Generating Leads – FB Ads Strategy

by Gaby | Sep 17, 2020 | Course, Leads

Lead generation is not a new concept, and you may already know that it is essential for measuring the success of a business. Generating customers who can turn into prospects is a way of making money for your organization. What are the right strategies to attract those leads?

First, let us know what a lead is? Leads are customers who have shown a desire in your service or product. There are many different ways through which leads can come. Here we will focus on one of those leads generation channels.

With the emergence of social media channels, it has become easier for companies to carry on their marketing strategies that help in generating leads. One such social media channel is Facebook, where you can run many different strategies to generate new leads for your business.

How Do You Attract Leads through Facebook Advertising Strategies?

If your company is looking to generate leads, then there are chances that you have received high quotations for getting qualified leads. Did you know that Facebook Ads is a very successful way of lead generation with minimal cost?

(Source : Google Images)

The main aim of Facebook Ads is to ensure that people who come to your website spend a minimum amount of time there. You will need attractive strategies to grab their attention and make sure that they convert to potential customers.

Did you know that only 1% of the people who come to your website do convert? The rest 99% either do not view your ads or don’t like it, leaving your website for another. Hence, it is quite clear that attracting leads is not an easy feat and needs careful consideration and planning.

Even if your organization has no budget, you can simply start with strategies for remarketing ads on your website. You need not invest immediately on any aggressive strategies and can easily save them for a later stage.

In this module, we will learn about the different Facebook Ads strategies that you can adopt for your organization. Understanding these strategies is the most important step in building a well-thought marketing plan for lead generation.

Understanding the Advertising Funnel Model

You may have heard about the Advertising Funnel Model that is used by companies as an essential marketing strategy. But if this is your first time hearing about it, then let’s first understand what the marketing funnel is all about.

The marketing funnel has typically three layers. The top-most layer is attention, the second layer is Discover, and the last layer is Consider. So let’s study in detail about the three layers of the marketing funnel.

Attention

The first thing to learn when you are using the marketing funnel for forming strategies is that it works well on warm audiences. Warm audiences are the ones who have an idea about your website and have visited it. They are either engaged with your website or have knowledge about the same.

In case you do not have warm audiences, you need to start turning cold audiences into warm ones. Without a group of warm audience, you will not be able to successfully use the marketing funnel to remarket ads.

The top-most layer of the marketing funnel, which is attention, is used to provide education to your audience about the existence of your agency. The audience is drawn towards your agency through the use of commercial videos.

In this stage, you should not try to convert the leads, but instead, give them information about your agency. Form videos that provide knowledge about your staff, teams, process, and even testimonials from your clients.

Always remember that trying to convert the audience into leads in this stage will not be successful most of the time. This is because the majority of the audience in this stage is just getting to know about your agency. They may have visited your website for the first time. These audiences will need time to trust your agency so that they can convert into potential customers.

Discover

Once you have successfully garnered the interest of the audience, you can move on to the second layer of the funnel, which is discover. In this layer, you take the help of strategies that will push the audience to become potential customers.

Here you use macro as well as micro-conversion techniques on the audience. Macro conversions are those which will ultimately result in a purchase. These are strategies that your agency would adopt to ensure that the audience comes to your website and ends up buying your product or service.

On the other hand, micro conversions are small steps that you will have to take to reach the macro conversions. You slowly lead the audience towards their purchase decisions with the help of successful micro conversions. Micro conversions can include webinars, newsletters, emails, etc.

Consider

The last and final stage of the marketing funnel is consider. Audiences who are in this stage already know a great deal about your agency and what you offer. They have a basic level of trust in you. You can plunge into hardcore marketing strategies to make sure that the customers make the purchasing decision.

Once you reach this stage, there is no turning back. You need to create a positive buying experience for the buyer so that they come back to your website again and again.

Using Facebook Ads Funnel for Lead Generation

The marketing funnel, or in this case, the Facebook Ads funnel is used to target different users with the help of different ads at each stage of the funnel. One thing to keep in mind is that the audience will not be interested in your agency with just one advertisement.

To gain trust in your agency, you need to keep exposing them to different sides of your services and your agency. You need to increase their temptation so that they make the final buying decision.

When on Facebook, a person’s main objective is to connect with their friends and family and not to buy your product. So when your advertisement comes in between their scrolling process, it is an interruption for them.

So you need to create a strong advertisement strategy which will be able to grab their attention and, in turn, tempt them to visit your website. Here you will have to follow the three steps of the funnel slowly before you push for that conversion.

What is Value Mapping?

Value Mapping is an essential part of understanding and forming strong customer relations. A very simple exercise, value mapping will help you understand the problems that are faced by the customers and provide solutions for the same.

As an agency, you need to ensure that you can determine the pain points of your audience. Based on the size of your agency, you will be exposed to different kinds of personas. Each of these personas will have different types of problems, and the intensity for each of these issues will also be different.

Understand Your Agency

The first step to a successful value mapping is to understand the capability of your agency. Before you try to determine your customer’s pain points and provide them with solutions, you need to ensure that you have the means to do so.

Without determining whether you are capable of providing the right solutions, you can create dissatisfaction within the minds of customers. Once the customers share their issues with you, all that matters to them is a solution. They will not understand your capabilities or limitations.

Hence, you need to make sure that you have a trained team that is capable of handling different kinds of problems handed over to them by the customer. For example, if a customer complains of having a lack of staff in their organization, then your agency must be capable of providing in-house staff for their work.

Problem Definition

Once you understand your capabilities, you can now reach out to your customers. Keep track of the different issues faced by the audience. Analyze the problem they are facing and reflect on them to find the best possible solution.

Understand the factors that are causing this issue. Determining the limitations of these factors will help you to come up with a strong solution.

Probable Solutions

For each problem that the audience mentions, you will have to come up with a good solution. You need to ensure that the solution you provide is effective and is in favor of the audience.

Let’s say an audience complains about the lack of knowledge in their team about a certain topic. As an agency, you will have to come up with a solution that will aim towards increasing the knowledge level of the team. You will have to start training sessions and provide them with information about the topic that they lack knowledge in.

Therefore, the exercise of value mapping needs proper strategies that will help the audience. Slowly you will be able to build a strong relationship with the audience. You will also have to maintain your level of performance and find ways through which you can increase your capabilities.

With time, as your agencies grow, you will be faced with many complex situations that will require you to grow your knowledge base. Monitor your team and establish newer strategies that would be helpful for you in value mapping.

Cold Audience Campaigns with Facebook Ads

Facebook advertising is a very powerful advertising tool if you know how to use it to your benefit. As we have already learned, forming a marketing strategy with the help of the advertising funnel will do wonders for your agency. Here we will learn how to use the advertising funnel to target the cold audiences through Facebook ads.

There are three levels of audiences, namely – cold, warm, and hot. The people who are your customers or buyers are the hot audience. You need to establish campaign strategies targeting each of these audience temperatures. But the one that you need to start from is the cold audiences.

What we have already learned is how to generate leads by remarketing ads. Though it is a very cost-effective process, you should not overlook the new audiences in this scenario. Cold audiences are those people who are still unaware of your agency and have no idea about your existence. To gain their attention is a challenge that needs proper strategy formation.

Find New Audiences with Facebook Ads

Facebook ads consist of content that needs to be attractive and attention-grabbing. You need to remember that cold audiences have no idea who you are or what services you provide. This is the first time that may have seen your advertisement while scrolling through their feed.

(Source : Google Images)

Moreover, they may be watching hundreds of such advertisements throughout the day. So why would they stop to view yours? You need to ensure that your video ad is unique and engaging so that they either view at least 25% of it or the whole ad.

You need to be very creative in building your content and target the audience based on which layer they are of the marketing funnel. To bring new customers to the top-most layer of the funnel, you need to turn the cold audience into a warm audience.

FB ads strategy is important, but it doesn’t mean much without solid FB ads execution.

Creating a Target Audience

Before you launch your Facebook ad, you need to establish a target audience and plan the content accordingly. Your target audience can be selected based on demographic, psychographic, need-based, job titles, or behavioral factors.

If you are creating Facebook ads for your agency, then you can keep the target audience open. However, for a specific campaign, you need to create content that is favorable to your selected target audience. The topic on which the Facebook ads are created should be for that particular audience and not for everyone.

For example, your agency is starting a campaign to target fitness enthusiasts. Hence your target audience will consist of both male and female audiences between the age group of, let’s say, 18 to 40 years old.

You already know that this group of audience will be more inclined towards content that focuses on sustainable and nutritious food options. Blogs or videos that state the different ways to lead a healthy lifestyle will also be preferred by them.

Now that you have your target audience, you need to focus on forming content that would immediately get their attention.

Content Creation for Target Audience

This is a very crucial part of your Facebook Ads leads generation strategy. Since your target audience has no information about your agency, the first thing that you need to know is to make them aware of the same. So, the content that you create for your cold audience will be to inform or educate them about your agency.

The advertisement should be informative, entertaining, educational, or even argumentative. Though you can write blog content, the more appealing advertisement would be video content. You can put in lively visuals, and they are also better at wooing your audience.

The target customers may not take out time to read your blog, but they can surely devote three to four minutes of their time watching your video. The video ad should be focused on one topic that would seek the interest of the target audience.

For Facebook Ads, you need to maintain short and crisp content. When you are putting up content on YouTube, then you can go for bigger videos. However, for social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, you can upload short three to four-minute promotional videos.

Remember that these adverts are only used as a promotional strategy. Once the audience shows an interest in your service, they will automatically watch your more in-depth videos or blogs.

The content that you create need not always be focused on the service that your agency provides. You can keep it more industry or audience-oriented.

Create Your Niche

Any content you create should be based on the preferences of the audience. Do not go all over the place and create a niche for yourself. You will be able to create a huge impact on the audience only if you know what your audience is searching for.

For example, if your niche is health-related topics, then you need to stay on that track and cover topics from the health industry. The content should be original and of high quality. Do not just cram in information into your video advertisements.

You can create long content and break them up into shorter videos to use as Facebook ads. Create eye-catching captions that will force the audience to look through your advertisement. You need to give advice or offer something to the audience from which they can benefit.

Creating a niche does not mean that you cannot divert to other topics. But remember not to confuse the audience with the services that you provide. You need to remain focused on the kinds of solutions that you wish to provide to your target audience. Moreover, the advertisement content will differ from one target audience to another.

Content Creation Process for Top Funnel

To ensure that you offer only the best content to your audience, you need to follow a proper process. No matter who your target audience is and what content you are building, following this process, all the time would help you in maintaining a disciple when it comes to content creation.

1.      Form Ideas

You need to list out certain ideas that you could work upon. Do not just focus on one topic when you are planning to launch Facebook ads organically. Build two or more content ideas so that you can know which works better with the audience.

2.      Build Your Content

Once you have listed down your ideas, the next process now is to film or build that content. If you are creating a video, then make sure that you have your set ready. Try to create videos with a representative so that the audience could connect to a person. Just building videos with animations, pictures, or text will not do the trick. If you or any other member of the agency is good at communicating, then they should be the face of the agency.

3.      Edit the Content

After you are done filming the content, you need to edit it according to your plan. You can add texts, animations, and pictures to make the video more engaging. If your content is a blog, podcast, etc. then you can edit them accordingly. In this stage, you need to proofread your content and get rid of all errors.

4.      Publish the Content

The completed advertisement now needs to be published on social media sites. The best thing would be to publish three to four videos at once. You can monitor the views of the videos after a day or two. By checking the views and reactions to the content, you will be able to decipher which one is most liked by the audience.

