Let’s face it – nowadays, small business owners find it hard to generate leads online. This is mostly due to the large businesses that established authority and have built credibility over time. However, generating leads for small businesses is not impossible. Actually, it is very possible – the only thing is, you need to find the right way and channel to promote your business in order to get leads.
Facebook is the pioneer of social media. It is the website with the largest user base. What started as something basic has transformed into a base with billions of people and it literally has endless potential for business owners to use its social platform to promote their product or services.
If you are wondering why Facebook ads are great for generating leads for small businesses instead of Adwords or similar platforms, keep on reading this well researched article.
Most of the business owners prefer Google Adwords to promote their business to get some leads but the fact is, Google can display only 7 “Paid” links on the first page search result but dozens of business owners use to target same keywords for their service and ultimately it ends with endless price war. I know some business owners who are bidding as high as $60 (for insurance, healthcare, transplantation etc related keywords) for 1 click and I always feel that they are just wasting their time and money with Adwords because paying $60 for 1 click is simply the craziest thing that anyone can even do and small business owners can’t survive in such situation.
Here, the power of lead generation through Facebook ads for small businesses – is according to us, even more powerful. Most of the people search for information on Google – and also use Facebook socially. These are two well-known facts. So, how could Facebook possibly outweigh Google when it comes to lead generation?
The truth is, on Google – people search for phrases and keywords. These keywords are exactly the ones targeted by the business owners. In other words, if you want to advertise on Adwords, you will find keywords and pay for your website to be on top when they are searched.
Facebook, on the other hand, uses the interests and demographics to tailor every advertisement to the person looking for it. You can use their “Audience Insight” feature to build your audience and get an idea about potential reach, audience behavior etc and then you can design your campaign based on that data. You can even track your website visitors and their behavior with Facebook pixel code. This will help you to run Re-Targeting campaign within your website visitors on Facebook. They have visited to your website that means they are interested in your product/services but somehow they didn’t contact you. Now, you can track them using Facebook pixel code and deliver your ads whenever they will login to their Facebook account. This makes Facebook more powerful than Google Adwords.
Also, you can use up to 5 images on Facebook to display your range of product or services within your targeted audience and you can write 2-3 lines about your business. This gives fair idea about your product/services to your potential customer on their newsfeed only. On the other hand, we have limited option available on Adwords in terms of no. of words/characters. Adwords allows 25 characters in ad title, 70 characters in ad description and 35 characters in display URL so overall you have only 95 to 100 characters to convince your customers and I personally believe that Google should reconsider this.
The campaigns on Facebook are simply put – easier to track. They work with an immediate influx of traffic and let you have complete control over your daily budget and maximum CPC. Not to mention that they are more affordable and have an instant return on investment through website clicks, sales, Facebook likes and eventually messages. You can also define a cost per conversion and understand what your profit is.
Facebook also comes with more targeting features. You can craft a message to reach an audience in a specific region, town, neighborhood or even friends of your page followers – which is definitely better for small business owners that want to influence a certain region. Additionally, you can create a message and send it to user based on their age, likes and interests – as well as a certain income bracket and other demographics.
Recently Facebook has launched another campaign type called “Lead Campaign”. It allows you to collect leads on their own platform only. No need to send someone to your website. Advertiser setup a form and link that with an ad copies and starts the campaign after audience targeting. Lead form automatically pop out when someone clicks on the ad copies. A customer just need to fill the form and business owner can easily download the data from “Publishing Tool” section of Facebook page. It has made things much simple.
In the end, we personally believe that Facebook advertising comes with a greater bang for the buck – with a CPC that is relatively cheap depending on the certain market and industry. You can easily generate dozens of leads everyday but you will have to work on audience targeting because this is something that actually makes a difference. Read our old blog post “Why Small Business Owners Should Hire an Agency for PPC Services” where we have described about the way we optimized a Facebook campaign to get better ROI.
Running an Adwords/ Facebook ads or any other PPC campaign but not getting desired result? We can do a free campaign analysis. Just provide your details here and we will contact you at our earliest.
