How to Improve Lead Quality Using Facebook’s Lead Generation Format

Have you ever thought about how you’ll share information with your target audience if you don’t have a list of potential prospects or leads?

This is exactly why lead generation is so crucial for businesses. But things don’t end here – you need to engage with your prospecting audiences repeatedly in order to boost your conversion rates and promote sales.

Facebook ads, in particular, can be an excellent tool to accelerate your sales or leads, helping you accomplish a wide range of marketing goals, especially developing a better understanding of your audience.

For businesses whose main objectives include market research, getting customer feedback, or increasing conversions – basically, capturing essential data – Facebook Lead Ads is the perfect fit.

In this guide, we‘ll try to answer all your questions about the relevance of Facebook ads for lead generation, along with tips to attract high-quality leads when using lead generation forms.

So, What Are Facebook Lead Ads?

The level of competition is only increasing.

Businesses need to work on maximizing their productivity, aiming to do as much as possible – as quickly as possible. The very first step to ensure this is automating the otherwise manual marketing techniques that facilitate organized communication, create and maintain customer engagement, and build brand loyalty.

With “marketing automation” small business owners and marketers can easily automate repetitive marketing processes and campaigns such as emails and social media.

Out of these techniques, lead generation and management are very crucial – something Facebook lead ads can help business owners with.

Facebook Lead Ads permit users to submit your lead form without having to exit the platform at all. So instead of directing users to external landing pages, which often acts as a deterrent for some, your prospect can learn more about your offer without having to get off Facebook!

Eliminating the friction of a longer click-through path for the prospect can be key for building a dedicated subscriber list and increasing conversions. Plus, the ads make it easier for the business to attract and capture their prospects’ data that show interest.

Do You Really Need Facebook Lead Ads for Lead Generation?

Despite growing concerns about the reliability of Facebook, it doesn’t change the fact that the platform has 2.7 billion monthly active users – this gives almost every business a huge market to present their products, irrespective of their target audience.

Besides this, Facebook makes it easier for advertisers to generate leads by capturing custom data that can help you get closer to your business objectives, along with simplifying the signup process for users. Plus, the presence of auto-fills fields eliminates any potential user frustration further.

The current digital marketing landscape highlights how Instagram and Facebook are the most effective platforms for social media marketing. The fact that you can use Facebook lead generation forms on both these platforms can be very convenient for marketers.

So yes, if you want access to high-quantity and high-quality leads, you should use Facebook‘s trusted lead generation format, albeit smartly.

Tips to Gather High-Quality Leads Through Facebook Lead Ads

Simply creating a general lead capture form will not make much of a difference. If you want to grow your email list subscribers and get high-quality leads over quantity, you need to take a more hands-on approach – starting with how you design the lead gen form.

1. Choosing the Right Kind of Form

There are two types of Facebook lead generation formats: More Volume and Higher Intent.

More volume forms are the easiest and fastest forms to fill that gives you a higher quantity of leads. On the other hand, higher intent forms add a review step that asks users to confirm their information by sliding to submit.

Since our focus here is to get more quality leads, you should consider designing forms that have a longer descriptive paragraph about the offer.

This will give the user a second chance to review exactly what they are getting into before leaving their information, which, in turn, will help you filter out higher intent users from low intent users.

2. Keeping it Sweet and Simple

Your form should be easy to understand. If the questions are too complicated or confusing, your completion rates will reduce drastically. The chances of a user abandoning your form increase with every question you add to it, according to Facebook.

Keeping this in mind, try to ask only relevant information. We would highly recommend using multiple choice questions and restricting the number of choices between three and four.

3. Focus on Targeting

Think beyond the form by focusing on who your target audience is. If you want to promote your submission rate, you need to consider various segmentation criteria, such as location, session count, and basket value.

The following are a few targeting capabilities you have available on Facebook:

• Education
• Age
• Job titles
• Relationships
• Average income
• Language proficiencies
• Hobbies
• Entertainment

You can also consider targeting your forms according to the traffic source of your visitors. It can help you gain alignment between the reality of the experience and the expectations set by your visitors, depending on the email, ad, or post.

4. Coming Up With Attention-Grabbing Offers

Have you ever come across anybody who doesn’t like a free giveaway or discounts? Exactly.

Facebook users expect free offers and contests, so you can immediately get their attention and maximize conversions by offering discounts and incentives. This makes it far easier to capture their contact information.

There is a wide range of offers that can trigger leads, which you can use to get your visitors to fill your form. Some of these include:

• Free samples or free consultations
• Tip sheets
• How to guides
• Checklist
• Documents discussing top 10 industry trends
• Infographics
• Whitepapers or ebooks
• Material kits, including ebooks, tip sheets, guides, blog articles, and so on.
• Case studies
• Contests that give the visitor a chance to win a prize

In addition to the above, you can also have videos that show your product or service’s features and benefits. At the end of the video, you can give the lead an option to download case studies or ebook, which will get you their email.

5. Using Questionnaires for Lead Qualification

Here’s a cliche for you: Not all leads are created equal. Hence, it’s necessary for you to concentrate on quality leads that have a better chance of converting.