5.      Promote the Most Liked Content

The video or blog that has the most likes and views is the one that you need to promote. This does not mean that the other contents are not of use. You will need to promote all your contents one after another. But the right way is to access the likes and dislikes of the audience.

If your audience prefers one of your content ideas at the moment, then that is the one you should promote. Viewing that particular content will help you to generate leads for your agency. As more and more people view your advertisement on Facebook, they will gain knowledge about your agency.

Once you can grab the attention of your audience, you can use other content ideas to slowly take them to the second layer of the funnel. You need to keep hammering on the minds of the cold audience to gain their trust.

Keep following this process so that you can provide them with content that would be able to bring them to your website. As you focus more on your target audiences, you can turn them into consumers of your agencies’ services or products.

Facebook Ads Campaign Strategies for Top Funnel

Advertising Funnel plays a major role in forming Facebook Ads strategies. To capture the interest of the audience, you must pay equal attention to each of the layers of the funnel. But the most important layer is the top-most one.

If you can successfully retain your audiences in this stage, then it would be much easier to guide them through the second and the last layer. We have already covered the different layers of the marketing funnel and how they contribute to the overall lead generation process.

Here we will learn about the specific strategies that we need to adopt in each layer of the marketing funnel.

Optimizing the Top of the Marketing Funnel

The top of the funnel is used to reach a large section of your audience, both known and unknown. If you can hone an exceptional marketing strategy in this stage, then you have done most of the lead generation work here itself.

The way that people view your brand has changed, and so has the effectiveness of certain marketing strategies. These days you have to focus on hard data to attract the audience. And this hard data needs to be used at the top of the funnel for effective results.

To connect with the right kind of audience, you will have to create high-quality content that can target different buying personas. The main objective at this stage of the funnel is to target the largest possible audience.

You can do this only if you create content that aligns with their needs. Moreover, you need to make them understand that you, as an agency, are ready to attend to their needs. To optimize the marketing funnel, you need to lay a very strong foundation in the top layer itself.

You can use different kinds of content to create awareness among the audience. However, the most effective form of content is said to be video advertisements. It has been seen that people can connect more with your agency if they can visualize the services that you provide.

The content you create is this stage is not designed for conversions but for conversations about topics that the audience cares about. You have to measure the engagement level of the audience and monitor the kind of people that are attracted to the advertisements. You also need to see if the attracted people are aligning with the kind of personas that you have envisioned.

Evolving From Traditional Marketing Practices

The earlier tools used for the top of the funnel marketing campaigns were expensive. This is why most agencies focused directly on conversion than on creating awareness about their brand. While this method worked for some agencies, others were not able to get the desired result.

With the evolution in technology, there have been changes in traditional marketing practices as well. Today you can engage your audience and make them aware of your brand at half the cost. Even agencies that have a smaller budget can think about performing well at the top of the funnel.

The challenge today is not the budget but remaining up to date with the latest developments in the industry. Even content intelligence is changing every day, and the kind of content that worked yesterday may not derive the same results today.

The key to effectively get results from the top of the funnel is to know the audience. In the ever-evolving market, your audience is simply not interested in content that does not align with their needs.

Today we cannot push our services to the audience, but it goes the other way around. The only way we can get the audience interested in our agency is by developing content that they wish to consume. This is why the investment needs to be made on audience analysis and on any other marketing tool.

Tips to Create Effective Commercial Facebook Video Ads

When an audience watches your video for just 10 seconds, Facebook counts it as a view. It is a known fact that people will not view your complete video if they are not able to connect with it in the first few seconds. So you need your video to be short and crisp.

Attract Audience Early

Try to make videos that are not more than 90 seconds. Any Facebook Ad longer than this time frame would be monotonous and left midway by the audience. To make the videos more engaging, you can add visuals to it. Make sure that you pack information about your brand in the earlier part of the video. If this is your first time using this marketing strategy, then you can opt for smaller videos of 15 to 20 seconds.

Add Text to the Video

Facebook ads have an auto-play feature, which means the advertisement will automatically appear on the news feed of the audience and will start playing without having to expand the video. But the downside to this feature is that the audio will not be heard until the video is expanded.

The video starts playing on mute, so you need to ensure that you can deliver your message even without the audio. For this, you need to rely on texts as well as visuals instead of just sound.

It is a must that you add captions or subtitles to your video. This way, the audience can read the subtitles and understand your message even if they are not in a position to listen to the audio.

Use Applications to Edit the Video

(Source : Google Images)

The most important of a well-presented video ad is its editing. You cannot just compile information and show it to the audience. There needs to be a proper flow, and the editing needs to be professional.

You can change the face of a mediocre video by adding visual imagery, texts, music, and other things. Even if you do not have the budget to hire a professional editor, you can find many applications online.

They are very easy to use and will have options for different kinds of layers and effects. Use them appropriately so that the video is of professional quality.

Use an Attractive Thumbnail

Thumbnail is the picture that the audience will be able to see before they play your video. This may not seem as important, but that is completely wrong. Choosing the right thumbnail can create a huge difference. When you upload your video on Facebook, you will be given options to choose an image from the ad as your thumbnail.

You need to choose an image that you feel will drive the customers to open your video. Also, make sure that the video is formatted in 1:1 square format so that it is compatible with all devices.

Use Real-Life Visuals

Since you are targeting cold audiences, you will need to include content that will help the customers gain trust in you. Hence, use images or visuals that are connected to your agency. It can be something as simple as the logo of your agency.

If you have client testimonial footage, then do not forget to add them to your advertisements. The audience will trust the words of the customers more than they would trust yours. You can also include visuals of your office space, employees, any press coverage if available, etc.

Copywriting Tricks for Commercial Facebook Ads

To create a profitable Facebook Ad, you need to add all the necessary ingredients properly. In addition to proper editing and visualization, the main aspect of the video is its copywriting. Without the right copy, even attractive visuals will not be able to do the work.

Understand the Audience

No advertisement strategy will be successful if you are unable to determine the needs of your audience. Hence, this is the first step of any advertising campaign that you build. There must be hundreds of agencies that provide the same services that you do. But you need to specifically determine what the audience wants and offer the same.

Focus On Their Emotions

The need for the audience will emerge from certain pain points that they have. So when we say that an agency has to understand their audience, it only means that you have to find out their pain points.

The pain points will generally be something that they are unable to get from any other agency. Hence your goal would be to focus on the emotions of the audience and generate ideas that would touch those emotions.

Create Mobile-Optimized Captions

In earlier days, people had to focus on creating content that can be viewed on the desktop. However, with the emergence of mobile technology, people spend most of their time surfing social media on their mobile phones.

So you need to write captions or headlines that are suitable for the mobile view. Short captions are the hype these days so that people can understand the base message in just a few words.

Build Powerful Stories

When you are trying to create awareness about your brand, stories can be very compelling. You can inform the audience about the reason for starting the agency. You can also bring customer stories into light and how they have benefitted from them.

Be specific in your stories so that they sound real. Do not be vague about a client. Share their experiences in the first person, as if the client is taking the story. Or you need to specifically say “this is why I started the agency.”

Keep It Simple

Do not make your Ad copy complex. People do not have the time or interest to go through complex sentences or structures. Create a proper content flow and include short and simple but meaningful sentences.

Expose them to enough information that they are aware of what your agency does. Also, keep them wanting more so that they feel inclined to again view your ad if they see it again. Since you are not pushing for conversions in the top funnel, you will not have to include a call to action message in your Ad.

One thing you should never forget is to mention your USP. Do not just straightaway mention, “we do this best.” Make sure you hide your USP tactically in the message.

Generating Leads through Webinars

Webinar is a video presentation that is hosted by an agency to share knowledge about their work, services, and products. Webinars can be both live and pre-recorded. Though live webinars are much more engaging, if you want to use pre-recorded webinars, then they would have to be much more creative.

You can host a webinar for many different reasons, such as to present your products and services, to capture leads, or even show your expertise on a particular topic. No matter what your reason is for hosting a webinar, you need to be very aware of the kind of content that you are sharing with the audience.

The process of hosting a pre-recorded webinar is as follows:

• Create and film the webinar

• Edit the video

• Create your landing page

• Set up an email account specifically for the webinar

• Create mini ads to promote the webinar

• Test the success rate of the webinar

How to Build a Successful Webinar?

A good webinar would be able to inspire your audience and motivate them to gain trust in your agency. Webinars are good options to target the audience when they have good knowledge of your agency. This is why this marketing strategy is generally adopted in the second level of the funnel.

Select the Topic

Whether you want to go live or pre-record your webinar, the first thing that you have to decide is the topic. Remember that you cannot just build a webinar for any random topic. If your target is just to generate lead with the help of your webinar, then you might fail to do so.

On the other hand, if you consider the needs of the audience while building your webinar content, then you will go a long way. Avoid choosing generic content for your webinar. Instead, choose a topic that would appeal to the audience and very specifically showcases the services that you can offer for the same.

Though selecting a good content is the very first step of building a successful webinar, it is not the only one. There are many other aspects that need equal attention.

Plan a Proper Script

No matter how experienced you are in hosting a webinar, you need to have a proper script. If this is your first time, then not having a structured script will be a complete disaster for you. The script of the webinar would hold certain pointers, as mentioned below:

1.      Context of the Webinar

The first thing that you will have to note down is the main context of the webinar. Here you write a one-liner about what information you will be imparting through your webinar.

2.      The Topic

Next, you will specifically write down the topic of your webinar. Choose something of significance to your target audience.

3.      Setting

This is just for your information regarding how you will prepare the setting for your webinar. Will you be sitting on a stool or a chair? Will there be a desk in front of you? Or will you be standing the whole time? You will also have to note down where your cameras will be positioned.

4.      Title of the Webinar

This will be the headline of the webinar. Make it short and to the point. The headline should be able to define what you will be demonstrating in the webinar.

5.      Target Engagement

The worst way to start a webinar is by introducing your agency. When the target audience views your webinar, they are more interested in the solution you are offering than they are in your agency.

Therefore, to engage your target audience, you will have to divulge directly into the problem that you will be providing a solution to. Make it interesting through stories as well as case studies.

You can also provide a summary of the solutions that you will elaborately discuss at the later stage of the webinar.

6.      Webinar Agenda and Speaker Introduction

Once you have the attention of your target audience, give them a detailed explanation of what you will be covering in your webinar. You need to be engaging here as well so that the target audience gains interest in what you have to offer.

In this stage, you can also briefly introduce yourself or whoever the speaker is. Make sure you do not go into a full-fledged agency description as it can be boring for the audience.

7.      Present the Solution

For the rest of the video, you need to properly provide solutions to the problems that you have mentioned before. Make sure that you are clear and easily understandable. Do not use complex sentences or vocabulary.

8.      Offer Your Services

You need to be very tactical in your approach to providing your services. They must be valuable for the target audience and should also be unique in a way. Your service should align with the solution that you have provided.

The last portion of the webinar should be a call for action. Lead it in such a way that the audience is hooked on your service. Your webinar should be designed properly that the audience is compelled to click on the link that leads to your website.

Filming the Webinar

Once you have written the script, you need to film the webinar professionally. The best thing about a pre-recorded webinar is that you can edit the mistakes. Use a good microphone that has good sound quality.

Also, make sure that you show the face of the speaker for the majority of the webinar. The speaker should also have a very strong personality. You can use different screen capture tools for the webinar.

After you have filmed the video, edit it properly. The video should be visually appealing to the audience. Get rid of any fumbling like ‘umms’ and pauses that may have been done by the speaker.

Build a Strong Landing Page

A webinar is a great strategy for building audience and lead generation. However, before you hoist the webinar, you need to get your target audience. One of the best ways to do this is through a strong landing page.

