The Best Facebook Ads Formats for Leads and Sales

According to e-marketer the Ad revenues for Facebook and Instagram combined will reach nearly $95 billion in 2021. This trend is aligned with the most recent research which shows overall growth in the worldwide digital ad spending for 2021.

Facebook campaigns have proven throughout the years to be ideal for companies with limited advertising budgets for their lower cost especially when compared to Google Ads. Not only that, Facebook Ads have proven to be great also for direct response marketing campaigns.

As I was saying, business owners have started to think about social media not just as a simple entertainment channel but as a way to increase their profits. Facebook and Instagram can represent an amazing opportunity for companies that want to generate new leads or sales.

Every digital marketer should look at the set of options available regarding the advertising formats that the social media channels offer in order to get the best value out of every advertising dollar spent. In this post, we'll see how advertisers can run successful lead generation or sales campaigns using the right creatives.

Before getting to know the ideal ads format for lead generation or sales have you defined who your customers are? Are you sure to know well their habits, interests, demographics, language, and online behavior? If you haven't done it yet you will have to spend time analysing your customers’ specs in order to craft effectively the audiences you want to target with your ads.

One last thing before we start...What about Facebook Pixel? It's a must to have it installed in order to understand precisely what's going on with your Facebook ads traffic and optimise the campaigns for the best results.

After this initial assessment let's get started discussing the formats!

1 - Do you want more leads?

When you select the "lead generation" objective for your campaign you will be able to use a pre-populated form to collect the information of your potential clients.

This is an advertising format that also Google has launched for its search advertising.

The lead form ad is simple to use, fast, cost-effective and you won't even need to have a dedicated landing page to collect your clients’ information. You can forget about the A/B testing for your pages and focus more on your creatives design.

You will be able to decide which info to collect and work on the appearance of the pre-populated forms fields. In order to increase the filling rate, It's important to collect just the basic info that you need to establish the initial follow-up with your potential clients. Don't tire your prospects with long forms and many questions to answer.

Within the form’s settings, there's also a calendar option that will allow your potential clients to schedule an appointment with you to discuss the products/services you offer.

One of the latest enhancements for these ads is the opportunity to synchronise the leads that you get with your CRM, you can read more about this function here.

Last but not least, don't forget that the right call to action increases the filling rate of your forms!

2 - Do you want to boost your sales?

If you are selling your products online, more specifically, if you are an e-commerce owner choosing "Catalogue Sales" as a campaign objective will give you the opportunity of using Dynamic Product Ads. With this ads format, you will be able to show exactly the products viewed and not purchased by the people who have visited your website. This is an effective way to remarket what you sell and have the opportunity to increase your revenue.

In order to use this format, you will have to set up a product catalog and keep it updated accordingly to the changes in your stock. You will also have to set up custom events for your pixel in order to retarget specifically users who have browsed around your website but not purchased or added something to the cart without purchasing for example.

If you are not a developer you can still set up your custom events fastly and without a code, find here a complete guide on how to do so.

And you know what? This kind of specific remarketing has proven to be highly effective to get more sales for online shops!

3 - How to get the best result out of these formats?

Test and scale are a must, your first choices most of the time are not the winning ones. In order to increase the results coming from your advertising, you will have to try different audiences and different creatives designs, decide which one performs better, and go for it. Refining your initial assumptions is a must if you want to get the best results. This is a general rule of thumb for all online marketing campaigns.

If you want some inspiration on how to craft your creatives you can have a look at the Facebook creative hub. It's a great resource that showcases top-of-the-class designs for Facebook ads.

Another important factor to cover if you want to get the most out of your Facebook Ads is to check the performance of the placement. Not every advertising space on Facebook or Instagram gives the same results. This is why it becomes fundamental to run daily placements reports to review how the different placements are contributing to the final success of your campaign. Depending on the results you will be able to identify and take out the low-performing placements from your campaign.

In addition to these suggestions, taking a look at your competitors to see what their message/value proposition is and if there's anything to learn from them can represent another viable strategy to further improve your advertising performance. The Facebook Ad Library tool is a powerful way to find out what your competitor’s strategy is and take the necessary steps to craft a successful campaign.

Not only that, if you want to know how to leverage AI to stay ahead of your competition in the social media landscape you can have a look at this post.

Final Remarks

These formats represent a great opportunity to increase your sales and boost your online lead generation in the social media network. The more skeptics about the effectiveness of direct response campaigns in Facebook will be proven wrong by lead form and dynamic product ads. Don't forget to test your initial assumptions and readjust your campaign with the data you'll get along the way. If you are still unsure how you can turn Facebook into a profitable lead or revenue engine, let's have a chat! Contact us at Digital Nomads HK!