For this purpose, you can design a series of questions, which will allow you to create segments based on customer journey of the leads. Additionally, you can figure out the following:

• Whether or not a lead requires your product or service
• Market research to help you understand how you can serve your target customers more proficiently
• Allowing you to focus your marketing and sales efforts on better
  prospects from your company’s POV

6. Using Videos, Images, and Messages

The year 2020 has proved to be very turbulent for Facebook as a large number of companies have joined a Facebook advertising boycott. But considering how millions of smaller companies rely heavily on the platform for lead generation gives Facebook a solid advantage.

Having limited budgets, these businesses can use bold images, videos, and messages when designing lead gen forms. Not only is this an excellent tactic for attracting customers, but these aren’t very expensive as well.

Business owners only require an image of the product or service, tailor a creative and unique message for their audience, and use bold colors to stand out in the member’s feed.

7. Creating a Follow-Up Plan

Having a swift follow-up plan in place can work wonders for improving conversion rates. In fact, the quicker you follow up with a prospect, the higher the chances for them to convert into your customer.

Harvard Business Review published a landmark study that pointed out businesses that make contact with customers within an hour are seven times more likely to secure qualified leads.

You can also consider using Facebook Messenger to contact your prospects, especially considering how messaging apps are becoming the preferred way for customers to communicate with brands. At the same time, you can also ask your customer for their preferred means of communication and time to be on the safe side.

The good news here is that Facebook lets you sync the forms with CRM products to manage the lead generation process better. For instance, if you use MailChimp, once you receive new contact information, it will automatically add it to a segmented list in your account, and a targeted group email campaign will commence.

8. Testing and Optimizing

When drafting lead generation formats, you need to figure out ways that attract more leads by arousing that curiosity about your solution for their specific pain point.

Optimization, on the other hand, is crucial for improving lead quality and is done after measuring what portion of your leads have converted into paying customers. You can incorporate your offline sources, such as CRM or coupon redemptions to your digital marketing campaigns, to track every lead you generate down through an offline sale.

Using this information, you can then optimize your ad campaigns.

In fact, ad optimization and testing is the perfect tactic to achieve your goals. For example, MeUndies, an underwear brand for men and women, found out that video ads worked better for their target audience, helping it see a 40% increase in conversion rates. If the company hadn’t tested video advertisements, their conversion rates would’ve possibly stayed stagnant.

The only way you can create the best lead ad is through A/B testing and fine-tuning.

You can run two lead ads simultaneously with each having different imagery or copy, or run ads that have different form lengths. While the former will help you understand which copy or image makes the most impact on prospects, the latter will allow you to measure completion rates.

Using Lead Generation Forms for More Than One Purpose

You can use your lead generation forms for multiple purposes in addition to collecting data for advertising your business to interested users. Not only are you able to learn more about your audiences, but you can also use them to enhance the efficiency of your email marketing campaign.

Email marketing is incredibly cost-effective after all, with potentially massive returns on investment. Keep in mind that the Digital Marketing Association estimates an average 4300% ROI for US business. Not bad, right?

Other than lead generation, you can use Facebook lead gen ads in three additional ways:

• Inquiry Forms: These forms can be used to learn more about a specific audience and gain more insights into their preferences and interests
• Email Signup: The more obvious benefit of using lead generation ads is to grow your email list and newsletter signups. Since visitors themselves give you their emails, they are likely to be receptive to what you send.
• Special Offers and Promotions: You can hold the attention of your visitors by offering exclusive material and promotions. Not only will this generate more brand awareness, but people might actually end up buying your product or service because of the immediate reward offer.

Let’s consider an example:

The company Quip used Facebook ads that firstly showcased the benefits of using the app. Then it incorporated the “Learn More “ CTA button that will direct the lead to an instant form where they can sign up for a webinar.

Once the lead submits their contact information, they’ll receive emails (as shown above), reminding them about the webinar as well as offering a live demo of Quip.

The Bottom Line

Using Facebook for creating a well-optimized lead generation form can help you create a strong email database – something which is a critical commodity for every business.

So yes, you can generate high-quality leads via Facebook lead ads.

Start by choosing between the type of form you want, but make sure you keep the questions simple. If they are too complicated, your visitor might abandon the form.

You should also design the form in a manner that focuses on who your target audience is. This includes criteria like session count, location, age, and so on. To increase the appeal of the form further, you can grant the visitor exclusive offers and discounts, such as e-books, infographics, entry to a contest, and white papers.

Test all kinds of offers to generate interest and get users‘ attention. Additionally, creating engaging videos, including surveys with qualifying questions, along with other strategies we’ve mentioned before, can help you improve your reach. These tactics can help you increase your customer base and grow your business in the long run.

Facebook’s powerful targeting capabilities will lock in higher quality leads as well that will be more likely to convert into new clients and customers.

About the Author

Nahla Davies is a software developer and tech writer. Before devoting her work full time to technical writing, she managed—among other intriguing things—to serve as a lead programmer at an Inc. 5,000 experiential branding organization whose clients include Samsung, Time Warner, Netflix, and Sony.

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