LEADvertising On Facebook

“I hate cake!”

“I love Elaichi in my biryani!”

“I love filling out forms!”

Said no one ever!

In the age where smart handhelds are deemed to be omnipotent, the potential customers of businesses advertising online expect certain ease and convenience even when they are being exposed to advertisements. Facebook’s new advertising option, Facebook Lead Ads, cater to the same requirement.

Rony, the owner of a local bookstore in Bengaluru, India often uses Facebook Ads as a tool to get newsletter sign-ups for his business. Viny, the founder of an Online Creative Writing School uses Facebook Ads to make her potential customers aware of her business and its services. Like Rony and Viny, there are innumerable other marketers and business owners that use highly targeted Facebook Adverts to connect to people who are interested in their business.

Say What?

A Facebook Lead Ad is a Facebook Advert that is meant to capture information (leads) of a potential customer in a form that is hosted locally on Facebook itself.

As Facebook puts it,

“Facebook lead ads make the lead generation process easy. People can simply tap your ad and a form pops up — it’s already pre-populated with their Facebook contact information and ready to be sent directly to you. With just a few taps, they can get the information they want, and you generate a qualified lead for your business”.

This is the convenience that helps the target audience react better to these advertisements. Easy few-taps lead capture mechanism, auto-filled form fields and no redirecting to a third-party website make lead generation easier and faster than ever.

So, What’s Different About Lead Ads?

Take-offs and no landing!

A lot of things are different about Lead Ads, but most importantly the absence of a landing page. As and when a thumb taps on a Facebook Lead Advert, a form pops open — On Facebook Itself! Yes, the advertisement will not lead the audience to the advertiser’s landing page. The person seeing the advertisement will make a decision to tap on the advertisement or not solely based on the information available in the copy of the advertisement in the person’s Facebook feed. This is a challenge for the advertisers to get their creative hats on to have compelling information about their business in the advertisement. The advertisers have a little help in terms of an increased character limit for the copy of their ads with the help of tools like Power Editor while setting up their ads. Also, the audience will not be redirected to the advertiser’s website after they submit their information in the lead capture fields. This means that the advertisers will have to make sure that they deliver on their promises (through e-mails or any other form of communication) that they made while taking required information from the audience.

An observation that is of key importance while lead advertising on Facebook is that once a person has tapped and submitted his/her information into the advertisement, there is an option of visiting the advertiser’s website that is not mandatory. While this on one hand gives the person the freedom to close the tab and browse on, it may cause confusion in his/her mind as to what to do next to get the resource that was promised for the information he provided. This could affect the campaign performance adversely.

Not Customary but Custom Questions!

Yes, gone are the days when advertisers could simply ask the customers their contact information as leads. Facebook Lead Ads lets them ask customised questions — “How often do you want to hear from us?” for a newsletter sign-up or “How many people are in your household?” for just sampling. This is a huge plus when it comes to generating quality leads.

Accessing the Leads

Facebook Lead Ads collect the lead data on the Facebook page of the advertiser. The advertisers need to transfer this information from their Facebook page to their Lead Management System/CRM software for its effective utilisation by their tele-calling teams or backend operations.

If only there was a way to bridge the advertisers’ Facebook data and their CRM software, in real time!

There are players in the industry which offer a real-time updating tool (not mentioning them here intentionally) that pulls the lead information as and when it is recorded on the advertisers’ Facebook Ad and uploads it into the Lead Management Systems or CRM software for the advertisers to get going on converting them. The macro-based transformations that some of these tools provide help the cause of the CRM software by pulling in information from the capturing fields in the form required (Example- First Name and Last Name pulled separately but pushed into the CRM as one [First Name][Last Name]). Apart from this, a whole array of analytical insights help you segregate the leads based on their quality/utility for the business. This is made possible by an end-to-end tracking system.

All in all, Facebook Lead Ads are a step towards a mini revolution in the arena of direct response marketers. An effective Lead Generation campaign could do wonders at the top of the funnel to provide just the boost your business needs. Getting aboard with the new feature from Facebook could benefit in future as this new ad type will revolutionize the scenario with a few augmentations that might (read should) not be far away.

So, if you, like Rony and Viny are all geared up to ‘lead’ the way with your business, Facebook Lead Ads could very well be the way to go!

Hope this was a useful read!

Until Next Time!

May you pick all the Elaichis out of your Biryani!

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