The Key to Using Facebook as a Lead Generation Tool

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Social media is a great tool for any business wanting to increase their brand awareness online. It has an extremely low start up cost as the main cost you are paying for is time. However, I see a lot of businesses use Facebook as purely a brand awareness tool.  They create a Facebook fan page, get some fans to it and post content hoping that their brand awareness will increase. That is, more people will see their brand on Facebook and this should ultimately lead to more customers and sales.

Yes this can happen but if a business solely focuses on using Facebook as a brand awareness tool then they are leaving money on the table. Facebook is actually a very good lead generation tool. Depending on a business’ niche determines the extent of how beneficial Facebook is as a lead generation tool for that business. The key to unlocking Facebook as a lead generation tool is through the targeting features that Facebook provides at your fingertips.

Everything that Facebook collects about a person such as sex, age, location, where they attended high school, what movies they like watching, what pages they like etc is all collated in its database. Facebook has then allowed businesses to use this information to target ads to specific users who fit your target audience. For example, if you own a gym then Facebook allows you to target ads to users who like fitness pages, who may be between a certain age group and who live in your area. Another example is you own a business that trains people on how to eat healthy and live a healthy lifestyle. You can use Facebook to target ads to people that have an interest in paleo recipes, gluten free recipes or TV shows like The Biggest Loser. The possibilities are endless. As a result, your ads are being shown to your exact target audience which means a higher response and engagement rate and less wastage on the wrong people clicking on your ads.

However, targeting your Facebook ads is only the first step to using Facebook as a lead generation tool. The second step is having a proper sales funnel behind these ads. For example, what happens after someone from your target audience clicks on your ad? What should they do? How will they progress from being a cold lead to a warm lead and then to a customer? So just like a proper sales process in any business, the same process still applies online.

An example sales funnel that I use with Facebook ads is to drive users to a landing page that captures their email address and then offer something of value like a free case study or PDF download as an incentive for joining your mailing list. Then from there, using an email sequence that really seeks to form a relationship with that person. Once you build a relationship, then you can use a soft sell approach turning that lead into a customer. Remember to always add value to your potential customer.