Facebook is one of the biggest platforms for small and big entrepreneurs to generate leads. Whether it is a startup businessperson or a digital media expert, Facebook offers everyone to generate revenues and leads through Facebook ads.

Do you know that generating traffic and leads are the most important marketing challenges for any business? Even if you are a blogger, you need traffic on your blog or website to get leads or generate some income.

The Facebook ad is the prime social media platform other than YouTube that guarantees a plethora of leads and good revenue with the minimum effort. As per the Facebook annual report, it has 2.2 billion monthly active users. Over 1.5 billion people daily visit Facebook globally. You can imagine the ocean of leads you can get from these many people worldwide.

Let us see what is a Facebook ad and how does it work?

Facebook ads target audience at the micro level. You can choose your audience based on demography, language spoken, gender, age group, interest or profiles. It helps you to look for specific potential customers without much hassle or a headache. Also, check out our recent post to know how to optimize Facebook ads

Nevertheless, before jumping to create your own Facebook ads, it is significant to understand how it actually works. Various ad types and targeting options might confuse you on Facebook Ads. It is better to learn a little about the ads type you get on Facebook.

Types of Facebook Ads:

· Photo Ads:

It is the simplest way to start with your advertising campaign on Facebook. You can easily create a photo ad or use your already posted click for the photo ads. A photo ads must be interesting and eye-catching. You chose an area and the types of people you are targeting and facebook ads helps you to boost your photo ads as per your instructions.

· Video Ads:

Apart from still visuals, videos speak a volume about your product. Facebook offers you video ads facility to impress your target audiences.

· Slideshow Ads:

What is better than creating slideshow ads from collections of photos you have? In a small video, you can insert many pieces of information about your product through various still snaps in the form of an impressive slideshow.

· Carousel Ads:

You must have seen carousel ads on Facebook. It allows inserting a combination of 10 photos or videos in a single frame like a big panorama. You can insert various information of a single product, or various products under the same banner through carousel ads.

· Collection Ads:

A mobile exclusive feature, the Facebook offers the ads for easy online shopping experiences. It allows users to have an instant experience of shopping where they buy products without leaving the Facebook interface. It encourages users having a bad or a low internet connection to do easy online shopping.

· Dynamic Ads:

These ads are mobile-specific that allows brands to display only one or two products at a time. The customer can click and buy those products easily from their mobile.

· Instant Experience Ads

If you own a website, you must use Instant experience Ads. Earlier, the Instant experience Ads was famous by the name Canvas. Customers can load the ad 15 times faster than the mobile website when it is outside the Facebook. In addition, the “Facebook Pixel” is an automatic add on with the instant experience ads. It helps you to check the full tracking of your leads and revenue generated.

· Messenger Ads:

It is one of the most popular Ads systems among the corporates. You get the wide 1.3 billion potential customers who use the Facebook messenger frequently. You also get many privileges on this platform. You can set Photo Ads, Dynamic Ads, Carousel ds and video Ads for the messenger. Also, you can advertise on the Facebook feed by running the “Click-to-messenger” ads.

It also allows customers to have a one-on-one conversation with your customer representative directly through the “call-to-action” button on messenger.

· Lead Ads:

In the UK alone, the people are generating more than 9k leads for promoting their product sample. Lead ads are exclusive to mobile users. If you are looking for getting subscriptions or signing people for a campaign or a trial of a product sample, this is the one for you.

Lead Ad Format:

Lead ads help to get the people info from Facebook and Instagram who could be your prospective clients. You can present a lead ad either by image, video or carousel. Therefore, when the user engages in the ad, an auto-filled form encourages them to share their info with you.

How does it work?

Lead ad allows you to do a lead generation campaign. You can run this campaign on both Facebook and Instagram.

You must have played games on Facebook or clicked on links that ask your permission to access your information. Likewise, through lead ads, you can get the contact information or the email address of people without asking them to fill any form. As soon as someone clicks to your ad, Facebook provides an automatically filled form on behalf of the customers. You can also ask custom questions to people.

A lead ad format helps you to gather the lead information easily. You can directly download these data from Facebook and connect it to your CRM. You can use this data for various purposes like:

Ø Follow up calls,

Ø Price estimation,

Ø Business information,

Ø Sign up for newsletters, etc.

