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Why Facebook Pages are the DUMBEST Strategy for Lead Generation

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Some people ASSUME that, “The best way to do Facebook marketing is through fans and pages.” It’s not.

Fan-oriented marketing was one of the main Facebook marketing strategies for years, but eventually most people realized that fans don’t always respond the way you want, and might not be your best new customer prospects.

The good news is: you don’t have to market to your fans. There’s a better way.

The main problem is organic (non-advertising) visibility. Once you get fans, not enough of them see your posts to make it worthwhile. You have to advertise to your fans to reach them! But who wants to do that?

Should you still have a fan page and fans? Yes! I recommend:

  • Have a fan page because that will allow you to run newsfeed ads.
  • Keep posting and finding out what posts your fans like and don’t like. Monitor your engagement rate and improve it by doing more of what works and less of what doesn’t. You can get your Engagement Rate (the % of fans who both see AND interact with your posts) up to 30% at times if you consistently, diligently, strategically create posts and discover what they like.
  • Run FB ads to your fans, because they still love you and need to see your latest stuff. But this is just one audience you should advertise to.

But don’t rely on unadvertised page posts to get you results you want. You’ll reach 10% or less of your fans that way. Yes, there are some exceptions, especially in pages with less than 20,000 fans… but NO fan pages are reaching over 50% of their fans organically. When you start advertising, you should see a 10x increase in your Facebook post visibility- and often more than that.

But don’t boost posts if you want website traffic or conversions. Boosted posts are mainly shown by FB to people who interact with posts more than they click to websites. They work for post interaction, but that’s about it. If you have goals beyond awareness and engagement, use website conversion ads from the Ad Manager.

The formula for Facebook lead gen success is simple:

  1. Advertise. There’s no way around it.
  2. Advertise to both warm and cold prospects.
    1. Warm prospects are fans, opt-in email lists, people who’ve viewed your videos on Facebook, people who’ve interacted with your posts or ads on Facebook and website visitors (retargeting).
    2. Cold prospects are people who don’t know your brand yet: interest targeting, demographic targeting, behavior targeting, and lookalike audiences.
    3. Typically, retargeting and lookalike audience convert the best.
  3. Make sure your webpages or landing pages convert visitors into leads effectively. They should convert over 10% of your warm prospects and at least 2% of your cold prospects.
  4. Make sure your lead forms, notifications and pipeline into your CRM (if you use one) are working properly.
  5. Put a lot of creative, unique ideas into your ads. Learn what your prospects respond to and don’t. And then for each segment of your prospects (ad sets and targeting in Facebook ads), find out what they respond to that’s unique. Your creative strategy for cold ads probably is going to be different than your warm ads.

Those are the basics! Get to work, or reach out to us for help!

4 Profitable Facebook Posting Tips

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1. Write Posts that are Cheerleads for Your Prospects and Fans’ Values and Goals.

The biggest problem with Facebook posts is reach. You need to get your audience to like them, and that means you need to know what your audience values and what their goals are. If you can create a post that cheerleads for those values and goals, you’ll get likes and that gives you more reach.

2. Advertise to Promote Your Posts to Your Prospects

But we feel that ads are needed to promote posts, because if you only have 1,000 fans and you’re only reaching 50-100 people with each post, that’s not enough. What percentage of those 50-100 will come to your website or contact you or come into your physical store? The number of potential customers drops with every step through the marketing funnel, so out of 50-100 people you may only get 5 clicks to your website. That’s not enough. The average ecommerce website converts 1% of visitors, so you need to be getting 100 people at a time to your site, not 5. That’s why ads are necessary, and fans are an increasingly peripheral consideration. promote your posts with ads that target your potential customers, whether they’re fans or not.

3. Reach New People For Free With Shareable Posts

The way reach new customers for free is to get Facebook shares.
(click to tweet that sentence!)

I studied what kinds of posts get shared and which don’t in Contagious Content (free pdf here).

People share posts that are giving (contests), advising (how-to), amusing, inspiring, amazing, or warning (bad weather coming).

People don’t share posts that focus on your company or its employees, are edgy or offensive (except for rare customer groups that are all about those things), are obscure or niche in interest.

When you find that one of your posts is highly likeable and shareable, advertising it will get you a ton more interaction and visibility for a low cost. Our best post ever got us 80,000 likes and 35,000 shares and was seen by 424,000 people for less than a $200 ad spend.

4. Drive People to Your Website

Any post without a link to your website is a wasted opportunity.
(click to tweet that!)

Keeping people on Facebook won’t necessarily help you get sales.

For B2B, blog on topics that help move your prospects toward the decision to buy from you, then post that on Facebook with a link to the post. Then promote that post with ads targeted to your prospects.