Episode 142 - The one type of Facebook ad I'll always choose over others
Welcome back to the new school of marketing podcast. I’m so grateful to you for tuning in. Before we dive in I would love to pay respect and acknowledgement to the palawa people of lutruwita who are the traditional owners of the land on which my business operates and pay my respect to their elders, past, present and emerging.
Thanks so much for tuning in. I hope you’re having a great start of the week. We just said goodbye to grandma and are preparing for the school holidays. My toddler will continue to go to daycare, so no changes there and my kinder girl will be going to the school holiday program for a few days. She really loves being at school and wants to go to the holiday program so she can play with her friends and participate in the activities they do. How do you navigate the school holidays with kids?
Anyway, my world still revolves around Facebook ads haha. Because Tasmania has school holidays later than most other states I’ll be knee deep in one of my client’s membership launches during the holidays. I’ve just set up the lead generation ads and will be watching the numbers like a hawk. There’s always something to optimise or tweak.
Today I want to talk about the one Facebook ad I will always choose over any others, and it’s quite relevant because I’m working on this launch.
It’s literally the one I’d choose if I had a limited budget (which, let’s be honest, most of us have).
I’m talking about Lead generation ads (unless you’re an ecommerce store, then I’d run retargeting ads) but I don’t have an ecommerce store anymore so I’m going to focus on lead generation ads.
If you run a business that relies on leads, you could most likely benefit from lead gen ads.
Let’s first look at what lead generation is and what lead generation ads are.
Based on the Oxford dictionary, lead generation is the action or process of identifying and cultivating potential customers for a business's products or services.
So lead generation is the process of attracting prospects to your business and increasing their interest through nurturing, with the end goal of converting them into a customer. It’s a way of warming up potential customers to your business. Attracting them to your business to nurture them to eventually make a purchase.
Why do you actually need lead generation?
It seems pretty straightforward really. To be able to make sales you need leads and to get leads you need to actively market your business to generate leads. There are multiple ways to do this, like inbound marketing through blog posts, organic social media and there is outbound marketing like paid advertising (or annoying cold calls).
The process of lead generation has a few different steps.
Before people know you and your business they’re strangers. They generally find you either by accident through stumbling across your organic social media content, through word of mouth referrals or through a Google search.
Once they have found you they are visitors. They haven’t really taken any actions yet so your content and website needs to encourage them to take the next step. This could be through forms, landing pages or another call to action.
Once they have taken an action such as filling in a form or giving you their details they become a lead. They are a lead once you have some way to contact them directly.
Then the next step is to contact them and if they purchase from you they become a customer.
So, how do you get leads through Facebook ads and why is it one of my favourite campaign objectives?
Like I said before, people only become leads when they give you their contact details and you have a way, AND permission, to contact them.
In other words, they are showing an interest in your business or product and are happy for you to connect with them.
In order to get leads you need traffic and to get traffic you need to either spend time or money.
Organic social media, podcasting, blogging - all of these tactics can generate traffic so you can capture leads.
I’m a very impatient person so I prefer to use a combination of organic and paid marketing to attract leads.
And if you’re selling online courses or have a membership with a low price attached to it, you’ll need a lot of leads to be able to make the amount of sales and money you’re probably dreaming of.
That’s exactly why I love running lead generation ads. To make more sales you need more leads and it’s simply a quicker process with Facebook ads.
Once someone becomes a lead and has given you permission to contact them you can start connecting with them and build a relationship.
I can do a whole podcast episode on nurturing and using email marketing automations but let’s stick to the topic of Facebook ads for lead generation.
Generally in the online space, the space for course creators, coaches and membership owners, lead generation is done through a landing page where you showcase a free offer that someone can download, watch or participate in in return for their email address.
You want this free offer to be an intro to working with you and ideally it solves an immediate need or problem. And you really want this offer to be so good that people are keen to take the next step with you and pay you for your next offer.
So how do lead generation ads work?
In a nutshell they are designed to drive more, targeted, traffic to your landing page or lead form on Facebook. The idea is that you capture people’s details in return for your free offer so that you can start your nurturing process, build trust, show them what you can help them with and ultimately sell them something.
So why is it my favourite type of campaign?
Because you need leads in order to make sales and let’s be honest, the organic lead generation process can be mighty slow.
This is fine if you only need one or two clients a month, but if you sell an online course and you want to scale the number of sales you make, you need more leads.
Facebook & Instagram ads can speed this process up, put it on rocket fuel.
It’s exactly how people have multi six or seven figure launches - because they have their lead generation dialed up a notch.
It doesn’t always have to be through paid ads, but I bet my two dogs on it that anyone who has a multi six figure course launch has a list of leads ready that they have attracted and then nurtured.
So if you need more leads to be able to sell out your course launches, or add more people to your membership, think about running paid traffic to your free offers (aka lead magnets) and spend time nurturing them so they buy from you.
Outro
Thanks for joining me on this episode of the New School of Marketing podcast, I hope this episode was helpful and I can’t wait to share more marketing tips with you next week.
If you’re ready to take your business to the next level with Facebook and Instagram advertising, make sure you visit www.newschoolofmarketing.com to download practical free resources, plus subscribe to the podcast and never miss an episode. I can’t wait to go on this journey with you. Until next time, take care and market your business every day.
