Are you thinking of running a lead generation campaign using Facebook Ads?
Thinking of ideas and strategy for a solid lead generation campaign can be very exciting.
In a successful lead generation campaign recipe, a number of different ingredients must come together in the right way. And it’s important to recognize that many ingredients are unknown such as:
- Who to target
- How to broach the subject
- How your ad creative should be designed
- What your differentiating value proposition is
- What you can offer
Let’s say you’ve done your market research. You know your campaign goals.
The next important thing to do is determine your who to target and how to reach them. Should you use Custom Audiences, Lookalike Audience and Interest Targeting?
In this post, I’m about to share with you what I’ve used to achieve tremendous success on Facebook.
How to prioritise Ad Targeting for a new lead generation campaign
1. Lookalike Audience (Customers)
Lookalike Audiences are groups of people that are similar to those in your Custom Audiences.
If you have a Custom Audience of your customers, its Lookalike Audience will be filled with similar Facebook users that are likely to buy from you.
My top Facebook targeting option is always customers instead of leads or a mixture of both your customers and email subscribers.
While the combined list of email subscribers and customers may give you a bigger list, the quality of that list is often diluted. As a result, your cost per conversion often ends up higher.
To find out how to create a custom audience of your customers, you can refer to Facebook’s tutorial.
As a safety net, make sure you exclude your custom audiences of existing customers for you to generate NEW leads, and not re-sell to your existing customers.
Pro tip: Increase Lookalike Audience from 1% to 5% to reduce your reliance on Facebook’s algorithm. What if Facebook’s algorithm was inaccurate and your ideal customers were excluded as a result? On the other hand, if the list goes into hundreds of thousands or even millions, make use of an interest to narrow them.
2. Lookalike Audience (Email subscribers)
Now, what if your list of customers is too small (<100) and Facebook refuses to let you create lookalike audiences? What’s your next best option?
Use your list of email subscribers - they’re people who’ve subscribed for something similar to your product!
They could’ve signed up for a critical piece of information you packaged in an eBook, slide deck, or even a free 15-min consulting session. Either way, put your email list to use.
And use it in an “advanced way”. What do I mean by that?
Segmentation.
There are many ways you can segment your list meaningfully. One example is that you can segment your list simply by users who’ve opened and clicked on your last 5 e-mails VS the rest.
I recommend creating at least 3 segments to split test your list.
Again, increase Lookalike Audience from 1% to 5% to reduce your reliance on Facebook’s algorithm. Then narrow your list using interest targeting.
Pro tip: One question that has consistently helped me picked the BEST interest to couple with lookalike audiences is this, “What would your ideal customers be interested in that NO ONE ELSE will be interested in?” Let me give you a real scenario. In a campaign that a friend of mine ran to target college students, instead of targeting by schools, he targeted individual schools’ confession pages (which at that time was a huge thing) - that led to a cost per mobile app install of $0.35!
Even if you have a big list of customers, you are leaving money on the table if you could’ve generated more leads using these emails. Doing so has helped me generate 21% more qualified leads for a campaign in June this year.
3. Website Custom Audiences
There are 2 kinds of website custom audiences you should set up at the very least.
The first kind is specific pages such as your lead generation landing page.
When targeting people who visited your page but never signed up, you should also exclude the subsequent page that they’d land on once they’ve successfully signed up. In other words, you’ll want to exclude people who’ve already subscribed or signed up, and only retarget the people who didn’t.
For example, if you’re targeting your landing page, make sure you exclude people who’ve already clicked and gone on to the next step. To do so, you may either exclude the next page’s URL or exclude your email list altogether (if you’re collecting emails).
The second kind of website custom audience segmentation is specific website categories, such as your product categories or product pages that follow a specific URL structure. For example, Garcon Model sells 4 kinds of men underwear:
- Briefs
- Trunks
- Boxers
- Jocks
Each of these product categories have their own URL path. e.g. For briefs, it’s /briefs.html. You could also sell products by targeting people who have read related content.
Protip: Once you’ve done so, design a simple split test! Run different ads for different categories and see which product categories are the most attractive, from their clickthrough rates (CTRs) down to the actual cost per acquisition (CPA).
4. Lookalike audiences (Website Custom Audiences)
Most businesses forget about this option!
If you invest time or money in creating quality content, building an engaged following, attracting high-quality traffic, then surely it makes sense to reach more of the same people by creating lookalike audiences for your website visitors.
Similar as what was mentioned, you can segment your website custom audiences by the pages or website categories they visit before you create your lookalike audiences.
I haven’t got results to share about this at this moment but I’m running them right now to see how effective they’d be.
Again, I only do this selectively for sites with high-quality content.
5. Interests intersection
Did you know that when you select 2 or more interests using Facebook Ads Manager or Power Editor, you’re reaching everyone as long as they like one of them? That’s very broad and definitely not my cup of tea.
To make interest targeting more meaningful, you should combine multiple interests so that you’re reaching people you know that have a high chance of buying your product or signing up for your list.
This is the next perfect option if you do not have any of the 4 targeting options mentioned earlier.
To do so, you need to either work with a Facebook Marketing Partner who’d be able to access Facebook’s API and set it up for you OR use a third-party app like AdEspresso (non-affiliate link).
Here’s how it works: imagine I want to target people who like BOTH social media examiner and copyblogger, for people age between 25 to 40.
If I used Facebook Ads Manager or Power Editor, I’d end up with 100K people.
However, if I used AdEspresso to set it up, I’d end up with 50K people. This option will shrink your audience size dynamically as you add more intersections.
Protip: This targeting option works really well if you know of multiple interests that have affiliations that distinguishes your customers from people who won’t buy. It allows you to better categorize and target your core audiences.
Conclusion
These are my REAL experiences with Facebook ad targeting when it comes to generating leads - hope they help you on your campaign too.
What are your experiences like? Do you have a different preference from me?
Other relevant reads:
Your First Facebook Ad: Targeting by AdEspresso
5 ridiculously powerful Facebook Ad targeting strategies by Wordstream
Facebook Brings More Advertising Control to Location Targeting by Jon Loomer
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