Landing pages are stand-alone pages where the customer will land after they have clicked on your Facebook Ad. Once the customer clicks on your ad, they have automatically reached the second level of the marketing funnel. So you need a high-quality landing page to keep the audience hooked and push them to view your webinar.

Create a Good Headline

Most people will just read your headline to get an idea of what you are providing. They might not even read the rest of the content on the landing page. Hence, your headline should entice the audience to read the rest of the content on the landing page.

Body of the Page

You can focus more on video content here to describe what you will be offering through the webinar. Make sure that the video is very short, maybe a maximum of one minute. In this one minute, you need to define the problem and why they should watch your webinar.

Below the short video, you can put bullets points showing the topics that would be covered in your webinar. Even if the audience does not watch your video, they can get an idea of what you are offering from the bullet points.

Call to Action Link

The call to action link on your landing page is where the actual conversions occur. Make sure that the call to action button is the brightest one on the landing page. Be creative about what you write on the button. Write words like Save my Seat or Book my Spot and place it below the short video.

Registration Form

When the audience clicks on the call to action button, they should be diverted to the registration form. Do not make the form complex and ask for too many details. Remember that you are not making a sale. Just ask for your name, phone number, and email address.

Make sure that the registration form is compatible with all devices. You can also provide them with the provision to save the time and date of the webinar to a calendar.

Thank You Page

After the audience has entered their information and registered a seat for your webinar, they will be redirected to a thank you page. This thank you page is again as a short call to action page where you will provide a summary of what they will expect from the video.

Here also, you can add a short video where you thank them for booking a spot in your webinar. Do not make this a selling page as the audience may not find it appealing or may not watch your webinar at all. Your main goal at this stage is to ensure that the audience views your webinar.

Email Reminder

Do not just let the audience be once they have registered for your webinar. Give them a reminder email where you provide the link to your webinar. Without this, the audience may not view your webinar at all.

(Source : Google Images)

Consult Scheduling

At the end of your webinar, make sure that you have a review or consult button. This will help the audience reach you with their problems after watching your webinar. The whole point of this marketing strategy is to gain leads.

Hence this review or consult schedule should have a proper format. When they click on the scheduling button, redirect them to a form where they need to put their details as well as the problem that they are facing.

Ask necessary questions that will help you understand their issue and thereby provide them with a satisfactory solution. Give them the option to choose a time and date according to their comfort.

Creating Email Follow-Ups

Getting people to register for your webinar is not the final step. More than half of those audiences may forget to watch your webinar if they are not reminded of the same. Also, after they have finished watching your webinar, you need to push them to purchase your services.

How will you do this? The simplest way to remind people and generate leads is through an automated email sequence. The first half of the email sequence will ensure that the people who have registered for the webinar watch it.

(Source : https://www.activecampaign.com/)

The next half of the email sequence will target the customer and motivate them to become your customers. For this, you can use any email platform such as MailChimp or ActiveCampaign.

Pre-Webinar Email Sequence

This is the first sequence of emails that you will send the audience before they have watched your webinar. This sequence will mostly consist of three to five emails.

The first email that will be sent to the audience will be a reminder. This will be sent maybe one day after they have confirmed their registration.

The second email will also be a reminder email, which will be delivered a few days after.

You can construct the third email as a value proposition email for people who may have forgotten what your webinar offers. This email will contain bullet points about the problems that will be addressed in your webinar.

The fourth email will be to instate urgency among the audience. Write messages such as ‘few days left to view the webinar.’ People who need your webinar will be motivated to watch it through this urgency email.

The last email will be a final call to the audience. Even though you may not remove the webinar, you will have to create such an environment for the audience.

Post-Webinar Email Sequence

Though there is no proper order for this email sequence, the main aim is to conduct a follow-up as well as push for conversion. This can be set of five to ten emails consisting of different sales content.

However, you need to address the audience in such a way that they do not get irritated with your email. The emails could consist of case studies or stories about your customer’s experiences.

Some of the emails could contain an overview of the services that you offer, along with stories about your agency. However, you should start this email sequence by inviting the audience to join your social media channels or any community that you may have.

Also, send them an email about any future webinars you may host, which aligns with their current needs. You have to make sure you get at least half of the audience to seek consultation or purchase your services.

Form a proper structure for these email sequences. They should not look like a sales pitch but should be able to keep the interest of the audience awake. That is why you should schedule the emails at proper intervals. Getting daily emails can be a nuisance for the audience.

Setting Up Ads for the Webinar Funnel

After you are done building your webinar, creating your landing page, and the email sequence, you now need to create strong ads to divert traffic to your webinar. This is one of the most important sections of the webinar funnel. Without proper advertisements, people will not know about your webinar.

These ads will contain attractive pointers, which will reflect on the topic of your webinar. You should also mention whether the webinar is live or pre-recorded one. Many people try to pass on a recorded webinar as a live one to get people to attend them immediately. However, this breaks the trust of the audience even before it has formed.

Advertisements to send the target audience to your landing page needs to be short and eye-catching. You can include visuals or gifs along with including the pain points in the ads. Make sure that you write short sentences. Do not include too much text, and it is always better to use bullets.

Create a script for the advertisement, the same way you did for your webinar. Build good content and remember that this advertisement would only be for a few seconds. In such a short amount of time, you need to include content which will drive the audience to click on the landing page link.

Like for any other ad idea, you can use customer stories for Facebook Ads as well. Create at least two to three ads for your webinar traffic diversion. This way, you will be able to target more people than you would with just one.

Facebook Ads Campaign for Bottom Funnel

This is the last and final stage of the marketing funnel and is solely dedicated to conversions. The audiences at this level of the funnel are warm audiences who have proper knowledge about your agency and what you do.

They have also attended your webinars and may even have thought of booking consultations or purchasing your services. The ads strategies at this stage would surely be a call for action. You need to create video ads where you talk to the audience about purchasing your services.

The ads that you set up here will have a direct link to your service page. Keep the video engaging as well as entertaining. Make sure that the audience does not find the video to be a push sale. Form it in such a way that they become eager to use your service.

Generating Leads – FB Ads Execution

Facebook is a great platform to boost your business since you can easily get conversions, track them, and simultaneously spread brand awareness. A major part of your target market could be active on Facebook, which is why it is necessary to fully optimize the platform.

The next phase is all about Facebook ads strategy and creating leads for your agency. In the previous module, we went over strategies to help you create the best SEO campaign. Thus, you best believe that this module will help you generate effective Facebook ads and leads.

(Source : https://www.facebook.com/business/success/real-madrid)

The best example to get you started on understanding Facebook lead ads is how Real Madrid optimized their advertising campaign. While Real Madrid already has a large and loyal customer base, they still advertised themselves in countries with low engagement. Through a three-month-long campaign, they successfully generated over 2 million leads while decreasing their cost per lead massively.

The following module consists of ways to help you do the same. You can learn how to set up ads, change them, and conduct tests to create a steady stream of leads. While you may be an expert on using Facebook, the business manager version can be a bit tricky.

How to Set-up Facebook Business Manager?

As an agency, we hope that you already have a personal Facebook account. However, if not, then you can make one instantly. Once you have created a personal Facebook account, we can move onto the business aspect of it. Since you are a business, we have to set up ads through your personal account.

(Source : https://business.facebook.com)

Stay logged in and visit the webpage ‘business.facebook.com’ to create a Facebook Business Manager account. You will be asked for your name, business name, and business email address. Next, you will be asked to input your website URL and address, including country, region, street address, pin code, etc.

The box will also have two options that ask for the purpose of having a Business Manager account on Facebook. One states that you promote your own goods and services. While the other states that you provide services to other businesses. Select either one of which seems appropriate and simply submit.

Once you submit, the pop-up box mentions that you need to confirm your email to continue. All you have to do is confirm the necessary to receive full access to your new Facebook Business Manager account. Finally, on confirming, you will be redirected to the homepage of your Facebook Business Manager account!

How to Set-up Business Manager Assets?

Now that your Facebook Business Manager account has been created, you can log in to your dashboard that can be accessed on the website ‘business.facebook.com.’ The dashboard will show you an overview of various assets within it.

Business Settings

Since this is your business manager account, you will need it to be as personalized as possible. To do so, you can find ‘Business Settings’ anywhere on the screen. It could be either on the top left or top right of the screen, depending on the Facebook version you are currently using.

In these settings, you can decide on which assets will connect to which business manager. Surely, you can keep multiple business managers on the account. For now, this module will focus on the basic settings of the Facebook Business Managers to help you understand how to generate and run ads.

People and Accounts

(Source : Google Images)

Let us shift this focus onto two concerning aspects of Business Settings quickly. There are two tabs called ‘People’ and ‘Accounts.’ The accounts tab has two important subsections, ‘Pages’ and ‘Ad Accounts,’ that will play a major role in optimizing your business ads. As for the people tab, you can add members of your company that need access to the Facebook Business Manager Account.

In case you do not have members that you need to add, then make sure that you add at least one backup account. You can input any one of your personal email addresses for backup, for when an issue arises. For instance, this could include Facebook glitches or forgetting your login details.

Within the accessibility settings, you have complete control over how much access your members receive. You can assign them different pages and allow them to manage the page, create ads, view page performance, publish content, etc. Once that is done, your invite is sent to the member.

Pages

In most cases, a business must have created an independent Facebook page linked to a personal account. But that does not offer enough ownership unless connected to a Business Manager account.

There are three options to connect your Facebook Business Manager account to a business page. You can edit the settings for the page and allow people to be managers.

• Add a Page – You add a page when you want to connect an existing page that you own.

• Request Access to a Page – You can request to connect a page that is not under your ownership.

• Create a New Page – If you have not already created a page, you can do so while connecting it to your Facebook Business Manager account.

Ad Accounts

(Source : Google Images)

Moving on, let’s head to Ad Accounts. On most Facebook Business Manager Accounts, you have the same settings as that of ‘Pages.’ You can add an ad account, request access to one, or create a new ad account. All these options will be visible only if you have started your Facebook Business Manager account from scratch.

In case you already have an existing ad account, then you can simply connect it and add people. You can edit their accessibility and provide administration, or remove them at any given point as well.

As for now, you do not need to worry about the ‘Instagram Account’ tab since your Facebook account might already be connected to Instagram. As long as there is at least one link to the platform, your ads will run effectively.

An Overview of the Campaign Structure

Now that we have created a Facebook Business Manager account and connected all the assets, we return to the homepage. The homepage displays the ad accounts that your Business Manager account handles.

To be able to effectively carry out your next campaigns, you need to be able to reflect on the previous ones. You can do so through regular tracking and further ensure to improve in places where your campaign lacks.

For this step, go ahead and select any one of the Ad Accounts to look at the Facebook Asset Manager Dashboard. There will be three key tabs on the dashboard, namely Campaigns, Ad Sets, and Ads. If you can interlink the three, you can optimize them to understand your campaign results better.

Campaigns

Under Campaigns, you can decide on your objectives and ensure how Facebook executes your plan. The campaign tab can have multiple campaigns and objectives that need to be executed. In one place, you can see an overview of the results, reach, impressions, costs, ranking, duration, and more.

Ad Sets

This displays what kind of audience which ad is capturing and where it is being run. Ad Sets will completely specify the positioning of your ad.

Ads (Per campaign)

This subsection will display a specific campaign and give you a visual representation of how it is doing. You can go over the delivery, bidding strategy, budget, results, reach, impressions, conversion rankings, quality ranking, etc. You will understand whether your call-to-action is effective in this tab.

How to Optimize the Performance Tab?