You can create a lead ad either through your Facebook fan/business page or through the Facebook Ad manager.

How Can You Generate Revenues and Lead Through the Facebook Ads?

It is important to understand the concepts behind the Facebook Ads. Remember, the Facebook ads are more for demand generation. You can display your products through Facebook Ads. You can attract more potential customers to your brands. However, Facebook Ads do not assure you that the visitors will use your services.

The Facebook Ads works like a trap to bring customers to your door. Whether the customer will buy from you or not totally depends on the customers and your product. In addition, Facebook users do not use the social media platform to do shopping. They visit to connect with people. It is up to you to convert those visits for your own benefits.

There are few other aspects also that you must understand before going much deeper into the topic.

· Generating Leads from the Low-Friction Conversions:

There is no magic wand to generate high ROI from Facebook users. They sign up the platform not to buy your products. Perhaps they have clicked to your ad on a whim.

The moment you try to sell everything that you have, they perhaps behave fussily. Now, the million-dollar question is to convert these fickle visitors into real customers. The idea is to connect with them through simple conversions.

Encourage them to sign up for your service first. You can request them to fill a short form or can ask for the e-mail address. You can anytime upsell them later through e-mail marketing. Here, you are generating leads only that will convert into the revenue ultimately.

· Building Trust in Your Business Model:

Once you collect the e-mail address of the potential customers, your next target must be to generate some revenue. Have you thought how many daily deals a person gets through his e-mail? The answer is easy to guess. We all get numerous deals daily and most of the e-mail marketing goes unnoticed or into the spam folders.

What Can You Do to Gain the Customer Trust and Attention?

Remember, through Facebook ads, you generate revenue not at all once but over time. You get the valuable leads through Facebook Ads. Then you start building your brand value by offering daily deals and subscriptions.

Facebook Ads do not give you an instant customer but it helps you getting lifetime loyal customers. It is wise to target 20% payback on Facebook ads. You can easily get 100% payback within the span of 6 months. So, it would not be a good idea to look for some quick revenue, rather focus on gathering leads and building a great business model.

A Systematic Guide to Creating a Facebook Ad

If you are running a business or a brand, you must have a Facebook business page. However, if you are new to it, you first need to sign-up for a Facebook business page. You do not need to be a pro to create a new Facebook business page.

Creating a Facebook Business Page:

Follow this Step-by-step tutorial to create a Facebook business page:

Ø First, click on the link to create a new page. After the page is opened, you will see a Green Button with the text ‘Create Page’. Click on it.

Ø Another page will open. It will ask you to choose between a business or brand page and a community or public figure page.

Ø Now you have to select your page. Next, name your page and find a suitable category for your page from the catalogue.

Ø After, you have to add a profile picture and a cover photo.

Ø Congratulations. You have created your Facebook Business Page.

Creating Facebook Ads

Now you have a Facebook Business Page. You are ready to generate a Facebook Ad. Here is a step-to-step guide to generate a Facebook Ad:

1. Choose your Objective:

It is the most crucial step. Before starting your Facebook Ad campaign, you must be very clear about your objective. When you log into the Facebook Ads Manager, you have to select a suitable campaign tab.

Facebook offers 11 campaigns options based on marketing objectives. They are:

· Brand Awareness: Getting the new audience for your brand

· Reach: Spreading the wings of your reach to the audience and maximizing brand awareness.

· Traffic: get the organic traffic to a web page or app.

· Engagement: This helps to get a wide audience. It also helps to maximize the number of likes on your post or page.

· App Install: It encourages people to install your app.

· Video Views: It increases the reach of the video views.

· Lead Generation: It helps to add new sales prospects to the business.

· Messages: Facebook encourages people to contact you through Facebook Messenger.

· Conversion: If you have a specific task, like getting more subscription or leads on your website, Facebook helps you by conversion.

· Catalogue Sales: You can connect your catalogue to Facebook Ads. It helps you to show your products to those who could be the buyers of those products.

· Store Visit: It helps to drive nearby customers at your store.

Now, select an objective for your Facebook Ads. Remember, there are two payment methods depending on the objectives.

· Facebook charges pay per action for all conversion-oriented objectives like sales.

· For exposure objectives like traffics or leads, Facebook charges pay per impression.

Let’s say I use Traffic as my objective of Facebook Ads.

