by a competitor.

Our suggested turnaround time for business leads is 24 hours or less.

One way Facebook lead ads make this easier on you is by integrating with many email marketing and CRM (customer-relationship management) tools.

Some of the more popular tools they integrate with are:

• MailChimp
• Constant Contact
• Marketo
• Salesforce
• Marketing Cloud

Even if Facebook doesn’t connect with your specific tool’s API, you can use an integration application tool to try to get them to “talk” to each other.

We love Zapier for situations like these!

Other Best Practices

There are plenty of best practices for Facebook lead ads! In fact, Facebook offers an entire page of their own tips for running lead ads.

Have you experimented with lead ads yet? What are some of the best practices or tips you’d like to share? Let us know in the comments section below!

Read more: Stop Playing Hard-To-Get with Facebook Lead Ads