The basic purpose of Facebook Ads Manager is to provide you with an overview of your Facebook advertising campaign. To make this process of analyzing easier, Facebook provides a default Performance tab for you to get a simpler overview. Your default system includes reach, results, impressions, etc.

(Source : Google Images)

But more elements fall under the performance tab. These elements are different columns that dive deeper into a particular topic. For instance, when you select engagement, you receive insights into the post reactions, comments, saves, shares, link clicks, page likes, etc.

Looking at one particular topic is not enough to analyze a particular campaign. You can analyze other options given in the drop-down like Performance and Clicks to receive results on reach, frequency, budget, etc. You can also access metrics such as CTR, click rates, unique link clicks, conversion rates, and more.

Facebook gives you a wide range of options for your advertising campaign analysis within the performance tab.

(Source : Google Images)

If this is not enough to conduct a full-fledged Facebook advertising campaign analysis, then you can get the option to customize as well. Once you select the option of ‘Custom Columns,’ there will be a display of settings wherein you can choose which columns to keep. Additionally, if you want a particular order of columns for a while, you can add them to your presets.

Make sure to be as strategic as possible. You do not have to select all of the options, just the ones that are relevant to your Facebook advertising campaign. Since you need to generate leads, you can search for the leads column in settings.

Now that you have the columns of your choice, you can order it in a way you wish to see it in an overview. This makes it easier for you to conduct the analysis because it is personalized to fit your preference.

As a sidenote while we’re speaking about optimization, don’t forget about page speed optimization, it’s very important for paid traffic too – not just organic SEO!

How to Analyze the Demographics Breakdown?

Facebook Business Manager offers a lot of features, and one of them is specific demographics. This allows you to analyze the demographics of a certain Facebook advertising campaign better. Keep in mind that analyzing regularly will lead to better optimization over time. The Breakdown tab for these demographics is present on your campaign overview page.

By Time

Under the time subsection, you can access certain days, weeks, two weeks, months, and so on. You can find out on which day your Facebook advertising campaign has been doing its best. Based on this, you can easily strategize on what day to optimize.

By Delivery

Within this subsection, you can analyze several specific demographics such as age, gender, business locations, country, region, platform, placement, product ID, and more. Sometimes, your Ad Sets might have a specific gender assigned, but you later find out that it has been viewed by another gender. This happens when your ad gets shared around.

Another essential subsection is ‘Placement.’ Placement includes other platforms such as Instagram, where the advertisement could have landed. Further, it includes specific positioning like stories, news feeds, instant articles, in-stream videos, etc. You can always use more than one platform since Facebook focuses mainly on audience reach and engagement. While that is a good thing, you also need leads and conversions.

Moving on, ‘Time of Day’ refers to the time-zone of a particular country, and you can instantly analyze how it impacts your metric goals.

By Action

This subsection consists of conversion devices, post-reaction type, destination, video view type, video sound, and carousel card. This is extremely specific for running dynamic ads. You can easily assess how each of these dynamic creative ads is doing.

Dynamic ads help us to understand how the audience consumes organic advertisements. With the help of the by-action tab, you can find out which images have been capturing the audience’s attention. In fact, you can eliminate the headlines or images that aren’t doing well during the campaign run.

How to Create Custom Audiences?

To successfully conduct a Facebook advertising campaign, make sure you are aware of the different kinds of traffic, namely warm and cold traffic. You need to know how to work with it, what it involves, and reach the results you estimated.

But before we get into that, you should know that a certain type of traffic is generated based on the audience demographics. To optimize your audience demographics, you can create customer lists. This option is present in the navigation bar as ‘Audience.’

(Source : Google Images)

Here you can create a custom audience to suit your campaign and help build your reach. You create an audience with the help of ‘identifiers’ collected about your customers that includes email addresses, phone numbers, and location. Facebook then takes this information, carries out a process to match similar profiles, and effectively helps to advertise your business.

Custom audiences are the first step to advertising on Facebook, especially for startups. For every Ad Account, Facebook Business Manager allows you to create up to 500 customer audiences.

In Audiences, you can select the option of creating an audience. Once you choose custom audiences, the screen will display a box with several options.

Use your own sources:

Includes Website, App Activity, Customer List, Offline Activity

This allows you to select an audience that already exists through app activity, website, or offline activity. You can even upload email CSV files into the customer list and select a few identifiers like previously mentioned.

Use Facebook sources:

Includes Video, Instagram Business Profile, Lead form, Events, Instant Experience, Facebook Page

Facebook maps out a suitable audience for your advertising campaign based on the subsections you selected. They pull out an audience from those spaces and display your advertisement to them.

Video from Facebook sources is one of the most effective ways to reach an audience. In this method, Facebook targets an audience that has previously watched your videos and is aware of your business.

Once your custom audience is created, you can take the audience and place them inside any one of your Ad Sets. Simply click on the edit, which will then open a settings box. The settings will include a subsection called ‘Audience,’ wherein you can select your newly created custom audience.

How to Create Lookalike Audiences?

While we learned how to build custom audiences, let us quickly go through creating lookalike audiences. If you are not aware, lookalike audiences refer to the process of reaching more and more people who could be interested in your business. They are quite similar to your existing customer base and serve an opportunity for expanding your target market.

(Source : Google Images)

On the audience page, you can select the lookalike audiences within the option to create an audience. Once you click that, you have three subsections to select from and select your lookalike audience.

Select Your Lookalike Source

A lookalike audience is primarily based on sources. You can select from any pixel or website. Facebook pixel is simply an analytics tool used by businesses that helps you in measuring the efficiency of an advertisement by understanding people’s reactions to it.

In case you select a pixel, then you get another option to select an event with value. This basically helps the tool to assess the frequency of the select event as well as value.

Select Audience Location

After selecting a source, you select your audience location. The location has to be a country. This way, the tool will instantly understand that you wish to reach people within a certain country and those who have visited that particular source.

Select Audience Size

The audience size has a range of 1% to 10%. The range refers to the percentage of the population in your selected country. For instance, you select the United Kingdom and choose 10%, then your estimated reach becomes 4,500,000 people. The tool instantly calculates the approximate amount of people.

To reach a broad audience, you can increase the percentage. But it is suggested that you be as specific depending on the source you chose. In case your source is small-scale, then you might not reach your estimated 10% goal.

(Source : Google Images)

Once you submit, you can see your lookalike audience applied to your dashboard. You can see the name of the source and type of audience.

How to Set-up Your Pixel?

To generate and run effective ads, you need to track properly. Tracking and monitoring is an essential part of your process because you should understand what works and what does not in your campaign. To do so, ensure that your pixel is set up within your website so that you can further optimize it using your Facebook Business Manager account.

(Source : Google Images)

You might have a pixel already, however, you can always create a new one. To install your pre-configured pixel, you visit your Events Manager. If you see an interface with an overview of events, there will be a Set-Up tab. You simply select the option and further install the pixel.

Once you do that, you will be shown three options. The recommended one is ‘Manually add pixel code to websites.’

All you have to do is copy the code to the clipboard and head to your website to paste it. You need to set this code up between the header section of your website and the tag. This needs to be done for every webpage on your website.

In case you do not understand the process, you can email the instructions to your website developer with the option of the ‘Email Pixel Code.’ Most agencies hire a website developer, however, if you do not have one, then the process is quite simple to carry out on your own.

(Source : Google Images)

Now that the set-up is completed, you need to install Facebook Pixel Helper from Chrome Web Store. Keep the icon visibility on your chrome panel, so that whenever you visit your website, you can check whether the icon is highlighted. This will tell you whether a pixel is present on your website or not.

Understanding the Customer Experience Timeline

Before generating ads and leads, we need to understand the philosophy of campaign building. The principle philosophy behind campaign building for Facebook marketing is the customer experience timeline.

An unaware customer base may have seen some content relating to your business in the form of a blog, video, ad, etc. The aware one has some insight into your business, what you do and provide. You cannot use the same advertisement for each one of them. If you do, you could end up losing a potential customer.

You cannot offer the same products over and over again to your loyal customer. But can do so for other types of potential customers. To keep your loyal customer satisfied, you offer them new options to select from.

An ideal customer experience timeline would be to provide more context and less trust to the unaware potential customer. While the loyal customer should be given less context and more trust. This is how you strategize an effective method for your Facebook advertising campaign.

Optimizing the Campaign Structure

A campaign structure helps to figure out how your Facebook Advertising campaign works and how it can be effective. Our first step to campaign structure definitely starts with the ideation of a campaign.

Campaign

At this step, you need to list down your campaign’s objective. This includes asking questions like how many video views you want, the number of lead ads, the conversion rates, etc.

Further, you negotiate on a budget and work towards campaign budget optimization (CBO). CBO involves making effective use of your expenditure to achieve the best campaign results. You need to decide on different kinds of budget, including daily and lifetime budget.

Next comes the customer experience timeline, wherein you allow a certain number of customer layers. Each one of these layers will have distinct purposes and characteristics to set itself apart.

The last one is the focus of your campaign. Every advertising campaign requires a focus of its own. It could be a problem or an innovative angle, you need to decide what purpose your campaign serves.

For instance, Kentucky Fried Chicken could market healthy fried chicken in an attempt to spread awareness about healthy eating. As a fast-food chain, cooking healthy meals becomes an innovative angle for them to market.

Ad Sets

Ad Sets describe different types of people you are targeting for your Facebook advertising campaign. This includes mentioning age, location, interests, etc. The Ad Sets will outline completely different advertisements shown to those people.

Ads

Your advertisements are visual creatives that will capture your target audience to form the Ad Sets. Through the advertisement, people will be drawn to visiting your website and learn more about the business. This could eventually even turn potential customers into buyers.

What is Testing Philosophy?

Marketing is all about trial and error because one can never expect a certain result from it. You might never know whether the campaign will go viral or completely backfire. All you can do is go with your instincts. This is when testing comes into the picture.

To put it into better words, your campaign is nothing less of a test!

Why do you need to test?

You need to establish two things about your testing philosophy. The first one is why do you need to test. You need to test to know whether you can achieve your metric goals, such as leads, conversions, reach, etc.

Two, you should test to avoid exhausting your audience. Marketing an entirely different purpose to another audience group will only make them disinterested. Further, this will risk your chance of gaining potential customers.

What do you need to test?

Similar to your campaign structure, you will start by testing the campaign level. This includes testing the customer layer, problem, or angle. Try to question yourself by digging deeper into your campaign idea.

Further, you describe your audience demographic in Ad Set Level. This includes their location, age, and retargeting type. Re-targeting can include targeting those who stumbled upon your website or ad previously and capture their attention again.

Then comes the Ad level. This requires you to be creative and create visually appealing content. In case you end up creating the best ad, you can use it again for other ad sets. Within your ad, you should use the basic structure that includes headline, images, text, and call to action.

Testing will help you reach your overall metric goal. Moreover, keeping a couple of Ad Sets can benefit you later in case one of them backfires.

Setting up a Facebook Advertising Campaign

Now that we have brushed over the concepts and terminology of Facebook Business Manager let us go through a quick run-through on how to set up a campaign. As we start this section, make sure that you went through the module thoroughly because only then will you understand the directions and philosophies.

• Log in to your previously set up Facebook Business Manager Account, and open the ‘Campaigns’ tab in your navigation bar.

(Source : Google Images)

• Within the campaigns tab, you select ‘Create,’ and a dialogue box will open.

• The dialogue box displays a few options, including campaign name, buying type, campaign objective, split test, and campaign budget optimization. Further, there are two sections to create a new ad set and new ad.

• Be as specific when you input a campaign name. Next, you select a campaign objective that serves the exact purpose. To get clients for your business, you can go ahead and select lead generation.

• For campaign budget optimization, you can select whether you want a daily budget or a lifetime budget like mentioned in the module previously.

