Lead generation with Facebook Ads

A lead is a person who shows interest in a company's product or service. The fundamental concept is precisely interest.

If you pick up the phone, call a random person and try to convince him or her that your gym is the best in the area, that is not a lead, unless he or she finally expresses some interest.

Of course, a lead is not a customer and the marketer's skill lies in leading the lead to purchase, through a process.

This process is made up of a series of steps in which a person's interest is built up slowly, making him or her go from being a cold contact (uninterested) to a warm contact, i.e. ready to adhere to your company's business offer.

Usually these steps have to do with the provision of interesting content, structured in such a way as to convince the person that the solution proposed by your company is the right one for him.

In short, collecting contacts is one of the most important activities for a company: it increases your brand awareness, builds relationships, generates leads and closes business deals. No leads, no customers, no business.

A lead is a person who shows interest in a company's product or service. The fundamental concept is precisely interest. If you pick up the phone, call a random person and try to convince him or her that your gym is the best in the area, that is not a lead, unless he or she finally expresses some interest.

Of course, a lead is not a customer and the marketer's skill lies in leading the lead to purchase, through a process.

This process is made up of a series of steps in which a person's interest is built up slowly, making him or her go from being a cold contact (uninterested) to a warm contact, i.e. ready to adhere to your company's business offer.

Usually these steps have to do with the provision of interesting content, structured in such a way as to convince the person that the solution proposed by your company is the right one for him.

In short, collecting contacts is one of the most important activities for a company: it increases your brand awareness, builds relationships, generates leads and closes business deals. No leads, no customers, no business.

How do you get leads?

Having established that contacts are important, how do you get them?

The marketing practice of collecting data from your potential customers is called lead generation.

You can get leads in many ways, but remember to also give importance to the quality of the contact. It is not always good to have a large number of leads if they are not interested in the solution you propose. Having many low-quality leads is a boomerang: you will have spent money to acquire them and resources to try to convert them, without getting results. Your salespeople will complain about poor quality leads, because you will waste their time and get no commission.

In web marketing, you can get leads through different channels, such as SEO, Google ads or banners. The goal is to bring traffic to a page on your site where you offer the user an incentive (in marketing terms, a lead magnet).

The incentive can be content, a webinar, a discount, a coupon, a free trial of a service, anything that a person values and is encouraged to leave their valuable personal information.

Do not neglect in-person events to gather contacts.

How to do lead generation with Facebook Ads

Advertising on Facebook is a marketing solution now widely used by companies.

The power of this tool lies in the possibility of reaching a highly targeted audience through various advertising formats, which corresponds as closely as possible to the 'typical customer' or sympathisers of your brand.

Compared to other tools, e.g. Google Ads, advertising on Facebook is quite simple, as the dashboard is less complex than advertising on Google; moreover, the CPC (cost per click) is significantly lower than what you would have to invest on Big G.

But not all that glitters is gold. Even on Facebook's Ad Management section, it is good to know what you are doing and be clear about your business goals to avoid wasting your budget.

Facebook Ads Objectives

Having clear business goals is crucial, it is certainly the strategic basis of any marketing action, online or offline.

Within the 'Ad Management' section of Facebook, we can choose from a number of objectives, to date:

• Brand awareness;
• Coverage;
• Traffic;
• Interaction;
• App installs;
• Video views;
• Contact generation;
• Messages;
• Conversions;
• Sales of catalogue products;
• Point-of-sale traffic.

Of all these Facebook Ads campaign objectives, there is one that allows the collection of user contacts without leaving Facebook, the Contact Generation objective.

Nothing, however, prohibits using another type of campaign to collect data from potential customers. In both cases, there are advantages and disadvantages.