You may be using Facebook advertising for a number of reasons but probably the most important one is to obtain more leads for your fitness or sports business.
Facebook gives you a range of different advertising objectives such as brand awareness, more video views, engagement and conversions. But from my experience, the most effective method is to use Facebook lead ads. They are a fairly recent addition to the different advertising options but it is probably the best way to generate leads for your business.
Unlike other ad types, lead ads include a contact form that lets people show their interest in you by filling out the form in Facebook with their details so you can follow up with them. It makes it so simple for your prospect to express their interest in your business.
Benefits of Lead Ads
What I like best about lead ads is that when a person clicks on your lead ad, they are taken to an on-Facebook form. Likewise, when they click on your lead ad in Instagram, they are taken to an on-Instagram form. On this form, they can edit and confirm their pre-populated information (usually name and email) before clicking the “submit” button. It has been proven that a higher percentage of people will fill in their details when the lead form is within Facebook compared to clicking on the Facebook ad and being directed to a page outside of Facebook (such as a lead form on a seperate landing page or an enquiry page on your web site).
There are some other great benefits to lead ads to consider too:
- How simple and easy it is for a person to provide their details to you – the easier you make it, the more likely they will submit their details to you.
- You choose which questions to ask in your form – you can customise the questions in your lead ad form so it’s tailored to your business.
- You can download your leads directly from Facebook or you can connect your leads to a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system such as MailChimp or Salesforce (CRM is basically software or a program that manages how you interact with current or potential members).
- Many CRM integrations: Connecting to a CRM can help you download your leads faster and take real-time action on new leads.
- Facebook’s lead ads are particularly effective in generating leads, as they allow people to subscribe in just two clicks.
- Lead ads can be used to collect sign-ups for your newsletters, price estimates, follow-up calls or business information.
A traditional Facebook ad campaign redirects users to a landing page on your website, where they may complete a subscription form. In this case, your website’s loading time is crucial because potential customers could leave before opting in. According to Dynatrace and Akamai surveys, 50% of website visitors expect sites to load within 2 seconds, and if they don’t load within 3 seconds, people will abandon the process.
Facebook lead ads are specifically designed for mobile traffic and you don’t need a landing page to generate leads. Instead, when people click your ad, Facebook will automatically populate the opt-in form with their data, making the signup process simple and fast.
The Lead Form
On your lead form, email and name is already populated but you can ask any additional questions you want. Your lead form can have up to 21 questions and up to 15 custom questions (though I certainly don’t suggest you ask your prospect 30 odd questions).
The type of questions you ask is a critical factor for your lead campaign performance Asking too much information will kill your conversion rate, asking too little information may provide you with a list of low quality leads that are just tyre kickers.
Facebook best practice says that three custom questions is ideal, but how many questions should you have on your lead form? Well, that depends on the campaign and the audience, of course!
The more questions you have on your lead form, the higher your cost per lead will be. Conversely, by removing too many barriers between the user and conversion, you run the risk of attracting low-quality leads/conversions.
If you’re simply looking for opt-ins to your campaign, then basic questions will work well. But if you are trying to reach an audience with the intent of nurturing them for a higher value conversion, you may want to consider adding one or two custom questions to help sort out the better marketing qualified leads.
What type of questions should you ask
As you might expect, email and name are the top two questions. No surprises there. But then again, asking just for the email and name doesn’t really tell you how qualified the user is filling in your form, does it?
The form is so easy for the user to submit that anyone with a fleeting thought could accomplish it. While you are likely to see better conversion rates and cheaper costs per lead with easy questions, you have to ask yourself what are you learning? Unfortunately, getting detailed information isn’t always easy.
Asking for email and phone number converts better than phone only but not as well as email only. When you think about it, this makes sense. A phone number is a bold request, even when done in person so it’s not too surprising to find out that asking for a phone number increases your the quality of leads but will often lower your conversion rate.
In general, you should set up a series of campaigns and ask questions based on how qualified your traffic is.
Make me an offer I can’t refuse…
You need to have a lead magnet, and it must be absolutely terrific!
A surprising amount of people set up their lead campaign and forget to think about what kind of value they are going to be driving for the person on the other side on that Facebook campaign.
It doesn’t matter how good your copy or how good your graphics are if you don’t have a great incentive for people to click on your ad, you’re not going to get a lot of leads.
People don’t log on to Facebook to find new services to sign up for, they log on to interact with their friends and look at interesting content on the Internet.
Creating a lead ad campaign with a call-to-action and no incentive is a recipe for a poor performing ad campaign.
That being said, your lead can be anything from an e-book, gift vouchers or a free training session. What matters most is the value you provide with your offer. The business that delivers the most value to the person on the other side of that ad is going to be the one that wins the lead and will have the lowest cost per lead in the long run.
Make sure you keep your promise
Once your lead has submitted their lead form, it is very important you deliver on your lead magnet, and do so quickly.
When someone submits a lead form to you, they are expecting a response and the sooner the lead is contacted, the better. A study by Harvard Business Review showed that prospects who were contacted within one hour of submitting their query were nearly 7 times more likely to be qualified, compared to a lead that was contacted over an hour later.
Many businesses don’t respond to inquiries quick enough so if you can master this part of your lead ad, you will definitely have a competitive edge.
Your leads should be entered into a contact list in your CRM and sent an email within an hour from submitting your lead form with access to your lead magnet.
Talk to me
If your ads are asking for a phone number, then your lead will be expecting a phone call. You can actually schedule your Facebook ads to make sure your campaign is not running when leads cannot be contacted. Not many fitness business are open 24 hours a day and it is not ideal to have your leads waiting 8 or more hours for a follow up call so look at scheduling your ads when you can respond to them promptly.
The power of remarketing
Remember a submitted lead form is just the very beginning of the customer journey. You can create a custom audience out of people that submit your lead form and those who open and don’t submit your lead form.
This allows you to:
- Exclude the audience that already submitted their info from any being included in campaigns for that stage of your funnel
- Include the audience in campaigns that move them along your funnel’s next stage
- Create a lookalike audience of those that submitted your lead form
The most important part of your lead generation campaign is your follow-up.
The next campaign could introduce the audience that submitted your lead form to even more information about your offering. You could have the audience see a video testimonial ad, for example. This audience is already familiar enough with your brand and has enough trust to give you some information about them, so a video testimonial is a great way to move them closer to being a paying member or client.
So as you can see there are a lot of advantages to Facebook and Instagram lead ads – if you are already using these social media networks for promoting your business, then definitely set up some lead campaigns to grow your database, gain leads, get more people to your event or to get some extra interest in your training services.