• While creating an Ad Set, you can select from any of your previous Ad Sets linked with a Facebook business manager.

Once you finish your editing, you can save this creation to drafts. Moving on, we have to get into the details of setting up a campaign.

(Source : Google Images)

• On your campaign dashboard, you can edit your campaign draft within the ‘Ad Set’ tab. Most people edit the Ad Set name at this stage, specifying target audience demographics. This includes the type of audience, age range, and location.

• When selecting your locations in the audience section, you can opt for an expanded area. Instead of a country in Europe, you can target Europe itself. This completely depends on your business’ relevance to a particular region. Take into consideration aspects like relevance, accessibility, and affordability.

• You also get extra options to choose language preference. Moreover, detailed targeting includes the target audience’s interests. For instance, if you offer digital marketing services, you can input digital marketing, content marketing, social media marketing, and so on.

• Once you are done with your Ad Set editing, you can go ahead and move on to editing the ‘Ads’ tab.

(Source : https://unsplash.com)

• Make sure that you use images that are relevant to your ad content as much as possible. Besides looking visually appealing, it also has to convey the purpose of your Facebook advertising campaign. While there is no harm in using stock images, try to publish images that are owned by your business. Download all the images and upload them to your images panel.

• Moving on, think of catchy headlines for your ad. You can input one or more if you wish to. Make sure your lead-in and ad copy are attention-grabbing and relevant to your ad content. Moreover, keep it as simple as possible because complex sentences might just bore your potential audience.

• Lastly, go ahead and finish editing your basic ad settings. Do not forget to enter a display link that redirects to your business webpage.

• A call-to-action is just as necessary because that is where the conversion process starts. There are so many good examples such as apply now, book now, download, get quotes, learn more, sign up, subscribe, etc. Select one that is fully relevant to the goods or services you are offering.

• Coming to lead forms, enter applicable questions, headline, layout, etc. You also get to include a privacy policy redirect and a thank you screen. Again, keep a polite tone to not lose your audience’s attention. Adding to that, keep your questions limited to name, email address, or contact number.

You have now successfully created a Campaign, an Ad Set, and an Ad. Since you have set up a Facebook advertising campaign that is clear about who to target, do not forget to publish it!

Analyzing Results of a Facebook Advertising Campaign

After you have set up your Facebook advertising campaign, all you have to do is wait for the results to show up. While the campaign set up was important, the next steps are comparatively vital. You will be analyzing your on-going campaigns to wherein you work towards improving less impressive sections of your Facebook advertising campaigns.

Our focus for analyzing the Facebook advertising campaign results, for now, is lead generation, which generally is quite difficult. But once you get the hang of it, you can analyze your results faster over time.

(Source : Google Images)

Head over to the performance tab and start by customizing your columns. Like we mentioned in the module earlier, you can remove unnecessary columns that are not relevant to your analysis. For lead generation, you may want to remove delivery, cost per result, quality ranking, last significant edit, bid strategy, schedule, and such.

If you want a reference, you can customize your dashboard to fit the ideal lead generation analysis dashboard. This includes campaign name, ad set name, reach, impressions, the amount spent, on-Facebook leads, and click through rates. The following one consists of the most basic columns, however, once you start analyzing, you can keep adding.

You can select your order of preference for the columns and save the preset for future purposes.

To understand how lead generation is analyzed, you focus on CPM, CTR, and Link CTR.

• CPM refers to the cost paid for every 1000 impressions.

• CTR refers to the click-through rate, that is the number of times your Facebook ad was clicked.

• Link CTR refers to link-click through rate, which focuses on clicks that redirected to a linked webpage.

Your click-through rate should be high because that means that a large number of people have clicked. When a customer clicks on your ad or link, a signal is sent to Facebook that further helps in calculating the engagement of the ad and campaign.

Once you are done analyzing the existing columns, you can also add cost per lead. The cost per lead is simply to keep a check on the amount spent to achieve the given results.

Make sure that you have an engaging ad campaign and creative. Not only will Facebook reach your audience, but it will also keep sharing it as long as your ad campaign stays relevant. With more engagement, Facebook can help you get additional engagement. If you have to, then do not hesitate to change your creatives, replace them, or create new ad sets.

Lastly, to achieve the best results, focus on the click-through rate. If your click-through rate is high and impressions are low, it implies that you need to improve the ad set or ad. Adding to it, if your cost per lead is high, that also implies improvement.

Make sure you monitor properly and look through every type of date preset. The lifetime date preset will show the total number of results to date for the selected Facebook advertising campaign.

How to Create Campaign Angles?

Creating campaign angles is something that a lot of business managers fail to address. This entire process of creating angles deserves to be talked more in marketing, especially when you start considering its importance.

As manageable as it sounds, but you won’t make any money if you are not framing and channelizing your campaign in a way that connects with the audience. One skill every marketer should develop is being able to come up with new, creative, and effective angles for new campaigns consistently.

It is time to awaken the creativity within you while you are keeping in mind what drives your audience to purchase the goods or services you are selling.

You need to get clarity about various angles and problems that you are trying to identify. So, to not let this slip of your mind, you could initially get a clear understanding of the problems inside the ad campaign and a solution best suited for the same.

You can perform a small logical belief exercise wherein you analyze the central thing that you’re selling and identify what are the connective points to that or the journey of making your customers believe in whatever your product is.

Let us consider this, if you are starting with digital marketing, identify what sort of things are associated with digital marketing so that someone would want to connect with you. So here comes SEO, Facebook ads, email marketing, PPC, and automation.

Now when you look at these things individually, try to analyze what problems people might have faced while doing this or with someone else. For email marketing, you can say poor deliverability, poor per rates, bad copywriting, uncreative emails, and, most importantly, spamming.

In the digital marketing industry, there is one particular area that you will exploit by devising a solution for it. If you decide to work on a complex ad campaign, your Facebook ad should revolve around providing all the services and information to your customer such that they don’t face any difficulties.

When you do the same with Facebook Ads, issues like Attribution – Confusing results and Inconsistent reporting, Ad Copy- Poor CTR, high CPC, and the length.

In simpler words, you can basically create an entire web of various problem angels that you are comfortable working with. It is important that the problem you’re working with interests you. These libraries of problem angles will assist you in leveraging the production of your content.

Rather than telling people verbally about what your company does and what its goals are, let your client know that you have a solution to their problem. Here your creativity enters the picture and the creative angle solution.

Bonus Tips

Bonus Tip 1: Adding New Ads to On-going Campaigns

A lot of business managers on Facebook face the problem of being able to run new ads when one is already going on. Some people may face the issue of the new ad not functioning properly or the old one that stops working.

The simplest way to carry out new ads during on-going ads is to create a new ad set and add new ads to it. You do not really have to worry about displaying several ads to one audience set. Moreover, the amount of creatives does not matter most times.

You could display one dynamic creative and still achieve more engagement than you could with three dynamic creatives. The metric goals depend on the purpose of your Facebook advertising campaign for the major part.

Further, if you have two dynamic creatives, and one of them is not providing the expected results, then you switch that creative off and vice versa. In case you do this, and yet the remaining creative fails to do well, then you create a new one. You create a new ad set, publish a new creative, and run the campaign further. Better optimization surely contributes to your creatives doing fairly well.

In conclusion, remember to create a new ad set and then add creatives to the new one. Do not add creatives in the existing ad set itself. Even so, you can keep your ads as it is if they are doing well and are steady.

Bonus Tip 2: Campaign Budget Optimization

When it comes to optimizing your campaign on Facebook, you need to be philosophically vigilant. You do not need to have a lot of technical knowledge.

You can optimize your entire budget based on just one single thing, and that is the viewers’ experimental timeline with you.

The visitors could come from different categories, namely.

• Someone completely unaware of the service you provide
• Someone who has very little information about you and the services you provide.
• Your customer, someone who has made a purchase from you in the past.
• A repetitive customer, someone who has made multiple purchases from you.

Now when you create a campaign, you need to manage multiple ad sets at one go. You cannot have the same ads and the same information for someone completely unaware of your services and someone who has made multiple purchases.

You need to analyze and then set up your campaign. All your ad sets will have different messages to deliver. If you have an impressive ad that is value-packed and manages to solve the viewers’ problem, you will get a reaction, this reaction will lead to attention, and attention simply means that the viewer will be drawn to engage with your content.

But at times, to get this reaction becomes a little difficult, and you might think that you’ve invested in the wrong audience. When working with a completely unaware audience, you need to be patient, and if you do not want to experiment or I rather say if you don’t want to wait that long, you can simply cancel out of this group of audiences.

Earlier, you had to create different campaigns for different services, but now you can simply focus on one service that you are keen on providing and can form multiple ad sets for the same. This way, you leverage your own potential in the niche, and your customers will refer you.

When optimizing your budget, you need to decide which audience you want to reach out to and where do you get more reactions. Someone aware of you is more likely to take your service rather than someone who has never heard of you.

You can simply run the ad campaign with your customers and repetitive customers. Here the response will be quick, and you will be able to see results in no time.

Wrapping it up

Now that you are well-equipped to publish a campaign and conduct analysis for it, here are some tips to make your Facebook advertising campaign stand out.

If you’re always focused on SEO, hiding your PBNs, optimizing your content and the like – some time working with FB can be refreshing and can give you a better perspective on your overall marketing.

Ensure that your campaign has a clear message and that your creative ad can be comprehended easily. You have to build enough trust within your audience base so that they feel comfortable sharing their contact details with your business.

Facebook Business Manager has a wide range of interesting features to offer, but make sure you do not overdo it. Keep a simple target, campaign, and avoid overwhelming your audience. For instance, your campaign could be very complex, or your instant form has too many complex questions.

Last but not least, be sure to give your Facebook advertising campaign a personal touch. Your advertisement should completely be able to reflect your brand image and attempt to get a response. Finally, setting up a Facebook advertising campaign is pretty fun if you let it!

Don’t forget to grab some social signals for your blog posts, too.

Generating Leads Through Cold Outreach

Do you like it when you hear the ‘whoosh’ sound of the email notification? As much as we hate the emails piling up in our inbox, we love it when people and brands reach out to us!

We’re guilty of enjoying the attention and offers we get from promotion emails. Have you ever wondered how it would be to initiate such emails? If you’re looking to grow your business with cold outreach, then this guide is perfect for you!

Generating leads: Important for all types of business

Whether you are a new freelancing business or an established company, to remain relevant and popular with the clients, you should be flexible.

Maintaining your current customer base while actively seeking fresh clientele can be a stressful process. We will guide you on the comprehensive steps that are included to make the best of cold outreach.

Generating leads is a recurring business activity. Constantly updating and generating leads will make a huge difference in your overall business sales. Cold outreach is a very good option for reaching out to potential clients. This method will effectively ensure that you are making a lasting impression on the people and businesses you reach out to!

Lead generation process and attracting the right clientele for your new business is probably one of the most difficult things. In this guide, we will suggest steps for client acquisition and increasing business opportunities!

Why choose cold outreach?

Lead generation is one of the crucial steps which determine the sales of your company. As a business owner, you might find countless tactics that will help you reach your business goals. However, when you’re on a tight budget, most lead generation tactics can be expensive.

This is where cold outreach can come to your rescue. We often believe in the notion that more money invested means better results. Though this is not true. You don’t have to spend a lot of your money to achieve the results that you want.

You can accomplish clients and generate leads through a cost-effective and simple approach: cold emailing outreach. Consistency and attention to detail are two things that you must possess to have a successful cold outreach approach.

Step By Step Process for Generating Leads through Cold outreach

Let delve into the lead generation process step by step!

