Are you getting quality leads from your digital advertising?

Businesses across Bangladesh are very well skilled at generating leads traditionally. But in the pandemic era, the importance of creating a digital presence for all businesses has become a top priority. As such, knowing how to generate quality leads digitally is becoming just as crucial.  

As performance objectives redefine digital media plans and investments, it becomes critical to connect with your most relevant audiences effectively.

But, with incorrect objectives and metrics, campaigns can under-deliver, leading to wasted budgets and opportunities. This can be further compounded by the business's need to run multiple campaigns with different objectives and restricted audience size. 

In some cases, businesses also tend to apply all marketing tools to yield results based on hearsay. Naturally, a campaign run by Business X will not bear a similar result for Business Y because they are different businesses and have different audiences and, importantly, other objectives to meet.  

When users interact with content on Facebook, they generate data in their responses and actions. These data points can be utilised by businesses to refine their campaign setup and objectives further. And given how many of the population in Bangladesh are active on Facebook, it makes sense to run these campaigns to generate leads.

Today, the explosion of data that is now available to businesses is simply unheard of before. But more often than not, these data points are not being used efficiently. As a result, businesses are falling behind their competitors who have been more precise in the way they used their data.  

So what is the solution to ensure that a campaign being run will generate the proper amount of leads with the best returns? For starters, the business brief has to be clear, with specific objectives being outlined and addressed. 

Secondly, using the right tools and the right platforms to run these campaigns is just as crucial. Through its family of apps, Facebook connects you with people, users, or potential customers who want to know more about your business. By using ad generation ads make it easier to build a connection between potential customers and your business.

Facebook's lead generation objective helps your ads find the people who are most likely to take actions that are unique to your business goals; i.e., sign up for more information, request a quest, or download an app.

These are the benefits of using the lead generation objective for your campaigns:

-    You can include contact forms in the ad.

-    You can choose which questions to ask in the form.

-    You can easily download your leads and also integrate them with your business's CRM systems.

There are users on Facebook who are similar to your best customers. Reach out to them through the lookalike audience feature. Put merely audiences enable you to enlarge your prospecting horizon with a relevant set of audiences.

Businesses can also automate their lead generation ads to align with their audiences' interests. With Facebook's Dynamic Ads, your business's most relevant products or offerings can be shown to them based on your audiences' interests. Dynamic ads enable businesses to:

-    Show the right product.

-    Scale ad creation.

-    Find higher quality leads.

-    Encourage potential customers to take action.

Illustration: TBS

Business' lead generation strategies can be further refined by smarter measurement. Measurement enables brands and businesses to unlock the potential to optimise their ads and understand their audiences.  If you have ads running on Facebook, you can access Facebook's measurement tools via the Ads Manager. Businesses can monitor not only campaign performance but also view performance broken down with demographics. 

Generate and Monitor reports that are most important for your business, again, via the ads manager.

Get a bird's-eye view of the ad account or take a closer look at a single ad's real-time analytics. Determine performance metrics most relevant to the business you care most about and save these as preset filters for quicker analytics.

Compare results to find the most successful placements. To create the best advertising strategy, businesses need to know where their ads perform best, and which audiences are most engaged. With Facebook measurement tools, cross-platform and cross-device performance can be reviewed for real-time adjustments and marketing optimisation.

How can you further improve business outcomes through better lead generation practices?

By combining Facebook activity and data through machine learning, Facebook can predict who the right people are for your products and services.

This is no magic wand, but a process to ensure that every Taka is allowed to flow along the most efficient route to fulfil your business objectives.

These are the 5 key levers that can aid in driving success for your lead gen and business conversion campaigns:

1) Your Audience: Target expressively rather than exclusively. In the short term, a sharp, targeted audience can deliver results, but; it builds constraints over time by reducing the available audience.  But by targeting a relevant yet broader audience, it can provide positive results over time.

2) Budget Optimisation: By allocating your budget at a campaign level, the machine learning system works to optimise your budget effectively across your campaigns. This will enable you to make smarter spend decisions in real-time. By using campaign budget optimisation,

-    you save time otherwise spent manually optimising budgets,

-    improve delivery through efficient budget management of ad sets

-    spend efficiently by allowing budgets to move via the most active routes

3) Placements: Facebook provides businesses with opportunities to connect with their potential customers across its family of apps. Importantly, every placement is a means to connect with a potential customer. While businesses can decide and manually select placements where they would like their ads to appear, automatic placements provide optimum effectiveness. With automatic placements.:

-    Targeting is optimised with the right ad reaching the right person.

-    Time Is saved from building out multiple ad sets for every placement

-    Lowest cost per outcome is delivered as the platform optimises across all placements.

4) Simplify your campaign account: Not an easy task, as businesses use different ad accounts and campaigns to organise different marketing strategies, i.e., Facebook vs. Instagram or prospecting vs. retargeting. This leads to an exclusive narrow audience target, which denies businesses the ability to reach larger and relevant audiences in the long term.    

  5) Intent Signals: When users interact with content, they generate data in the form of actions they commit. It can be further combined with your customer information to create signals. These signals can be used to identify positive patterns over time. This means you can deliver more:

- automated ads

- personalisation at scale

- insights into your customers' journey.

How do you reach the right person at the right time? 

How we conduct businesses has seen multiple changes over the past decade. But with the ongoing pandemic, we all have had to adjust our ways some way or another. For the businesses in Bangladesh, it is vital that they also adapt to the changing times. Generating quality business leads online is just the tip of that changing iceberg.

Rohan Noronha is Facebook Partner Director at Httpool Bangladesh

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and views of The Business Standard.