Although we are concerned with Facebook’s policies around news and politics moderation, the platform is still clearly one of the strongest ways to get in front of qualified target audiences.
With more than 2.6 billion users, Facebook is a major platform for generating leads and advertising your brand. Additionally, Facebook offers companies several powerful resources to promote their products and services and to gather vital information about their audience.
Here are some tips on how to take advantage of the 800-pound gorilla that is Facebook to generate leads and boost your sales.
1. Organic posting
Organic posting with relevant information and quality posts can bring in customers and audiences. Being active daily on Facebook with interesting, engaging, and fun posts is key to keeping your presence fresh and alive.
What sort of content can generate leads?
The type of material to post on Facebook is almost endless. Anything that’s digital can be shared.
Think of e-books, small online courses about your product or service, free product samples, and service trials.
You can also post helpful demos, contests, checklists, and how-to guides that increase your brand’s value.
Create a plan for podcasts, slide share presentations, templates, events, online tools, free apps, webinars, and whitepapers… the list is endless.
Post relevant and engaging material designed for the audience you are trying to hook.
For example, as a social media company, we post case studies, hints and tips, and related guidance. We also share data and industry-related research with interesting and useful statistics that can assist businesses and clients.
Give away something free.
Free gifts are lead magnets.
Gifts don’t have to be expensive. The best kind of gift offers people a way to deal with a very specific problem they are facing by providing a free solution. Once they solve this problem, they will come to you for more solutions.
How do you come up with an idea for such a gift? The easiest way to determine what an audience wants is to ask. We all love to give our opinion, as this makes us feel validated. Creating conversations offers an opportunity for interaction with your audience and it’s the first step toward building a relationship.
If your audience chooses to accept your gift, ask them to opt-in with their email. This becomes your first point of contact and a valuable lead. It is the first step to anchoring them to your brand and your business. Once you have an email address, you can send them newsletters and targeted promotions and offers.
Facebook loves videos
Facebook’s algorithm favors videos and will show them more frequently compared to texts or photos.
Create Facebook Live videos to engage with your audience or to promote an event or an offer. By adding a verbal call-to-action, you can lead your community to your website.
Videos are an effective way to connect with your audience, maximize your reach, and build a community around your brand.
Facebook groups
Use Facebook groups to connect with new audiences.
Joining a Facebook group relevant to your business will offer precious insight into what people really want.
One common mistake is to join a Facebook group only to bombard its members with offers and promotions about your business moments later. Imagine you’re at a party and someone approaches you, beer in hand. “Hi,” he says, “Name’s Jim. Let me tell you about this amazing product I make.” Erm, no, I don’t think so. You’re only noting his product so you don’t ever buy it by accident.
It’s the same online. Instead of becoming a nuisance, engage in real conversations and offer valuable information. Be fun. Be helpful. Be yourself. Once group members have had a chance to get to know you, they will want to learn more about you and you will have created a lead.
Only advertise after you have reached a certain level of connection with people and you have already offered them valuable information and value.
Conversations and reactions
Posting organically means starting meaningful conversations and reacting to people’s posts. Through these, you can get to know your audiences and build relationships around your brand. Ask for feedback on a product or service and engage. This will help you understand what your clients are looking for.
Conversations don’t have to be dry. Humor makes people respond better to you and your post and offers a good way to open up a conversation.
Negative comments
At some point, most companies have to respond to negative comments: by remaining polite, calm, and apologetic, business owners can win back dissatisfied clients.
Your highest priority is to serve the two audiences seeing those comments — the disgruntled user and your page fans. Defuse the situation and do everything you can to take the conversation out of the public eye. Acknowledge the situation and invite the commenter to reach out directly to sort through the problem.
Responding to negative comments is crucial to managing your brand’s reputation.
2. Advertising
In addition to organic posting, companies must run paid ads on Facebook to see measurable results.
You may need a social media agency like WideFoc.us to help you create and manage your ads in a way that will ensure maximum exposure and the best results for the smallest possible cost. This is because advertising on Facebook requires deep knowledge of the platform and a profound understanding of targeted audiences.
A common mistake companies make is to focus their advertising spend during the gift-giving season, when both major brands and independent business owners advertise on social media. This pushes up costs and minimizes returns.
Instead of cutting spending on paid social media ads during slower periods, you should take advantage of them to increase your sales, build your brand, and grow your audience. Don’t try to save money on a road trip by not putting gas in the tank. Slow times offer a unique opportunity for your company to thrive.
We will help you to determine your goals.