1.     Prospecting

Choosing the right potential customers is very important when you are prospecting. It is a fairly easy process, but it is one of the most critical steps in cold outreach.

Prospecting involves reaching out to qualified and experienced people who you think would be interested in your business. If done wrong, you will be wasting hours of your research and efforts to reach out to people who aren’t even the slightest bit interested in your company.

As a business owner, you should be willing to dedicate most of your time to make the prospecting list as extensive and inclusive in the cold outreach approach. By reaching out to the right people, you have already made sure that they would be interested in your business.

Prospecting in cold outreach means identifying a list of qualified individuals or businesses that have no idea about your company. By making a good prospecting list, you ensure that such companies or businesses can be informed about the services that your business can offer.

Google search and Browser Plugin

In this method, we will help you curate a prospecting list from basic internet search along with a little help from a browser plugin. In the google search, you’ll be finding a database of people who are very easily accessible. And then use a browser plugin like Hunter.io to extract the contact information from the databases that you find online.

(Source: Hunter.io)

Many of us believe we are champions to find out information on the internet. But how many of us can find the relevant information? You can use commercial aggregator sites like thumbtacks to help you find companies in your industry.

Just open google search and type in the type of company or industry that you’re looking for + ‘database’ or ‘repository’ or ‘directory.’ You can even type in ‘best (name of industry) in (location),’ and you’ll be directed to an aggregator website like a thumbtack.

Aggregator websites like clutch and thumbtack can make lead generation b2b a very easy process. You can filter out your target industry and even make it area specific. For example, if you’re a freelancing content writing business that specializes in property descriptions, then real estate would be your target industry.

(Source: Clutch.co)

Does your business specifically cater to the software industry? Then you can use G2 (formerly known as. It is a review site that is mainly focused on aggregating user reviews for lead generation in businesses and companies from the software industry.

It all depends on what your company’s niche is or who you intend to cater to! If you intend to keep your business local, then you can find a localized business database specific to your industry. It is very easy to use an aggregator. You can create a website scraper or a virtual assistant to get the company’s information.

You can even hire someone temporarily to help you with the data entry job. Let’s go through some easy prospecting steps that will help you with lead generation b2b.

• The first step to make a list of target companies from the aggregator websites.
• Then you can go over this list one by one to make a record in the spreadsheet. In the spreadsheet, you can mention all types of contact details that the virtual assistant has scraped out.

• After you have recorded the basic information about the company, you need to go deeper. You need to determine which the right person to contact from the company is. This is the step where most people mess up. So, carefully research and select the correct point of contact and make a note of the same in the spreadsheet.

• The next logical step would be to find out contact information for the point of contact. You can easily look for such details on the company’s website. Make sure you’re jotting all these things down on the spreadsheet.

When you’re scouting for details of prospecting companies for the lead generation process, it is important to note that we’re looking to contact people, not the company. So don’t shy away from research and try to find as much information about the right point of contact in the company.

Hunter.io will give you the email ids, but you’d want to go further and find out more social media handles like Instagram, LinkedIn, and their blog pages. By listing down everything, you’ll be able to foster better relationships with the prospecting company!

GrowBots

GrowBots is the easiest way you can spice up your lead generation process. It picks up data from LinkedIn Sales Navigator and BuiltWith to curate the best prospecting list. GrowBots might seem cheaper because it combines these two tools, but in reality it is not. It is an expensive investment as the costs tend to add up with the number of prospecting contacts.

(Source: growbots.com)

More than the costs, the whole process of using GrowBots makes you lazy. This is the biggest downside of using GrowBots as a part of your lead generation strategies. Highly customizable, you can find the right type of prospects with help from the extensive filters on GrowBots. You can choose to go ahead with a more mass outreach type of prospecting if you are offering exclusive deals that are irresistible.

The cold outreach approach for lead generation that we are suggesting is designed for a more 1-to-1 feel. But if your company has unique tools, then you can go for a more mass outreach program. GrowBots can help you create lists that will be appropriate for such an approach. This method of prospecting falls in the middle of the pitch box, and the personalization feels that we are going for.

GrowBots has prospecting and outreach tools so that you can get everything done in the same place. You can find contact and follow up with the contacts in the prospecting list, all with GrowBots. This is a powerful tool that gives you the most compared to other cold outreach tools.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

(Source: Google Images)

Are you looking to connect with people with their professional background? Why struggle with the ineffectual google search when there is a tool just for that? LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a very impressive tool that will help you find the right people.

With an extensive database of the world’s professional crowd and the who’s who from the industry are all on LinkedIn, lead generation on LinkedIn is super simple. You can search against popular filters like job titles, company employee strength, location, and other such data.

The process for using LinkedIn Sales Navigator is quite similar to the earlier one. However, with LinkedIn, you get better visibility of networks and exclusive access to algorithms. All these things make the job of prospecting much faster and way more effective.

LinkedIn Sales navigator will give you so many filters to choose from. Lead generation on LinkedIn makes prospecting in cold outreach less of a burden. You can target specific industries, in a particular geographic location, keywords, and even past lead and account activity.

The filters are very specific and will help you reach out to the right point of contact by cutting down your lead generation process time in half. After you click on the search tab, LinkedIn Sales Navigator will pull up a list of people matching the categories that you set.

After that, you just have to follow through the same process of prospecting and adding in relevant details in the spreadsheet. You will need to use Hunter.io to get the correct email id. Like the previous method, you can go ahead and make sure you go through all social media handles of the point of contact and make notes.

Prospecting for lead generation is very crucial. It’s easy to feel burdened by the specific details in the amount of research that goes into it, but it’s all worth it in the end. As a business owner, it’s important to note that people appreciate a personalized touch to the cold outreach.

If you go back to the mass email and similar such prospecting techniques, your marketing plan might just fall through. In fact, you could be at a higher risk of losing the value of your company. So, for an effective lead generation plan, invest in some time to give a personalized touch to every piece of interaction that you have with the point of contact.

Add an extra column in the spreadsheet to make a note of little things that will help you give a personalized touch to your interaction like something from their Instagram bio. This will help you create long-lasting connections by striking a chord with the prospecting point of contact.

For more clarity in the lead generation process, you can include an additional column for the status of the point of contact. Lead generation on LinkedIn was never this easy! LinkedIn Sales Navigator, along with Hunter.io, makes the perfect cost-effective option for cold outreach!

BuiltWith

(Source: builtwith.com)

Although BuiltWith is expensive, the specificity of tools will change the prospecting game for lead generation. What BuiltWith does is, finds out everything about the website from a technology perspective.

You can put any website for checking with the BuiltWith tool, and you’ll get access to the underlying dynamics of the page. For example, you can easily get to know if the website is running on WordPress or other such websites. Additionally, it also gives you the site’s performance using google analytics. The primary advantage of using BuiltWith is to make highly specific introductions in the cold outreach email.

BuiltWith is a very powerful tool that will help you provide specific solutions to the prospective database. It will also help to ascertain if a certain business is passing the criteria of being qualified to be in your prospecting list. BuiltWith will help you ascertain if the market is perfect for you.

It has a lot of tools like insights, keywords, industry verticals, locations, speed, and competitors.

For example, if you’re an SEO service company, then BuiltWith can help you ascertain if the websites are hosted on Demandware. Demandware is an expensive e-commerce platform that provides cloud-based solutions. Most companies that use Demandware have huge budgets, and you can target such websites to include them in your prospecting list. Then you can provide specific SEO solutions for the Demandware platform.

You can also use Sumo, which is another email collecting tool. Sumo is also an expensive option. However, it is so powerful that it will collect all types of contact information and social profiles from the website. However, you might need to recruit a virtual assistant who can go through the countless companies in the database.

BuiltWith is extremely beneficial for setting up your prospecting list. The unpaid version has access to a minimum of 50 websites. So, if you’re on a tight budget, then you can use the BuiltWith free version. You can even export the results to your computer in case the free period runs out.

2.     Cleaning your Prospecting List

After you have curated a basic prospecting list, the next important step is to make it concise. If you employed a different person for data entry, then you need to take this step yourself. Unlike making a prospecting list, cleaning it requires an understanding of your business.

So, if you don’t have the time to clean it, you can properly train the person who will be doing it. It will be easier if you have the same person curating the prospecting list and then making it even more relevant by taking your inputs. This will save you a lot of time.’

When you are doing lead generation through cold outreach, it is important to note that this approach is more focused on the people we are reaching out to. It is less about your business and more about how you can offer or add value to their business. When you put the other people in the spotlight, the chances of them reverting with a positive response becomes higher.

Cleaning your prospecting list is the most crucial step because you are looking to make that meaningful connection. You have to fish out the right type of people that will benefit from connecting with your business. Moreover, you also have to make sure you are providing value to the prospects so that they will be interested in engaging with you. This is the essence of coming through with the people on your prospecting list and an effective lead generation process.

When you write a cold outreach email, to give it a personalized touch, you’ll be taking reference from the cleaned prospecting list. So, make sure that the list is relevant and has all the details that will strengthen your cold outreach email conversation.

How to clean your prospecting list?

Now let’s see some easy steps that you can go through to extract the best and highly-qualified prospects from your rough prospecting list.

• Go through the social media pages of the people in the prospecting list. Look at their discussion topics, their online interactions, and what niche they operate in. This will help you make a great opener, which will help you add value to the conversation. You can select topics that they are passionate about, and this way, you will be able to grab their attention.

• Check out the blogs or any content they are putting out for their company. By analyzing this, you’ll be able to know their role in the company. You can provide those solutions and even reference to one of your services that would make an excellent addition to their work. For example, you can give them a quick tip that would improve their SEO or lead generation strategies.

• Like we previously mentioned in the first step of the cold outreach process, BuiltWith is also an amazing tool that can help in creating the prospecting list. You can even check their website from a technology angle using BuiltWith. You can give them easy tips that will help their business/personal blog site. This gesture will make them value your opinion and make it seem genuine. You can even offer them a customizable model that would be scalable and beneficial to their business!

• Keep a record of the new findings in the notes column, so that you don’t have to repeatedly go through their social media pages. Little things like these will make a big difference when you sit down to draft out a value proposition to lure the prospective people.

You can visit the LinkedIn profile of the people to see the professional qualifications. Personal touches are a great addition to your cold outreach email, but it would be appropriate to check out the professional side of things.

It’s a human tendency to be attracted to flattery. So, you can even make it a point to appreciate or congratulate them on their professional or personal achievement. This will make you seem instantly likable!

Depending on what you’re going to sell to these people, you can make notes of the relevant things and include references that would be from your business. You can try to gauge what exactly the person would be interested in. All it takes is basic research of all social media accounts.

3.     Connecting on Social Media

This is an optional step because it can be too much of a hassle for some people who have hectic schedules. However, if you’re the type of person who is looking to convert each prospective into a quality lead, this step might help you accelerate the process. You can also find an intern to help you out with this so that you can make sure you portray your business as active as possible.

After thorough cleaning and tagging of the prospecting list, you are left with a list of high-quality potential leads. This list contains personalized information on each prospective person that will help you strike the perfect chord and convert sales.

It is easier to break the ice if you approach the people over social media. By taking help from the carefully curated notes that you have made on the people, breaking the ice won’t be as difficult. Having topics ready, you can easily comb through several conversation starters and topics.

The reason why this step is optional is that this requires a lot of effort and patience from your end. Being a business owner, you are already juggling a million tasks. And on top of that, reaching out to the prospective lists through social media can be a tedious process.

If you want to strengthen your existing lead generation strategies, then you could try connecting on social media. This way, you are keeping the company or the business updated about your services, and they can easily reach out to you if they need someone in that niche.

