It’s no secret that the cost of Facebook ads is rising. While it used to be possible to generate clicks for as little as a few cents, businesses are now paying dollars—yes, plural—to have a single user click on their ads.
As a result, the cost of B2B lead generation has risen, as has the cost per acquisition (CPA).
Businesses are caught between a rock and a hard place. Do they simply pay more for leads, or do they abandon PPC entirely in favor of more organic methods?
Fortunately, there is a third option. Rather than abandoning PPC and Facebook ads entirely, begin optimizing for maximum ROI. In other words, rather than spending more, spend wisely.
How exactly do you spend more wisely? Here are five ways to start spending wisely and lowering your Facebook ad cost per lead.
Discover your top-performing demographics for Facebook ads
If you’ve run a few Facebook campaigns, you’ll have access to a wealth of data that can help you significantly reduce your ad costs. You can, for example, learn which demographics your ads perform best with and then focus your efforts on that specific audience.
Go to the Ads Manager section of your page and click on “View Charts” to see how your ads performed across various demographics.
From there, you can see how your ad performed by gender and across various age groups.
Once you’ve determined which demographics performed best, you can limit your audience to only those demographics. This prevents you from wasting money on people who have already demonstrated a lack of interest in your offer.
One quick aside: When analyzing how your ad performed across demographics, always ask yourself the critical “why?” question. In other words, why did your advertisement perform well with one group but not well with another? The answer to this question can help you fine-tune your ads so that they are more appealing to your target audience.
Assume you’re a SaaS company looking to increase your user base. When you examine the results of your Facebook ad, you will notice that it performed poorly with men over the age of 55.
By asking why you can delve deeper into the issue. It’s possible that your ad creative was more appealing to a younger demographic, or that men over the age of 55 are simply uninterested in incorporating new technology into their lives. With this information, you can stop advertising to that specific demographic and instead focus on those who are most likely to buy your product. This will allow you to reduce your Facebook costs by focusing your budget on your best-performing demographics while discarding the average and below-average ones.
Simplify your landing page’s design
Few things are more detrimental to lead generation than an overly complicated landing page. In general, the simpler and clearer your landing page, the higher your conversion rate. The more cluttered and complex it is, the fewer people will choose to participate.
So, how do you make a straightforward, yet highly effective landing page? Here are some suggestions:
Make sure your landing page only has one goal in mind: lead generation. Every item on the page should help to achieve that goal. If you try to accomplish more than one thing on a landing page, your conversion rate will plummet.
Only request the information that is absolutely necessary. If all you need is their email address, don’t bother asking for their first name. If you only need their phone number and not their address, simply ask for the phone number. The more fields on a landing page you include, the more cognitive friction you create and the lower your conversion rate.
On the page, only one call to action should be present. If you want visitors to enter their email addresses in exchange for a free report, just ask for it. Don’t try to persuade them to click on a link.
Simplify your copywriting. Make use of headers, bullet points, and plenty of white space. In general, your copy should be easily skimmable and free of large blocks of text.
All important information should be displayed above the fold. Because the visitor may not scroll down to see important information at the bottom of the page, prioritize content at the top.
Always keep your visitors’ attention on the prize: lead generation, when designing your landing pages. Remove anything that is incompatible with that goal. You will be able to generate more leads with the same traffic if you create more focused landing pages, effectively lowering your cost per lead.
Create Facebook lookalike audiences based on your most active customers.
You don’t want your ad to be seen by everyone on Facebook. To be honest, there are a lot of people who aren’t interested in your offer, and showing ads to them is a waste of money. Your goal is to be in front of an audience that is genuinely interested in what you have to offer.
How can you ensure that it is seen by such a large number of people?
For targeting people within a campaign, Facebook offers two options:
Lookalike Targeting
Wannabee Targeting in Targeting Audiences
When you enter information about your audience, such as their interests, demographics, and so on, this is referred to as detailed targeting.
If you’re a well-established company, lookalike audience targeting will yield the best results 99 percent of the time. Lookalike targeting is a powerful proprietary technology developed by Facebook that can generate a large audience based on the characteristics of your best customers.
In other words, if you provide Facebook with a list of your most engaged customers, they will be able to use that information to create a much larger audience of people who are similar to those customers.
Let us talk about power.
To create an effective lookalike audience, you must first compile a list of your best customers/users for your lookalike “seed” audience. This is the foundation upon which Facebook’s much larger audience is built. It will ensure that your resulting lookalike audience is of the highest possible quality.
The simplest way to do this is to take your existing email list, segment out the most engaged readers, and then create a custom audience from that list. Ideally, your segmented list should be between 1,000-4,000 people.
From there, you’re going to upload your segmented email list to Facebook.
Facebook can then use your uploaded list to create a much bigger audience that shares the characteristics of your email list.
Facebook’s algorithm works by finding people that it believes will be most likely to take your desired action. By creating lookalike audiences based on your best users, clients, and/or customers, Facebook will have a better idea of who to target and will reward you with lower costs.
Try Facebook lead ads
Facebook lead ads make it extremely simple to collect people’s contact information. Unlike a standard ad, which sends a user to a landing page after they click on it, lead ads keep the user within Facebook and automatically populate the fields with information from the user’s Facebook account.
Because it makes it so much easier for users to enter information, it tends to increase overall conversion rates and lower cost per lead.
Cheaper leads, on the other hand, aren’t always better leads. Because Facebook lead ads are easier to complete than traditional landing pages, the lead quality is lower.
Because of this, I recommend experimenting with lead ads. You may discover that the quantity of leads you generate is sufficient to compensate for the lower quality of the leads. Alternatively, once you’ve seen the quality, you may decide that a good old-fashioned landing page is the way to go. In either case, Facebook lead ads can help you save money by lowering the amount of “friction” users must endure in order to join your email list.
Experiment with chatbot campaigns on Facebook Messenger.
With approximately 1.3 billion users, Facebook Messenger has enormous lead generation potential. And, with many companies now making it incredibly simple to create Facebook Messenger bots, Messenger can be a powerful lead generation tool.
Messenger Ads appear on Facebook with a “Send Message” call to action button. When someone clicks this, a chat window with your company’s Facebook page will open. From here, you can either respond to people’s messages manually or use a service like Mobile Monkey or ManyChat to send them to content automatically, similar to an email autoresponder.
Chatbots are definitely on the rise—and with good reason. Similar to Facebook lead ads, you are likely to see lower costs as a result of the simpler subscription process, as opposed to having to go to an external landing page and sign up.
However, as with any new technology, it is necessary to be skeptical. While Messenger has a higher open rate, it may not generate as many high-quality leads and conversions as email. Try your hand at Facebook Messenger ads and see what kind of results you get!
Reduce the cost of your Facebook ads per lead
According to a general marketing principle, the person who can spend the most money to acquire new customers always wins. While there is some truth to the statement, there are also ways to beat the guy who spends the most money.
You can squeeze more revenue out of your existing ad spend by focusing on your top-performing demographics, simplifying your landing page, creating lookalike audiences from your best customers, using Facebook Lead Ads, and deploying Messenger campaigns.
So, what are you holding out for? Get out there and start attracting those leads.
