For me, Facebook has been an invaluable resource for generating leads. There are several different business models for generating leads on Facebook, and while I’m not going to get into these too much, it’s still good to give a brief review.

There are three ways that I’ve seen people generate leads on Facebook:

  1. Leads to my own business (this is where I am)
  2. Leads for someone else’s business
  3. Leads that you sell to people and businesses who want them (my CMO has done this before)

And here are some metrics I like to think about:

  1. Cost per lead
  2. Quality
  3. Volume
  4. Budget
  5. Acquisition cost

Facebook has its ad format for lead generation, although I don’t believe that this should be the only format that you pursue. Lead Ads are something to try as a part of a broader lead generation strategy, but it’s just one thing you can do! I love Lead Ads because you can get a big volume coming in for cheap. However, while you’ll get more lead volume, you’ll sacrifice lead quality because it’s so easy for people to sign up. If you want lead volume, then lead ads can be a great way to get started at a lower budget. You also don’t have as much of an opportunity to filter out people who really would not make leads which eventually turn into customers.

Most of all (as I’ll get into later), you want to own your data as much as possible. This means that getting people onto your site and interacting with it is important. What I’d really to get into the heart of this post, though, is the psychology of how someone goes from seeing your ad to becoming a lead, to becoming a customer.

I feel that the very most important thing is understanding who your audience is

Once you know who your audience is, think about how they might operate on Facebook. I also challenge people to think about how they operate on Facebook, too. Why? We’re all susceptible to the power of persuasion whether we want to admit it or not! Once you understand how it is that you are personally persuaded, you can think about how that applies to others.

What are the three core tenets of persuasion?

  1. Providing credentials – who am I and why should you care about me? This is also where you need to establish trust. Remember, from the very first ad you are starting a relationship. A good relationship always starts with trust.
  2. Appealing to emotions – think about how you scroll through the news feed. Think about the posts that appeal to you emotionally. What incites a reaction versus what becomes just a distant memory? What gets you to click through an ad? Think about the problem that you are solving for someone else with your ad. Think about how what you are offering is going to bring someone out of their current pain. You need to be relevant and interesting enough to someone that they are going to stop scrolling.
  3. Appealing to logic – once you’ve gotten someone to think with their emotions, NOW is when you start offering solutions because you’ve got them thinking about their problem

If you’re new to advertising on Facebook, the very first thing that you should become well-versed in is how Facebook’s algorithm works. Why? Because not only will your ad be shown to more people, the algorithm will reward you with more organic traffic. Facebook chooses to show people is what they believe to generate the highest amount of relevancy and interest.

Applying this to your ads and lead funnel

Here are the steps I’m sure you hope a visitor is going to take…

  1. See the ad and click on it
  2. Go through your landing page or advertorial
  3. Request more information

But this is not how things are always going to work. When thinking about how to persuade those who are viewing your ad, you need to consider the stages of market awareness.

  • Unaware: I didn’t realize I had a problem
  • Problem-Aware: I know I have a problem, but I don’t know of any kind of solution
  • Solution-Aware: I’m aware of a solution to the problem I have, but I may not have found something that works for me
  • Product-Aware: I’m aware of what products are out there, but I don’t know what works for me yet
  • Most-Aware: I NEED a specific product to solve my problem!
Everyone that you are serving ads to is going to in these different stages. How you figure out who fits where is something that happens over time through good old-fashioned data collection. If you are describing your product to someone who is completely unaware they even have a problem, that means that your ad and funnel is going to need to be educational. You need to get people to care about something that they can’t even put into words yet. This why with lead generation on Facebook, you can’t just go straight to the sale unless you’re advertising to people who are Product-Aware or Most-Aware.
It also means you’ll need a longer sales to funnel to get people to the awareness stage. On the other side of the spectrum, when people are really aware of their problem and know what’s out, you need to take the steps to either persuade why you are the right choice or explain your product in a way that makes it feel novel from anything else.

This is why audiences will be your best friend

One thing that I love about generating leads on Facebook is the opportunity to leverage the data that you collect. The Facebook Pixel is easy to set up on your website, and there are many behaviors that you can track. This means that you not only can you track your leads over time, but you can also track their behaviors.

  1. How many leads became customers?
  2. How many leads dropped off early?
  3. How was the quality of your lead segments?

After separating my leads into segments, I can build multiple custom audiences that I can then leverage for new ads or even better, use them to create Lookalike Audiences (LALs).

The key to making this work will be a website that can guide people through the various stages of awareness. The quality of your site is just as signficant as your ad. If the landing page or advertorial doesn’t psychologically with the ad, people will feel deceived or confused and just leave. I like to set my custom audiences up to mirror the stages of awareness that I spoke of above. I also set up different ads and landing pages to test based on these (but this is when I have more data – more on that later)

Personal psychology: make sure you are patient and courageous with your budget

I see too many people dip their toes into Facebook Ads, get scared, and then walk away after spending $100 and getting no results. The problem with this is that these people haven’t given Facebook enough time to optimize who it’s showing your ad to in the first place.

Say you are starting with a pretty broad audience…

Each time your ad shows itself to a person, it’s kind of like a shot in the dark. Your ad may speak to a lot of people, but in the end, you don’t know how you are showing your ad to yet. Over time (I’d say after generating about 50-100 leads), Facebook really gets a sense of who is responding to your ad. When you put up an ad for the first time, you’ll see that it is in the “learning” phase. Facebook is literally learning which people best respond to your ad.

For this to work, you need to be a bit more patient and strong when it comes to your starting budget. Like I said before, 50-100 leads is really that magic number for Facebook to get a sense of who will convert, and it can optimize for conversions. This is also where you need to ask yourself the question, is Facebook the best avenue for me? Think about your cost per lead. If your leads cost $10, then you’ll want to put down $500-$1000 at least. I usually advise people who want to generate leads on Facebook to put down around $1,500-$5,000 to start out so that they can feed Facebook the data it needs.

Patience is what separates the winners from the losers on Facebook because you inherently need to spend the time to get to know everyone that responds to your ad. Facebook is a social experience, so you need to be social yourself.