Facebook recently introduced Lead Ads, an ad unit that makes it even easier for businesses and marketers to connect to potential customers. It’s a cost-effective alternative to sending users to your company’s website to fill out a form.
Lead ads can be an excellent strategy for businesses looking for leads, form completions, newsletter signups, and more. The mobile ads look like the regular ads on users’ Facebook timelines but when they hit the call to action button, it takes them to an editable form, pre-populated with their contact information that they’ve already filled out when completing their Facebook profile (name, email address, etc.).
The key to Facebook’s Lead Ads is that they keep the end-user within the framework of the social network instead of sending them to the company’s mobile website. The contact information the end-user has already provided in their Facebook profile is automatically populated, providing fewer obstacles and a quicker process for potential customers to fill out the form.
To set up your lead ad, the first step is to launch your campaign in Ads Manager by choosing the Lead Generation option.
From there, you can set your budget, targeting, and timing before you create the ad by adding a photo, headline, text and call to action button. This page also allows you to preview the look of the ad on the right-hand side and make any changes before saving it. (Previously, Lead Ads had to be created in Power Editor, but Facebook recently made them available in Ads Manager.)
The next step is to create the form intended to grab the details you need from potential customers. The form includes the basic contact information that would automatically be populated, like name and email address. You can also add three more questions to get additional customer data. These questions can include the suggested ones Facebook provides or you can customize your own if none are appropriate for your specific business.
We recommend that you don’t choose too many options, as the more fields you ask users to fill out, the more you risk losing their attention. If possible, limit it to name, email and phone number (all of which will likely be auto-filled already, thanks to their Facebook profile) and if necessary, one additional question. That should give your sales team enough information to follow up with them.
The last option is to add a link to your company’s privacy policy (required) and any other additional disclaimers.
For more details on how to set up Lead Ads, you can take a look here.
The easiest way to retrieve your leads is to visit your Facebook business page, click on “Publishing Tools” at the top, and then click on “Forms Library” to download a spreadsheet with the latest form completes. You can also sync your Lead Ads with your CRM tool. We detailed the most effective ways to do this when we first wrote about Lead Ads last year.
Lead Ads can be an efficient lead generation tool for businesses of any kind and provide business owners with a cost-effective way to gather user information without having to build new landing pages or forms on their websites.
