Any of you with experience using lead generation ads on Facebook and LinkedIn already know how convenient they are. Considering both platforms do much of the work for you in setting up the ads, getting your marketing message out to leads works faster than ever.
Yet, there are some downsides to lead gen ads within these channels – in some cases, the leads’ quality may be much lower than those that come to you from personalized and branded landing pages.Why is that? It makes more sense when looking at it from a branding perspective. Sticking with third-party ad platforms’ branding means less customization than creating a landing page to showcase your offer and brand.
Lead ads on Facebook and LinkedIn allow you to convert people right inside the platforms – they don't have to leave Facebook or LinkedIn and go to a landing page to provide you with their contact information. And yes, you should definitely test these platforms with lead ads.Facebook Ads does a lot of the work for you, thanks to some key features:
Likewise, LinkedIn Ads have some similar options. They frequently tout their service as being more successful in generating leads than any competitors. Some features there to consider:
One of the key aspects to lead generation on social media is bringing human stories to the table. This approach is just one of many, if also the crux of capturing lead attention. Positive brand identity is another, something a little more difficult to achieve going through Facebook and LinkedIn's ad services.While all of this is great, there are limits to how personalized your lead ads can be on these platforms. And, ultimately, their own brands supersede your own.
If these platforms do provide a convenient way for a lead to convert with a pre-filled form, one could also call it a slightly frivolous process, as the conversion is so easy.
Depending on what your offer is, such a whimsical conversion might affect the quality of your leads. If people click on you lead ads but are not quite ready to convert yet, this could mislead you of how successful your ad campaign really is.You might be able to generate a large volume of leads on Facebook or LinkedIn, and you might think that that's outperforming your classic landing page experience. What we've found from lots of our clients and their sales teams is that the lead quality is much higher when people actually click away from Facebook or LinkedIn, spend time on a landing page, and then submit their name and email.An ad on a third-party social media site is not really a rich branding experience where a lead is fully exposed to your offer and your brand. A landing page is a better alternative where you can showcase your features, share use cases and user reviews, and convert all in one place.
Generating lead quality is something Facebook and LinkedIn market to the hilt as being their strong points. Indeed, they do work well, yet statistics now show leads get a fuller experience clicking away from those platforms onto a landing page.
The reason is clear: With your own landing page, you have a blank canvas to create your own experience for the leads. Stepping up and being more personal on your landing page is the key to success. Proving you can solve a lead's problem goes a long way toward conversion. So does telling your brand's story, adding video, smart design, and great visuals.
If you’re debating which channel to use for your ad campaigns, here is some food for thought.
Most B2B marketers think LinkedIn is the natural place to run their campaigns, but the platform is just too expensive.
What we’ve found, is that there's a threshold of the value of a customer, below which LinkedIn ads just don't really work. Here's roughly where we set the customer value threshold above which LinkedIn Ads makes sense, and below which you should be thinking Facebook Ads.
To make LinkedIn ads justify spending those high cost-per-clicks, your customers need to have a lifetime value of $10 000 and up.
If the lifetime value of your potential customer is significantly lower than $10 000, you're probably better off moving from LinkedIn ads to Facebook ads. And don't just assume that Facebook is only a B2C channel – if you bring in the right audiences, then remarketing there is usually the cheapest.
So, if you're struggling to make LinkedIn work and your customer value is significantly below 10 000 dollars, try moving to Facebook.
Are you debating what resources to put behind advertising on Google and Facebook? Here are our two cents on splitting the ad budget between search ads and social media ads.
I am a digital storyteller helping brands enhance their online presence through content marketing.
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