Easy things you can do to shine through on social media

Connecting through social media can be a tricky process. If you’re unknown to the mysteries of internet dialogue, it’s best to hire a virtual assistant who can take this task off your shoulders.

Let’s see some easy hacks to get your social media noticed and use it as an effective lead generation source!

• Be interactive. If you want to master the social media game, one thing to keep in mind is to be present. Make it a point to drop a like, comment for every new post that a prospect posts. Initiate engagement and subtly link it to your page. For example, if a person posts about SEO traffic statistics, then you can comment on something sort of a call-to-action (CTA). This has to go hand-in-hand while appreciating the person’s post and adding more value to it!

• Don’t slide into the direct messages. As we said, social media dialogue is a completely different ballgame. Direct messaging can seem too intrusive, annoying, and quite frankly, a waste of time. Without breaking the ice, if you initiate a direct message, it might not make the intended impression.

• Share the posts. If you see someone posting good quality content, you can share it whilst tagging them. This will get your account noticed and also further the engagement on the prospective person’s page. This will easily get the person warmed up to you.

• Be consistent. Connecting over social media for lead generation is not just a one-day process. If you are looking to build strong relationships, you need to be consistent with your likes and comments. And make you spread it out over all social media handles and not just LinkedIn. Build your social media game by interacting with the accounts for at least 4-6 weeks before you reach out to them with a valuable cold outreach email.

• Keep it short and personal, but not creepy. Don’t cross the professional boundaries when you’re trying to have a good cold outreach strategy. Keep your interactions and direct messages concise, to the point, and friendly.

• Make sure your social media profiles are updated and active. You should leverage the power of social media. Keep your social accounts fresh with daily content, particularly to your niche. So, that when people click and reach your page, they feel you are genuine and will more likely connect with you.

• You must have someone who is constantly managing the activity and making regular notes about the advancements. You can switch over to different social media accounts and persistently engage and spark conversation. If you try the tricks above, you are guaranteed to get a positive reply!

4.     Outreach

We’re at that stage of the lead generation process, where you will be writing cold outreach emails to the prospecting people. The database is ready after extensive amounts of research and filtering. Now, all you have to do is draft the perfect message. To reach out to the people with a 1 to 1 feel is the most important step of the cold outreach!

There is no fixed compulsion that you need to send emails for cold outreach. You can even go for LinkedIn messaging or any other form of cold outreach to grab the attention of the prospective people.

Writing personal emails is a very appropriate method for reaching out to the people on your database. The reason is that the deliverability rate is much higher. Many professionals might find it appropriate to seek help from outreach software. But, you never really know for sure if the emails through such software make it to the inbox. The individuals in your database might have really good spam filters, and your email might get lost in the spam folder.

Do’s and Don’ts of Outreach Email Copy

• Customizing and giving a personal touch to the emails is so important. Your email will catch the attention of the person and make the intended impact. Don’t address people as ‘sir’ or ma’am as it immediately puts off the recipient. It will seem like you don’t even know their name, which is right there in their email id. So, either use their first name or nothing at all. This method might be time-consuming, but you don’t fall into the category of mass outreach emails, which is a really good thing!

• There are two ways that you can go when reaching out to the database. Either you can write a good email with personal anecdotes or shoot a short video. You can choose either of the methods depending on how comfortable you are in front of the camera. The reason why many people feel it is better to use a video is that it is the ultimate personal touch when doing cold outreach.

• People want to know the face behind the organization, and if you shoot a video and send it across, it shows how much you value the person on the receiving end. The people on the receiving end will appreciate the time and effort that you have put in to make such a high-quality proposition.

• Lead generation strategies are for the growth of your business. But when you are doing a cold outreach, it’s not about your company. Design the email in such a way that it focuses more on the recipients and less on what your company or services are.

• Humor is much appreciated. But try not to overdo it in emails. Decide the tone of the cold outreach email and stick to it. To lighten the copy, you can include their references in a humorous way.

• Another tip while doing cold outreach email is to stay away from email templates. Overused and very common, email templates often fail to deliver the personalized tone that we are focusing on. Consider creating a framework that would leave space for ample customization for each prospecting database person.

• You have spent a lot of hours to find out information about the people in your database. So, it has to reflect in the outreach message that you send across. For an effective lead generation, you should include as much researched points into the outreach email.

• Don’t reveal everything in the opening email. Give them a few tips, not all of them. Make the prospective people in your database curious, and that is how you’ll capture their minds.

• Make sure you include links and supporting information so the recipients can check out all your details.

You can try bombarding a thousand people with a non-personal marketing cold outreach email, with little to no results. However, the approach that we are suggesting is targeted to receive guaranteed results from a hundred people.

5.     Follow up

It is all about making an irresistible offer! The amount of time that you have invested in researching and reaching out to these people shouldn’t go to waste. Just sending a single cold outreach email is not enough.

Regular follow-ups that don’t seem too creepy are essential to break the ice and establish a two-way flow of communication. If you just send a single email and expect it to work like magic, you’re very wrong.

Strategically taking follow-ups is important as they make you seem persistent but in a positive way. A thing to note about follow-ups is that it is nothing like bombarding emails to the prospective. Follow-ups need to be carefully designed to get the conversation started.

Cold Outreach Email Follow Up Basics

It can get downright annoying at times to receive a recurring email from the same individual who you are not interested in. We often find such people trying to pave their way into our email inbox. However, we understand the reality of the situation when we are on the other side.

Here are some things that will help you space out follow up emails and effectively break the ice!

• After you send the opening cold outreach email, wait for two days until you receive a positive response. If you don’t hear back from the person, send another email in the same thread. Wait for two more days patiently until you hear back from them. If there is still no response from their side, send them another follow-up mail on the same thread.

• At this point, the prospecting individual has received three emails over five days. The frequency is perfect because the person is bound to notice the email thread in five days. Unfortunately, if you still don’t get a response after this, then it’s time to move on.

• If you receive a response from the person, then you move on to the response email. When you hear back from them, you have successfully established a communication channel from both ends. That is what makes the second mail as the response email special. The purpose of the second email is to convert the person for availing of your services.

• The second mail is crucial to driving them to consume the deal that you offered in the first email. Getting an immediate response is an ideal scenario. So, follow-ups are going to be a part of your routine in cold outreach emails.

• After you have sent them a response email, you can again go back to follow up every two days with another email in the same thread. This is to get an acknowledgment or response from their side. You might feel this process is time-consuming, but the results are worth it. You need to follow up until you get a definite yes/no response from their end.

• What you understand from their response is that they are interested in learning about your company/services that you are offering. You need to give them some time to ponder over the offer and get back to you. People might be forthcoming for the first email but might take time to think over the second email that you send.

A popular saying used by salesmen, ‘Money is in the follow-up.’ Stands very true in this scenario of cold outreach email. You need to be consistent and make sure you follow up because you are putting in a lot of effort and investing time in each person!

6.     Appointment Setting

This can also be called consultation. The main focus of the whole lead generation process is to reach this stage. When you send your email through, you are giving them glimpses of the services that you offer. An appointment setting or consultation meeting allows you to have a 1-on-1 conversation with the prospective and convert them into clients.

Even if your cold email outreach didn’t gain as much traction as you’d hoped, it’s still an amazing way to get the word out there. The result of the whole cold outreach process for lead generation is to reach this final step of interacting with the prospective client.

You have done your part with the accurate prospecting, investing time, and efforts in curating a personalized email and taking regular follow-ups. The deals or services that you have offered to help out in are like a glimpse into how you can add value to their existing model.

(Source: Google Images)

To set up an appointment, you can include things like, “Please don’t take this the wrong way, but your website took too long to respond. I took the liberty to check your website on Google Pagespeed Insights Tool. A slow page will kill your customer engagement performance in Google’s search. I can show you some easy tips that can fix this. Would you be interested?”

When you put things in this way, people are curious to know how you, as a business agency, can add value to their company. If you get a response on such an email, then you can go ahead and give them a little tip, but don’t give them everything. Suggest some more areas of where you have your expertise and something their business would benefit from. And then, you set a quick 5-minute zoom call consultation where you can completely convince and convert the clients for choosing your services.

If you have noticed, at every stage, we are seeing how we can add value to the prospecting person’s business. The key to personalization to keep the recipient in focus more than bragging about your business and services.

To Sum Up

Generating leads through cold outreach is something that would convert a higher percentage of people. Provided you carefully choose the prospecting list and invest the required efforts.

There are other ways to get leads too, like great FB ads strategy and execution, inbound marketing, and more – use everything in your arsenal, automate as much of it as you can, and focus on keeping your clients smiling and you’ll do great. Keep track of your KPI’s and ROI for your clients, and they’ll keep you busy!

The key to a successful lead generation process lies in the strategic personalization and follow-ups. Cold outreach email doesn’t always have to be so impersonal and spam-like. The efforts that you pour in will reap huge profits in terms of company visibility and generating quality leads.

If you take these steps one by one, you’ll come out with some high-quality leads that will enhance your sales pipeline!

Once you’ve got it down, you can start to think about building a team for link prospecting, too.

A ServiceNow wizard by trade, Gaby quit her 9-5 to pursue the world of search marketing. As a Customer Success Manager at SERPninja, she makes sure your projects get the attention they deserve. She is a certified Google Campaign Manager, HubSpot Inbound Marketing Expert and a SEMrush Expert – it is safe to say she knows exactly what she is talking about. She swears by  “The 5 Hour Work Week” but ends up working 80 hours a week to make sure your SEO is handled right.

Top Content Planning Tools that 5x your Content Marketing

by Gaby | Sep 15, 2020 | Course, Leads

You must have heard before that content is king and that you need it as a foundation for improving your content marketing game. 

You cannot convey your message to your targeted clientele without proper content. Content creation is a very intricate technique. Once you learn the masterful ways of content creation, the lead generation process becomes significantly easier. 

Why is content creation necessary, you ask? Content creation is the best way to generate leads. It is an essential tool in online marketing, and it helps companies advertise their operations how they want to. Without this valuable content, your audience will have difficulty understanding your operations.

What are Content Planning Tools?

Content planning tools help content creators to stay on track and align their creative efforts with marketing strategy and business goals. Such tools allow you to publish consistently and always have a big picture of your content landscape at hand.

You can use these tools to stay on the same page with your team while organizing your content and managing your content planning process.

These tools can be anything from simple calendars to more complex software with advanced features. These tools are essential because they help you streamline your content and increase productivity.

Why Do You Need A Content Planner?

A solid content planning strategy today is essential to stand out from the crowd. With a content planning tool, you can brainstorm ideas, plan your content strategy, create a content calendar, collaborate with team members, schedule posts in advance, and track your progress. There are many other benefits you can get that are listed here:

Consistent Flow

Publishing regularly on your website on time can be a bit difficult. Sometimes, you might even lose track of time and delay the process. You can use content planning tools to stay on top of your publishing tasks. These have options to schedule your content and will publish them automatically. The more consistent you are on your website, the more people will like spending time there.

Better Visibility

These content planner tools help you get relevant keywords for your content. With the right words, you can play around with your creativity and build a content that engages and delights your audience. You can reach your target audience much more efficiently using the relevant keywords.

Improved Brand Identity

Your brand’s name improves only if you can give value to your audience. And how can you do that? Simply by giving what your audience wants. Multiple content marketers use content planning tools as research tools to know what answers their target audience is seeking. Based on the research, various teams collaborate on creating the perfect content to enhance their brand identity.

Preventing Any Content Gaps

Content planning tools are not just used specifically for content creation but also to check how your competitors are performing. Based on the data, you can see what is missing in your content that is not letting you climb up the SERP. You can use tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush to find gaps and improve your content.

