Using Facebook Lead Ads to Grow Your Subscriber List: A How-To

The entrepreneurial life is hard. Websites crash for no reason – or at least, for reasons that are really annoying to deal with. Clients and customers poof into the ether with no explanation, leaving a hole in your formerly bustling calendar. Funding dries up unexpectedly. The hustle goes all night. Meetings, whether with a single business partner in your garage or with a full-on board, drone on… and on… and on.

So, yeah. There’s really no time to mess around. Unfortunately, a good deal of proposed social media marketing strategies appear to be just that: yet another way to mess around online without really accomplishing anything. If you’re a member of the large and growing collective we might term “Those Who Have Experimented With Social Media and Failed Oh-So-Hard,” then we feel you. Posting on Twitter, using Facebook ads, growing that subscriber list… it can all feel impossible sometimes.

It’s not your fault. The truth is that social media marketing isn’t intuitive. But that doesn’t mean it’s not possible, which is the common misconception we’re here to address today. It’s time to quit fighting and start winning, and that starts with understanding one of the basics of social media marketing: using Facebook lead ads to grow your subscriber list.

What Are Facebook Lead Ads?

Facebook lead ads are one of the most useful tools online for growing your business. Essentially, lead ads were created to overcome the roadblock that online forms represent. People love to get content, but they balk at filling out form fields. We humans are just averse to spending time on something perceived as another chore, plus there’s a psychological hesitance in offering email addresses these days. Lead ads remove the obstacles by pre-populating the forms for visitors.

Here’s how it works: A visitor is in the Facebook mobile app. They see an ad they like, offering a freebie or newsletter offer or whatever the incentive is. They click on the ad. Instead of sending them to an external link to fill out a form and learn more/get the download/sign up (which will turn off a high percentage of people), Facebook pulls up a native form.

Most magical of all: The name and email fields of the form are already filled out, sourced from the information the prospect gave Facebook when they signed up. Now all the user has to do is click “Submit.” Only then do they leave Facebook, directed to the site or page where they can access their free download or other promised incentive.

Voilà: roadblocks and emotional aversion removed. That, combined with additional potential form fields and the ability to reach a wide variety of audience types, makes them an extremely versatile and lucrative tool.

How to Create Facebook Ads Effectively

This form of social media marketing is extremely effective, but only if you do it correctly. For one thing, you have to keep in mind that because lead ads are all internal – they don’t leave Facebook – you won’t have a chance to introduce people to a long-form sales page. Without site content on which to rely, you’ve really got to sell the ad. That means taking a number of steps:

1. Use the Power Editor, which increases your text allotment (lets you include more information) and offers vast potential for targeting audiences.
2. Target your form fields correctly so that you get the right information upfront (since it’s not easy to collect additional information from leads once they fill out the form).
3. Create vibrant artwork that catches the eye and sells your offer.
4. Define your audience ahead of time so that you’re targeting the people most likely to sign up for your offer.
5. Choose a reasonable bid and budget to ensure that you’re not overspending, and spend cautiously until you find an approach that works.

How to Manage Facebook Leads Once Collected

Many people consider this the end of the social media marketing lesson. If I get some leads, they assume, then I’m all set. I can just start emailing, right? Bada bing, bada boom!

Slow down, Tony Soprano. As many entrepreneurs and companies have found to their extreme disappointment, getting a lead does not mean converting a lead to a product or service sale. When the prospect signs up for the incentive via your Facebook lead ad, you deserve to take a moment to celebrate. But by treating this as the biggest hurdle in social media marketing, you deprive yourself of the most-effective results.

It’s important to note that leads are not homogenous. Your signups, once they enter your funnel, have exactly one thing in common: They signed up for your list. Aside from a general interest in your field and a desire to possess your incentive, they’re all different from one another. Now your job is to find out more about them. That means:

• Split testing the emails you send from now on.
• Using email flows to separate segments of your audience and drive them toward content that fits them best.
• Constantly updating your lead ads, also via split testing, to generate better results.
• Getting the help you need to accelerate Facebook lead ads, stretching your budget and ensuring that they don’t become Yet Another Failed Experiment.

This last point is perhaps the most important, especially at first.

We Can Help: Learn About Pirate Labs

If you’re looking for marketing help, we have your back. Pirate Labs, a marketing agency in Atlanta, GA, is here to help you develop a Facebook marketing plan that works, kick butt at contacting your subscriber list, and finally, finally see the results for which you’ve been searching. Quit sweating through late nights and online tutorials that never seem to work; start winning with the help of an experienced marketing team and intelligent strategies that yield results faster than you thought possible. Start now – give us a shout.