Here’s How to Use Facebook Advertising to Reach and Engage Prospects

Whether you’re making new leads or trying to nurture existing ones, Facebook advertising provides a gold mine of attention-grabbing reach.

Facebook’s powerful advertising tools have advanced targeting and audience-finding features. These help you pinpoint action-prone audiences matching your most valuable demographics. You can also use Facebook to reach out to prospects you’ve discovered on other channels.

 

Between discovering new prospects and engaging with existing ones, Facebook gives you plenty of advantages for nurturing leads.

To help you make the most of their tools, here are some options you have and some best practices to follow that will maximize your chances of success.

Connect Every Post to Part of Your Multi-Channel Marketing Funnel

Facebook posts can fuel engagement, but that’s not an end unto itself. To get a prospect to do something that generates you money, you likely have to take them away from Facebook somehow, unless you are an ecommerce business with products you can sell via a shopping tab.

This fact means that each ad or promoted post must contain a call-to-action that brings people to your website. Ideally, the prospect will land on a product listing page or a landing page explaining a compelling offer.

For longer buy cycles, the prospect will be directed towards a contact list signup or an offer for premium content. When directing prospects to content, it should end with a strong call to action to engage in the next step of the sales cycle.

Either way, clicking on your Facebook ad should be the first step in a longer journey. Well-built landing pages are the glue that holds every step together. If you don’t tell your prospect where they’re going next (and why they should go there), then all the “likes” and comments in the world won’t bring you any revenue.

Put simply: make sure your Facebook ads lead to a meaningful conversion action to increase their ROI.

Use Targeting to Find Relevant, High-Value Audiences

Facebook has the deepest information out there about users and their interests. Use this information to your advantage when creating ads and setting their targets.

Options for custom audiences include:

• Education level
• Financial situation
• Home ownership and family status
• Work details, including specific occupations or companies
• Age range/Generational group
• Gender

You can also filter by “interests” to select audiences with a high level of engagement in particular fields. For instance, if your brand happens to have a strong green component, you can add filters for “environmentalism” and “sustainability.”

Try using a broad demographic at first while experimenting with smaller, more-specific demographics in limited A/B tests. Gradually, you can find the best mixture of messaging and targeting to lower your costs per acquisition (CPA) overall.

Build Off Your Existing Customer Base

Import your existing marketing lists and CRM information to Facebook as custom audiences for your ads, and you can grow your audience to other like-minded prospects. Even your LinkedIn Connections can be imported, helping you reach business-minded audiences on a more entertainment-focused platform.

Similarly, Facebook can expand reach to people “connected to” your page, meaning friends of people who “like” the page.

Facebook also uses a form of ad retargeting when you add a pixel code to particular product listings or informational page.

These features help you get in touch with your existing audiences while finding others who share their interests.

Make Sure Your Facebook Ads Can Grab Attention

Every Facebook ad should have a few key components:

• Strong, eye-catching visuals for the banner image
• Concise yet compelling copy that speaks directly to your audience while encouraging action
• Some form of request for engagement, like an open-ended question
• An appropriate call-to-action telling them what the next step is and why they should take it

For an excellent guide, Hubspot breaks down all of these elements in a clearcut way.

Facebook Advertising Puts You in Front of Huge Audiences, You Just Have to Tell Them What to Do Next

Thanks to Facebook advertising’s versatile and extensive feature set, you can find the audiences you need to fuel your lead generation goals. If you can follow best practices for ad formats and sales pipelines, you have just built a prospecting machine.

Want to learn more tactics that help your business succeed? Sign up for courses that can tell you the specific steps you need to take to gain more customers. By mastering digital marketing on Facebook and elsewhere, you can watch your business grow by leaps and bounds.

Want help making the most out of every social media impression? Take a look at Optimized Scribes’ social media marketing services today.

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