2. Name the Campaign:

Now give a name to your campaign. You can choose a name manually or look for the default name that Facebook suggests.

3. Choose the Ad-set:

Now is the time to look for budget optimization. It is useful when you opt for multiple ad sets. For the ad-set, you can use the default name appears on Facebook or set a specific name. You can also create multiple at-set at once.

4. Choose Your Audience:

Facebook offers unparalleled targeting options. You can target user by:

ü Location

ü Age

ü Interests

ü Connections

ü Gender

ü Relationship status

ü Education

ü Languages

ü Workplace

Generally, businessperson focuses on the age, location, language, and interests. You can go for other choices as well depend on the product or services you are offering.

You can also go further into broad categories but it is costly and the success rate is not impressive. Here you can focus on a specific interest. It helps to target precise customers from the oceans of heads.

You can also go for the custom audience.

5. Select the Ad Placement:

Through Ad placement, you can choose the platform where Facebook displays your ad. It could be Instagram, Facebook or the Audience network. You can go for automatic placement chose placement as per your choice.

6. Set the Budget and Schedule the Ad:

Now, you have to decide your budget. You can choose a daily budget or a lifetime budget. In addition, you can decide the start and the end date for a scheduled ad in the future or a live ad right away.

Advanced Budget Option:

You can go into more detail with the advance budget option. It is efficient and cost-effective. It assures to display your ad only when the target audiences are live on Facebook. Nevertheless, you can schedule your ad only with the lifetime budget option.

7. Creating your Ad:

Creating the ad is also easy. First, you need to select the page for which you are creating the ad. After that, select an ad format. It can be a carousel, video, single image, slideshow etc.

8. Media Selection:

Here you add images, text, and design for the ads. You can add call-on-buttons, pixels and many others to create an impressive Ad design. Once you complete the design, click the confirm button to publish the ad immediately. You can also do a review before the confirmation by clicking the review button.

How to Create Facebook Video Ads to Generate Leads and Revenue?

If you are creating a Facebook video Ad, chose single video views, carousel or slideshow as the campaign. Here you can optimize the video delivery between 10-second video views and 2-second continuous video views.

Now you have to follow the process below:

a) Uploading the video:

ü For single video or slideshow: If you have chosen single video or the slideshow, upload video by clicking “UPLOAD VIDEO” button. You can upload a new video or browse your library to select a video from the library.

ü For the slideshow, click “Create Slideshow” button and upload the video or still images from the library. You can also upload a new video or image.

ü For Carousel, scroll down to the Creative/Link section. There click “Video/Slideshow” button. Now, select the video or create a slideshow as per your choice.

b) Cropping the Video:

ü For cropping the video, select the Crop button. You get the option to choose the aspect ratio as 4:5, 2:3, 9:16, 1:1, and 16:9 for the video. After that, click Use Selected Video button. The video placement depends on the aspect ratio you have chosen for the video.

ü Now, select a thumbnail for the video. After finishing, click the confirm button. The Facebook will display video right away.

c) Write a Facebook Ad Copy:

You cannot lure Facebook users just by displaying images or video. Texts are significant because users read text apart from the visuals. Facebook allows only 25-character headline and 90-character body limit for the text.

To create a catching text, you can use the copywriting formula AIDA.

Ø A-Attention: Chose an eye-catching headline to grab the user’s attention.

Ø I-Interest: Describe the USP (unique selling proposition) of the product in a brief. You can grab the user’s interest by the USP.

Ø D-desire: Lure the users by generating desires. You can offer a free trial, discount, giveaway or some limited period offers.

Ø A-Action: At the end, finish the task with a call to action.

To get the best of AIDA, write 8-10 ads and find the crispest sales pitch that you can put into 115 characters.

How to Bid on Facebook Ads?

If you invest the money, your prime target must be lead and revenue generation. Strategic bidding let you understand the difference between the profit and a failed performance. Bid strategies control the cost. It works same as budget the overall event. It also helps Facebook to understand your choices in ad auction. You can choose from two bid strategies:

i) Lowest Cost:

By choosing this strategy, you tell Facebook to get you the lowest possible cost per optimization. You also allow Facebook to spend the entire budget at the end of the day as per the ad sets or campaign. You can also have the option to go for a “bid cap” where you limit the maximum amount for the bid.

ii) Target Cost:

When you target an average cost per optimization, Facebook bids as per your specific goal. However, you can use this strategy only the marketing objectives. For example, lead generation, conversion, app install or catalogue sales.