Streamlining Content Marketing Strategy

If you are developing content for multiple platforms, you are bound to get confused in the entire process. By using content planning and collaboration tools, you can easily know what work is scheduled and when so your work doesn’t collide with each other. For example, you can use a Content Calendar to know when a social media post is due, when to publish a blog, and so on.

Best Content Planning Tools To Use

Now that we know why planning is important let’s look at some of the top content planning tools to organize and effectively create great content.

1. Narrato

Are you looking for an app and tool tailored for content marketers and teams? Narrato is your go-to choice. This tool stands out by being a full-blown content marketing platform.

It’s an all-around tool that lets you gather content ideas and fine-tune your existing content. 

Features:

• You can use its AI features, grammar checks, readability boosts, and plagiarism checks.
• Save time with its personal writing assistant.
• Work collaboratively with SEO planning and content ideation tools to strengthen your content game.

Price:

Narrato offers a free trial but has different plans for different requirements. If you are working solo as an entrepreneur, you can get their Pro plan for $36/month. For larger teams, they have a business plan at $76. You can also contact them to get a customized plan for your needs. 

2. Coschedule

Coschedule is a content planning tool that makes planning and managing content much easier. It helps you stay on top of tasks and deadlines without drowning in email threads.

Now, you can avoid the frustration of endless email exchanges when planning. This online tool is your go-to for mapping out every detail of your content strategy at a glance.

Features:

• It helps you effortlessly manage schedules, meeting times, and content planning deadlines for your website.
• It lets you focus on the actual work that demands by allowing you to store all the crucial information in one place, accessible to everyone involved.

Price:

You can kick things off with a 14-day free trial, no credit card needed. If you decide to stick around, plans range from $40 to $2,200 per month, catering to different needs and budgets.

3. Content Snare

You can now forget the hassle of chasing down clients, colleagues, or content creators – this tool’s got your back. Content Snare is a content management tool for keeping your content creation game on point. 

You can say goodbye to the content chaos because Content Snare makes it easy for clients to upload their files directly, so you don’t have to do it yourself.

Features:

• All the files uploaded are all neatly stored in one place.
• This tool is not just a file storage spot; it’s a teamwork retreat.
• You can set due dates and reminders to submit projects on time.
• Use automated client reminders to focus more on your part of the project without stressing about others missing deadlines.

Price:

Try its free trial to improve your content production with Content Snare. If you wish to continue working on it, they have four plans ranging from $29/month to $179/month, all billed annually. They have a Basic plan, a Plus plan, and a Pro plan. For more features, you can get a custom-made plan by contacting them.

4. Wrike

Wrike is a content planning software that helps you and your team work together. It’s not just another project management tool; it’s a real-time collaborating tool that simplifies team communication.

Features:

• You can easily track your project and make changes with a simple drag-and-drop.
• Make your management work even simpler with its pre-built templates and customizable workflows.
• Plan projects with recent and updated information for better forecasting.
• Work along with your team at the same time by adding deadlines, tasks and building a customized dashboard.

Price:

To access the amazing features Wrike offers, you’ll have to purchase a Professional plan starting at $9.8 for each use every month.

5. Marketmuse

If you want to focus on creating SEO-optimized content, Marketmuse will help you do that. Marketmuse is an AI-based content planning platform multiple content marketers or collaborators use.

As it uses natural processing language and AI, it can check your content and suggest how to improve it. It’s an SEO-optimizing tool that makes it easier for you to develop content according to the search engines.

Features:

• It helps you generate content outlines and content briefs.
• You can analyze the strategies of your competitors.
• Check your content score by looking at its relevancy and content quality.
• You can get AI-driven suggestions to improve your content.

Price:

You can try out the platform for free, offered by Marketmuse, using its trial period. The paid plan starts at $149/month.

6. Notion

Notion is a content planning tool to build a content for your video channels, blogs, and social media platforms. You can arrange different ideas for different types of content from a single location.

Whether it is to organize your content ideas or hashtags and content pillars, you can see all of them in its user-friendly dashboard.

Features:

• Create monthly calendars to track important events and dates.
• Use templates to create engaging content like blogs, articles, newsletters, case studies, and much more.
• Publish your website on platforms like Shopify and WordPress so you can get your content reached to the right audience.
• Create roadmaps so your content team and marketing team work on the same page.

Price:

Using their free plan can be the best option if you have to use limited features. To work more seamlessly with your team members, choose from their three paid plans starting at $8/month billed annually. 

7. Canva

Want to keep your designs neat in one place? Canva content planner will do the work for you.

It is a project management tool that lets you design and create any visual content without breaking a sweat. At the same time, it helps you manage them, making it easier to handle your creative content workflows.

Features:

• Create designs using the pre-designed templates or create your own.
• You don’t need to be a professional graphic designer to use Canva.
• Improve your social media management with Canva Pro’s Content Planner, making creating and scheduling your social media content seamless.

Price:

You can use many of its features for free. But, if you want to explore and use more features, you must pay for its Pro version.

8. Google Docs

How can we ever forget the gift Google has given us when it comes to content planning? You heard that right.

You can get fantastic collaboration features all free of cost. Just sign up on Google Docs, and you’re all set to create high-quality content and manage it.

Features:

• Collaboration is easy as you and your team collaborate in real-time, no matter where you are.
• You get unlimited space to store all your folders and keep them organized.
• Google Docs auto-saves your progress, ensuring every brilliant idea is captured and preserved.
• Be it any type of content you are working on, just upload and work with various file types, from pictures to video content, enriching your website content effortlessly.

Price:

Google Docs doesn’t cost a penny. All you need is a Google account, and you’re good to go. It’s not just free for you but for your entire team, promoting seamless collaboration.

9. Ninja Content

Ninja Content is another collaborative tool to streamline your content planning process. They have AI features such as AI Writer, where you just have to enter the instructions, and the rest will be done by Ninja Content.

Features:

• It has a built-in project management tool that allows you to seamlessly plan, create, and share a piece of content across different platforms with just one tool.
• With its Content Calendar planner, you can schedule an article’s publishing time and date and even assign tasks to different team members.
• Get suggestions on relevant keywords that perfectly match your niche and industry, helping to get your content to the top.
• You can integrate Ninja Content with Google’s Keyword Planner and receive title recommendations for your blogs according to what your audience wants.
• You can brainstorm ideas for new content to achieve your goals.

Price:

Per their claims, you can access 50 content planner apps for just $14.99. To check whether they are your cup of tea, you can first try their 14-day trial period and then decide.

10. Adobe Express

ContentCal was one of the best content planning tools available, making it easy for businesses and their team members to collaborate. However, recently in March 2023, it shut down making way for Adobe Express.

The tool is much similar to ContentCal, however, is regarded as the best for social media marketing. Using Adobe Express, you can better engage with your audience on different social media platforms but at the same time, build content for your soc

Features:

• You can manage your social media posts, get new topics to work on, finalize campaigns and schedule posts on its user-friendly calendar dashboard.
• Get a preview of how your social media posts will appear to your audience.
• Set a pre-determined time to submit the post so it reaches the right audience on time.
• Helps you simplify your publishing and scheduling process by letting your publish content across multiple social media platforms.

Price:

You can give it a shot with its free plan. If you like using it, you can get a paid plan starting at $6.49/month per seat.

11. Surfer SEO

SurferSEO is an AI-powered content planning tool that helps you set up a strategy for creating content that ranks well on search engines. This platform can also help you conduct SEO audits and monitor your SERP rankings.

Features:

• You can access several integrations to help you plan, schedule, and create content.
• With its content planner feature, you can automatically generate fresh content topics and keywords for your content strategy.
• You can develop keyword clusters for a subject and find additional keyword opportunities to strengthen your position as an expert in your market.
• Use the SEO audit tool to find mistakes in your content and reuse older content to improve the search rankings for your most authoritative posts.
• Check out the content editor that offers tips for improvement based on the best-performing pages.

Price:

The pricing of Surfer SEO is quite on the higher end. The paid plans start at $119/month and go up to $419. They also offer a custom plan, the price of which may vary according to the features you want to use.

12. Ahrefs

Ahrefs isn’t just your average SEO planning platform; it’s the master of SEO toolsets. It’s jam-packed with features that’ll make your SEO strategies. But it also has a content planning feature that will make managing content easier.

Features:

• Ahrefs gives you information on the best keywords to boost your content game.
• With Ahrefs’ rank tracking feature, you can watch your website climb the search engine ranks like a boss.
• The SEO audit feature digs deep to explore important information and keep your website on top.
• Ahrefs has your back with detailed backlink analysis, helping you understand and improve your link profile.
• It lets you examine your competitors, giving you the intel to outshine them in the SEO game.
• With its Content Explorer feature, you can discover trending topics and popular content to stay ahead of the curve.
• Ahrefs’ site audit feature assists you in diagnosing and fixing issues to keep your site in peak condition.
• With Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer, you can dig deep into keywords by uncovering search volumes, click-through rates, and more to refine your strategy.
• Don’t miss any information by setting up the Alert option and get notified about new backlinks, keyword rankings, and other crucial changes affecting your site.

Price:

They offer paid plans from $99/month to $999/month. You can read here about what they offer and decide which plan to get.

13. SEMrush

SEMrush is your all-in-one toolkit for improving online visibility. It’s ideal for agencies and mid-size businesses and is the key to taking your content game from good to the best.

The content marketing tools it brings to the table assist your content-creating game by helping you find the trending topics and get recommendations for content that’s bound to skyrocket your SERP position.

It’s the most trusted tool for keyword research, blog auditing, backlinking opportunities, and more.

Features:

• It helps you find relevant topics to grab your audience’s attention and keep them hooked.
• It also has a content calendar to simplify your content publishing process, collect content ideas, customize your content for important events, align content creation with the social media team, and prevent the same content from being published twice.
• Create SEO-friendly content using its SEO Content Template for your users and search engine to grab more traffic.
• Use its SEO Writing Assistant that allows you to integrate WordPress, MS Word, and Google Docs to SEO-optimize your content on the go.
• Using its Topic Research feature to plan content and find relevant topics, titles, and frequently asked questions for better engagement.

Price:

Get a 7-day free trial to see if it’s worth giving a shot for your needs. You’ll be charged nothing within that trial period. You can get the Guru plan at $191.62 per month to unlock more content marketing and planning features.

Endnotes

Content planning tools are very important for businesses to give proper direction to their content management process and produce high-quality piece of content consistently. By using the right tool for your business, you can save time, increase productivity, and improve the overall effectiveness of your content strategy. So why not try one of these tools and see how they can transform your business?

FAQ

What is content planning in digital marketing?

Content planning is a process in which you organize your content and make strategies to reach specific goals. Through content planning, you conduct a deep research, identify your target audience, choose a content type that will please your targets and finally create a content calendar to follow proper schedule of work.

How do you do content planning?

To do content planning:

• First you need to decide on themes to use in your content.
• Then, spend some time in brainstorming for ideas about campaigns and posts to attract more people to your business.
• Make a schedule to publish the posts in a systematic way.
• Assign different responsibilities to different teams.
• Be creative with writing an engaging and attractive captions for your post.
• Use a planner to see if everyone in your team is on the same page.
• Always schedule the content in advance to avoid any hassle.

How can I choose the right content planning tools for my business?

Choosing the best content planning tool for your business can be difficult, but there are a few things to consider to make the process easier:

1. Consider your budget and how much you’re willing to spend on a tool.
2. Look at the features you need and how they align with your content creation process.
3. Check whether it has collaboration features if you are working in a large team.
4. Check the reviews of the tools from other users to get an idea about their effectiveness and user-friendliness.