A beginner's guide to Facebook & LinkedIn lead generation campaigns

If you want to understand your customers through relevant information that can be used for targeting and retargeting, social media lead generation campaigns can be the answer. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to set lead-gen campaigns on Facebook and LinkedIn.

Lead generation campaigns allow advertisers to not just gather information about their target customers but also help develop an interest in relevant services and products to the users. A social media lead generation campaign is simply collecting potential contacts/customers through the channels. From raising awareness about your brand to connecting with potential customers, such campaigns are useful for marketers looking at achieving objectives such as customer acquisition, customer retention, and completing the purchase cycle.

To do so, you have to just fill the context card or the contact form and execute the campaign in a step-by-step manner on your brand/business page. Further, the platforms even help advertisers to create retarget campaigns through lookalike and custom audiences as they intend to nurture the leads. 

Here’s a step-by-step guide for executing Lead generation campaigns across Facebook and LinkedIn, especially for beginners who intend to make a mark in advertising and learn more about the platforms.

Facebook Lead Generation Campaign

There are two ways to set up a Facebook Lead Gen campaign - either by directly accessing the business suite on your product/service page or accessing the Facebook ads manager and promoting the campaign.

As the first step, access the business suite followed by choosing a goal. Select 'Get More Leads' for the campaign to be redirected to campaign initiation.

The next step is to create your contact form. In this form, ensure to craft a unique form name associated with the brand. To gather the required information, you can select specifics under Customer information. You can even add short answer questions to the card, depending on the requirements.

Post this step, you will be redirected to the ad creative dialog box. Ensure to add an engaging brand image/creative with a relevant CTA. You will also be given an option of description, headline, and CTA button depending on the objective. In this step, describe your product/service offering.

After this, you are taken to a very important step, that is, to create the right audience for the desired ad set. In this, you need to enter the name of the audience, target audience's age, gender, location - detailed targeting. Under this, you also have the option of detailed targeting options which include behavior, interests, and many other options. As advertisers, you can even narrow your targeting as per the requirement. Use a combination of these options for the best results.

The next step is allocating a budget for the ad. Here, you can set a daily or a budget for the period for your campaign.

Facebook ads also allow the users to decide the placement of the ads which ranges from Automatic placements, Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, etc.

After you are done with all the above steps, click on promote and your ad is ready to run for the given duration of time.

Alternatively, you can also access Facebook ads manager, which is the usual path followed by the marketers for a detailed process. To do this, select the Facebook ads manager option and click on 'create campaign' where Facebook takes you through a step-by-step process of creating a campaign, ad sets, and ads for each of the sets.

After selecting the objective as lead generation and naming the campaign, you would be redirected to the ad set option. Ad set comprises the group of ad creatives as per the target audience combinations.

After naming your ad set, you will be taken through the same process of creating instant forms. 

Here, you get an array of options to create context cards for collecting leads. As the first step, mention the name of the form followed by selecting a relevant image for the background. This is followed by Headline or description in a paragraph or the form of a list. You can even ask a custom question as in the previous method. The instant form also asks you whether it needs to be High Intent or High volume lead generation form.

Make sure to create a completion card or the 'thank you' card which appears when your customer is done filling the lead form.

As soon as you select the desired Facebook page for the ads, you can scroll down to Budget and schedule. This has two options daily budget and a lifetime budget with a start and end date. Post this, add the privacy policy link of your website. With the message for the leads and a suited CTA button, you are done creating your instant form for collecting lead information.

Moving on to the next step, you can now create a combination of target audiences and run ads for a particular ad set. The options available include location, age, gender, detailed targeting, and narrow targeting options.

Post the selection of the target audience, you can set the placement with automatic and manual placement options.

Also read: How to set up Facebook & Instagram Shops

Instagram Ads from Facebook Backend

At the ad creative level, you need to put a relevant advert image with Primary text and headline. This is also the step where you can select Instagram to run the same ads on the platform if you have your brand Facebook and Instagram page connected

Facebook ad creatives provide the option of Single and carousel ads.

Once you select an adequate CTA, fill in the optional display link, and opt for the required lead form, you can review and publish your ads.

LinkedIn Lead Generation Campaigns

Much like Facebook, LinkedIn can also be leveraged to execute Lead generation campaigns.

For this, you need to again have a business page on LinkedIn. To set up the campaign, select advertise and you shall be redirected to the LinkedIn dashboard. As the first step create campaign groups. After the campaign group is created, you need to set up a campaign through a step-by-step process, starting from objective selection, audience, ad format, placement, budget, and schedule to conversion tracking.

As soon as you select your objective as generating leads, you are allowed to make the audience selection. LinkedIn provides detailed targeting - from various registered companies to even designation-wise targeting.

After selecting the relevant target audience for the campaign group, you reach the ad creative step as the platform presents you with an array of Ad format options such as Single Image Ads, Carousel Ads, and Video ads, amongst others.

Once you select the ad format type and the ad placement, you are taken to the penultimate step of Budgeting and Schedule. In this step, you can select your daily or lifetime budget as allocated for the campaign.

Additionally, the platform provides you with the last step (optional) for conversion tracking with a suitable CTA. Once you are done selecting the relevant ad creatives for the campaign, you can review and launch the campaign.

Best Practices

Overall, the above steps can be used to create and execute lead generation campaigns across Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. The platforms can also be leveraged to gather information through a mix of targeting options and the leads, thus, obtained can be nurtured. Further, summarizing some of the best marketing practices for lead generation campaigns that might be of help:

• Define your audience - knowing your target audiences is one of the first steps towards a successful lead generation campaign
• Be clear about your budget and leverage ad scheduling in the campaign budget optimization options across the platforms
• Use dynamic content - As per reports, engagement is higher on video content across social channels
• Include an interesting image (ad creative) with relevant call-to-action on the ad.
• Enhance reach through placement options on Facebook
• Leverage look-alike and custom audience options across the platforms- You can re-target customers across Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn who might have been previously interested or engaged with your ads.
• Utilize the context/Instant form judiciously- keep it simple, don’t increase the user’s manual efforts by including only the relevant details in the form, and make sure to include the thank you page for the customers. This is the page people see after completing the form

In case of any further queries around social media lead generation campaigns across Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, you can write to us on content@socialsamosa.com.