Using Facebook Ads To Acquire More Leads

Over the last few weeks our blogs have highlighted how you can improve your sales process by developing a winning sales mentality or how to locate key decision makers in any organisation. This week we wanted to focus our attention on paid advertising and in particular Facebook Ads as a potential medium to acquire more leads and more sales.

With the popularity of social media growing on a daily basis, many individuals and organisations are using social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter or Instagram to reach out to potential customers. The reason for this is very simple. Almost all of your potential customers are using social media sites on a daily basis to post about their lives or interact with friends and family.

Whether you are looking to target business owners with a mobile app or stay at home parents with the latest children’s product, social media offers a wealth of data that can be used by the modern day marketing or business professional. The focus of today’s blog is to highlight how using Facebook Ads can help acquire more leads for any business.

Facebook Ads allows you to create adverts in many different formats and locations, with each advert having a distinct objective. For example, if you are looking to build brand awareness and an initial audience for your Facebook page you might consider running a ‘”Page Like” advert and select a suitable audience that will find your content valuable.

In contrast, if your goal is to capture information such as the customer’s name and email address you may consider a “lead” advert which will serve this purpose. There are many different types of Facebook ads that you can pursue but it is important to consider your end goal. Clearly understanding the objective will allow you to select a suitable type of advert for your needs.

As smartphone devices are leading the way as the primary device by which we access and consume information, it is crucial that any adverts created using the Facebook Ads platform take advantage of the “mobile newsfeed” location. For example, Facebook has almost 1.8 billion monthly active mobile users. Research conducted by Facebook has shown that mobile newsfeed is the most popular location for Facebook ads and has the most impact upon the desired audience.

There are other locations such as the “right hand column” although they tend to not perform as well as a user often scrolls past without paying much attention to the advert. Selecting the right objective and location for your Facebook ads can ensure your advertising spend is providing the most value to you.

As mentioned above, Facebook holds a wealth of information about each and every user that can often be a treasure trove for advertisers and marketing professionals. Refining your audience can allow you to engage and sell products or services to virtually any segment on Facebook. For instance, if you are looking to create mobile apps for small or medium sized businesses you can target ‘small business owners’ as a potential interest and have your advert served to only people that meet this requirement.

As you start to build your audience, Facebook will also suggest additional interests for you to target as well as provide information on the potential reach of your advertising spend.

Facebook is a great medium to use if you are starting out with paid advertising as it allows you to not only pick your audience carefully but it also allows you to manage your ad spend according to your budgetary constraints. For example, you can run adverts for as little as £1 per day or put limits on your spending for a given period to better control costs. Having this level of freedom allows you to resourcefully manage your budget on a particular ad and meet objectives efficiently.

Spending money on paid advertising is a great way to grow and scale a business. However, without conversion tracking it is often difficult to establish how your spending on Facebook ads for example has resulted in sales made. Therefore conversion measurement is crucial in understanding your return on investment (ROI).

Facebook has made this task rather simple by way of the ‘Facebook Pixel’ that allows you to track users after viewing your adverts. You can then further segment the users contained in your Pixel by key events within your sales funnel such as the ‘Add to Cart’ or ‘Checkout’ event.

As with many different types of advertising, it takes practise and testing to find the winning formula. By selecting the right objective for your ads, creating a highly targeted audience and utilising creative ad copy anyone can achieve great results because the majority of your target market is on Facebook daily. Experiment with your ad budget and audience, split test and find a solution which works for you.

As we have seen throughout this blog, the Facebook Ads platform provides a great way to acquire more leads and customers for any business. With the popularity of social media increasing on a daily basis coupled with the growth in smartphone usage, there has never been a better time to enter the mobile industry.

To find out how Eazi-Apps can help you develop, deploy and market mobile apps for all types of businesses, contact us today.