What’s the real deal with generating SEO leads with Facebook?
We have all heard how influencers just rave about Facebook’s ability to magnetize, seemingly overnight, a huge amount of B2B (including, but not limited to, SEO) leads.
But just how easy or challenging is this process in reality?
We at Rankleads have broken down the actual processes that you need to perform in order to actually generate any kind of SEO lead from this social network.
First: The Budget
How much are you willing to spend advertising on Facebook? Each campaign is going to cost you a pretty penny, and if you have never done it before, well, like other advertising platforms, things can get out of hand pretty quickly, unless you have mastered the intricacies of the platform for years.
According to current stats, B2B marketers spend over half of their total budgets for just generating leads. That is a huge chunk of the total budget, and we know that there are other costs involved.
But still, we press on. Why? Because there are 1.52 billion users on Facebook, and somewhere in this staggering amount of accounts are goldmines of leads. But you have to spend to find them first.
Second: The Page
The basic space for your business would be the Facebook Page. When you get a Facebook Page for the first time, it is completely blank, there is no content, no followers, nothing. You will have to populate it, painstakingly, every single day, until you get people interested in what you have to say.
And the SEO market isn’t as large as say, the market for cat memes. You get the picture, right? While the technology is definitely awesome, and there is so much potential on Facebook, the fact of the matter is that getting five people to like your page on the first day is already a huge achievement. But then there is targeting, and actually finding people who might become your actual SEO leads.
When you have set up your Facebook Page, the next step would be to create the Facebook Group.
Facebook Groups are all about interaction. People can post stuff there like their own timelines, and Facebook now has a neat feature where the members of a Facebook Group can be instantly consolidated into a Group Chat, so people can speak to one another via Messenger.
But then again – the Facebook Group has to be populated with genuine people who are interested in what you have to say, and in the beginning the process is going to be painstakingly slow, too. Facebook marketing in this regard is not for the faint of heart.
Third: Facebook Pixel
Facebook Pixel is in charge of analyzing customer behavior on your website. Pixel also allows you to reach customers who have been to your website via Facebook Ads, so you can reach out to them again through ads.
The effectiveness of this analytics tool will depend on your desire and willingness to slog through analytics data and make sense of how people are responding and acting upon the content that you have on your website.
It is not a magic bullet, it doesn’t offer instant solutions to anything. It is just what it is: a tool, and it will be up to the user to utilize the data to benefit his campaigns. Nobody said that getting SEO leads through Facebook was going to be a walk in the park, and we’d be dodging the truth if we said that it was.
Fourth: Tap Facebook Lead Ads
Fortunately, there are Facebook lead ads. Facebook lead ads are fundamentally different from your usual, run the mill Facebook ad because these ads allow you to collect vital data like names, emails, phone numbers, etc.) The data collected by lead ads can then be downloaded and fed to a CRM software like MailChimp.
The challenging part is getting people to sign up and actually provide viable information that you can use for your funnel. Is it a hit and miss proposition?
Sometimes it can be that way, especially if your targeting is not specific enough and if your offer in the ad is not clear enough so you can veer clear of false-positives.
Fifth: Take Them Home
By “home” we refer specifically to the most important page on your website – the landing page.
A website can have multiple landing pages, and we highly recommend that you perform split testing so you can check which landing pages work the best. Betting all your money on a single landing page that “looks cool” can also mean that you are going to waste all your Facebook budget and not get anything done.
A landing page geared toward getting SEO leads usually offers a free download like a white paper or eBook and in exchange, the user must provide his name, phone number, email, etc. Take note that the simper the landing page, the better off you will be.
Emailing the download link to your SEO lead is better because then they’d have to provide a valid email before they can get the free material. This is a better approach than to just apply a gateway and a download link from the landing page itself, because you don’t know if the emails you are getting are really valid or not.
Sixth: Keep Those Viral Posts Coming
On social media, “going viral” means a single post (or more) are getting a huge amount of attention and coverage via word of mouth (or more specifically, through likes, shares, and tags).
The challenge is to actually create a post that has viral qualities. There is no single formula for this and user behavior on Facebook has been changing alongside the platform’s evolution these past few years.
For example, before, memes can easily go viral due to the influence of imageboards like 4chan or 9gag. But now, people are more focused on sharing quality video content that they can relate to.