What are you trying to achieve through your Facebook ads? Do you want to promote a product or are you trying to lead people to your website? Do you want to create a buzz around your brand?
Determining your goal means your ads will be better targeted. And targeting is the key to a successful campaign.
Know your audience.
Through your organic posting, you will have established conversations with your audience. These will offer valuable clues about what they like and what matters to them.
Facebook advertising tools supply you with plenty of targeting for audiences: gender, age, location, specific interests and hobbies, education level, children and their age, mobile user, even type of house. The better you target your ads, the more successful you will be because you are reaching the kind of people more likely to buy from you. Making a sale is much easier when you respond to people’s actual needs and desires!
We run multiple ads for you.
The beauty of Facebook is that you can run and test multiple ad campaigns at minimal cost. Each can have a different photo, video, and text and—crucially—target a separate audience.
So, if you sell beauty products, for example, you can run four sets of ads, targeting young adults, teenagers, women, and men. Each campaign will give you relevant information for that particular sub-group.
Not only will you be answering each group’s specific needs, but you will also see which group is most interested in what product. This will provide you with valuable market information that you can use to develop further products down the line.
Managing ads to create further leads.
As a social media agency, we know you need to get the most out of your investment.
That’s why we manage your ads and check their performance on a daily basis. Some ads will perform better than others and will deliver a better return on your investment (ROI). We will carefully increase the budget of the best-performing ads and stop running underperforming ones to maximize lead generation for your brand.
Running multiple ads also lets you maximize efficiency and evaluate which ad performs best. We run multiple ads simultaneously and constantly weed out underperforming ones in a process known as A/B testing. This ensures that only the most profitable campaigns are running.
3. Use all of Facebook’s resources to maximize your lead generation plans.
Facebook pixel and custom UTMs
A facebook pixel is a piece of code that tracks what people do on your website once Facebook leads them there, and connects their actions back to your Facebook ad accounts for better ad targeting.
Having a Facebook pixel on your website allows you to target ads both to people who have already visited your website and to larger audiences who fit the same profile of your site’s visitors.
Managing your ads is more than reading Facebook’s metrics: You need to know whether people actually visited your website and what they did after responding to your ad. Did they make a purchase? Did they contact you? Did they check out other pages or products?
UTMs are snippets of code appended to the end of a URL that track information about visitors arriving on your website. Designing custom UTMs allows for deep behavior tracking through Google Analytics.
With the Facebook pixel, we track the link between your ads and your website to measure each ad’s success. With custom UTMs, we track what happens when someone leaves Facebook and visits your website.
Lead generation form
Facebook has a specific resource to generate leads: the lead generation form.
This is a paid advertising campaign specifically geared at generating leads for your business. Lead generation advertising consists of a contact form with up to 15 custom questions that you create. Questions can have multiple choice answers or provide people with fields to fill in.
Through this form, you can learn more about what your consumers are looking for. Include the right questions to better understand your audience and how to reach it.
As with everything in life, people love gifts. Users are more willing to share their personal information if they get something valuable in return. Think of promo codes, free downloads, product samples, downloadable case studies, deals and offers, sweepstakes, or contests. Asking people for their feedback in exchange for a gift will make them more inclined to share their email and personal information.
Depending on your business, we can help you establish the relevant questions for your lead generation form and discuss the best possible gift or deal to offer your audience.
Call-to-action buttons
Facebook has created call-to-action buttons to encourage people to interact even more with businesses.
You’ll find several buttons with different goals, including “Sign up,” “Shop now,” “Contact us,” “Book now,” “Use app,” “Watch video,” and “Play game.” Depending on your business, you can assign the appropriate call-to-action button and interact with your audience.
As a social media agency, we advise our clients to adjust their call-to-action buttons depending on the occasion. For example, if you have a sale week, it’s smart to promote the “Shop now” button. If you are organizing an event or email newsletter, “Sign up” will be better. If you have created a video about a launch product, put up the “Watch video” button to entice people to learn about your new product.
We know how to help your business.
Facebook has been a prime revenue driver for our clients over the years, and we know how to leverage the opportunities it offers. We will work with you to establish the best lead generation strategy and use all the available tools to bring more customers to your website and increase your sales. Let us know your target audiences and goals for growth in the coming months — we’ll help implement a plan that’s customized to deliver.
Even if your plan is to handle paid social in-house, we’re here to provide advice. Drop us a line at officehours@widefoc.us to schedule a free 15-minute Q&A session or message virtualcoffee@widefoc.us for a 30-minute discovery call.
