6 Reasons to try Facebook and Instagram Lead Ads

In 2016, Facebook released a never before seen ad format called a Lead Ad.

What made this ad format revolutionary was the inclusion of an enquiry form within the Facebook or Instagram Ad. This meant advertisers no longer had to send people to a landing page on their website or setup enquiry forms which has in turn made lead generation via social media much easy for small businesses.

I’m still surprised however at the number of business owners and marketers I speak to who aren’t aware of this ad format.

If you haven’t come across one of these ads before, here’s an example of a lead ad from Macquarie Bank that showed up in my Instagram feed:

Pretty cool huh!? OK, I’m a digital marketing geek, so maybe it’s just cool to me ?

Lead ads are not a silver bullet for all businesses but it can work well in many industries. Here are the industries I’ve seen using lead ads effectively:

• Real estate
• Healthcare
• Automotive sales
• Finance
• Fitness
• Building and Renovation
• Travel and Accomodation
• Legal services
• Education and Training

You can see some ad examples here.

So, what makes Lead Ads so powerful for small businesses?

The ad example I used in the video above is from an Australian bank, but don’t let that dissuade you. Here are some reasons why you should try a Facebook and Instagram lead ad campaign:

1. Cheap to test
   Comparable to many other advertising formats, you can spend as little as $5 per day on Facebook & Instagram ads. I’d recommend a budget of at least $500. A lead may cost you anywhere from $2 to $200 depending one what it is your selling and how much you’re willing to pay for a lead.
2. Low friction forms
   If you watch the video above you’ll see that my details were already entered into the form after I clicked on the ad. These details were automatically pulled from my Instagram profile. It works the same way when ads appear in the Facebook news feed. This means your audience doesn’t need to try to use two fat thumbs to enter their name, email address and phone number. This is particularly important if you’re targeting an older demographic.
3. No landing page required
   Importantly for small businesses, you don’t have to get your web designer to create a landing page and enquiry form on your website. You do however have to be able to link to a privacy policy on your website. If you don’t have one of these… you should ?  . If your website is built on WordPress, there are plenty of privacy policy plugins you can use.
4. The best demographic targeting… ever
   Given that Facebook and therefore Instagram know so much about their users, you can be very specific as to who you target with your ads. For example: say you have a wedding venue; you can target Men & Women living within 50km’s who are engaged to be married.
5. Automatically add leads to your sales funnel
   Studies have shown that following up leads quickly (as in, within an hour of submission) significantly increases sales conversions, so it’s important that you can access leads conveniently. Third party tools like LeadSync or Zapier, you can automatically send new leads to your CRM, a Google Sheet or even an email autoresponder.
6. Excellent Reporting
   Facebook Ads Manager reporting will show you home much a lead costs you over time. Here’s a cost per lead report example where the cost per lead was $3.26 with 101 leads  generated.
   

Ready to give lead ads a try? Checkout my Facebook lead ads guide.