What Bid Strategy Helps Me to Get More Revenue?

The answer depends upon your objective of setting Facebook Ads. The basic trade-off between the lowest cost and the target cost is efficiency versus stability.

ü You get the most efficient use of the budget through the lowest cost strategy. Although, it fluctuates a lot, through bid cap you can control cost per optimization.

ü Target cost strategy is stable and keeps the average cost at par even if you increase the budget. You get the closet average cost per optimization to your target budget for a lifetime for your ad-set.

Getting higher CTR (Click-through Ratio):

A higher CTR indicated greater engagement of audience to your Facebook Ads. You can track the performance of your ads through CTR on Facebook. Remember, CTR does not give the conversion data of leads. However, you get the idea of audience reach and success of the ads.

A good CTR depends on:

· Your product or services

· The niche/market

· The graphics quality

· Post type

· Target audience

You can check the CTR performance by comparing your multiple ads by split testing.

Importance of Landing Pages:

Through Facebook ads, your ultimate goal is to convert the visitors into customers. This is possible when you send these visitors to a high converting landing page. When a user clicks your ads, you get the user’s information like age, interest etc.

You lead the visitors to a page of their interest. You must have a registration form or an e-mail submit box handy to track the exact conversion. Not to forget, your focus must be on conversion and not selling. Lure the visitors to sign for the subscription or the newsletter. You can offer the visitors gifts or other benefits for the e-mail subscription.

· Tracking the Performances Using Third Party Analytics Tools:

Facebook only offers data for users that behave within the Facebook. It does not track conversion once a visitor leaves the Facebook. Therefore, apart from Facebook Insights, you need other analytical tools like Google Analytics to track the performance. You can tag your ad tracking using Google URL builder for tracking the conversion.

· Tracking the Conversions:

Once you have separated campaigns by interest group, it is easy to track each performance. You can use UTM (Urchin tracking) campaign parameter to understand the ads performance based on user’s interest.

When you tag your URLs with UTMs, it gets you a clear data of visitors’ behavior and interaction with your website.

· Tracking the AD Performance within the Facebook Interface:

You cannot rest just by placing Facebook ads. Monitoring the Ads performance within the Facebook interface assures good leads. Various metrics allow you to track the performance. However, CTR (Click-through-rate) is the best metric for tracking. It helps you to understand both,

Ø Number of clicks within the parameter

Ø The amount you need to pay per click.

A low CTR is not good for Facebook Ads because it indicates fewer clicks and high pay. Ads with high CTR indicate greater clicks within your budget. In a long run, high CTR is less expensive as you get the maximum returns of your budget.

To work well with CTR, it is important to have an eagle’s eye on CTR by interest. You also learn the behavior of Facebook audiences for your ads. You understand the interest of visitors and learn to create ads that resonate with audiences.

When Should You Refresh the Facebook Ads?

Everything has an expiry period. The Ad performances are also having a limit period shinning time. Even the most popular Ads lose its charm over a period. It happens more quickly with Ads that have smaller target audiences.

As soon as you see the continuous drop in traffic on your Facebook ads, you know the time has come. Refresh your Facebook ads with new images and videos. Change the text and create it more relevant according to the time or season.

You do not need to edit your Ads for all these changes. You can simply duplicate the previous Ads and do changes. This gives you the privilege to have multiple different Ads for the same brand. In addition, you can delete those ads that are getting none clicks. You will see the change in performance by the next day.

Rotating High-Performance Images:

Your duty has not finished just by refreshing the Facebook ads. You have to monitor the image performances on a regular basis. It will tell you the best performing images. You can rotate those images in every few weeks until Facebook audiences stop reacting to these images.

Conclusion:

Facebook Ads are great when you know how to use them. Facebook does not claim the success of your business. However, it surely affects the business world with highest leads. You need to learn how to work on the target-specific interest. Channel your creativity towards the right pitch.

The success of Facebook Ads depends upon eye-catching images, a low friction conversion, and careful tracking of performance. When you choose the right strategy and monitor everything carefully, you can ensure high leads and great revenues.

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How to Use Facebook Ads to Generate Revenue and Leads