How to Grow Leads by Customizing Your Facebook Audience

Facebook advertising is a powerful tool. As part of a robust inbound marketing strategy, Facebook ads can super-charge lead generation.

We boosted a local client’s birthday business by incorporating Facebook ads and customizing Facebook audiences. Here’s how we did it.

Birthday Party Bookings Needed a Boost

Children’s birthday parties are a key revenue stream for Pin Chasers, a family-owned bowling business. After great success with blogs, emails, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and social media marketing, we focused our efforts on increasing birthday party bookings at all three locations.

Fortunately, we knew we were marketing something fantastic. Birthday parties at Pin Chasers consistently receive 5-star reviews on Facebook, and the parents evangelize online about their experiences.

Using Facebook Ads to Spread the Word

We needed to get the core message of budget-friendly, fun birthday parties in front of new people, in the right demographic, at the right time.

Facebook advertising is a natural fit for Pin Chasers’ target audience of mothers. In order to reach a wider range of people, we took advantage of what we knew about pre-existing customers to develop a custom audience.

With custom audiences, we targeted people most likely to become sales qualified leads.

Incentivize landing pages.

We implemented Facebook Ads that directed leads to a custom landing page offering a coupon for 15% off parties. The page’s copy focused on value propositions, and the structure of the page made it easy to immediately download the coupon.

Sleuth with a Facebook Pixel.

Facebook Pixel tracked information about Pin Chasers’ website visitors. The Pixel showed us what devices visitors used to access the site and let us gather audience insights. The most important function of the Pixel was building Lookalike Audiences to create a highly-targeted ad campaign.

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Build custom audiences.

We set up 15 different custom audiences to monitor which performed best. The audience included people who had engaged with Pin Chasers’ Facebook page, visited their website, and several Lookalike Audiences.

The Lookalike Audiences performed the best, as they mirrored current customers most closely. These audiences targeted Facebook users who ‘looked like’ parents who booked birthday parties, signed up for camp or other children’s activities. Then we created radius targeting to make sure we were focusing on users within geographic range.

Here’s what Facebook says about Lookalike Audiences: “A Lookalike Audience is a way to reach new people who are likely to be interested in your business because they’re similar to people who already are… we identify the common qualities of the people in it (ex: demographic information or interests). Then we find people who are similar to (or “look like”) them in the country/countries you choose.”

Choose the right objective.

Facebook ads allow you to choose from Awareness, Consideration, or Conversion objectives. Awareness objectives are used to spread the word about your product or service. Consideration objectives get people thinking about your business and looking for information. Conversion objectives encourage people interested in your business to make a purchase.

For our purposes, we chose a consideration objective. The goals of a consideration objective are driving traffic to a landing page and increasing engagement, as well as getting app installs, video views and leads. We wanted to increase our lead generation by gathering information like email addresses and phone numbers from people who are interested in booking a party.

Format and design for the platform.

Facebook (and users) favor videos over images. With this knowledge, we used Animoto, a video creation program, to create quick, informative, and fun videos for the ads.

Enticing copy and compelling calls-to-action (CTAs) attract users and drive them to take action. We A/B tested to see which copy resonated best with our audience. We also tested the CTA buttons to see if Claim Offer was more effective than Learn More. It wasn’t. Learn More won out. Our audience wanted a bit more information before converting. Luckily, our customized landing pages delivered what they were looking for.

Use recommended automatic placement.

Facebook recommends Automatic Placement, which means Facebook shows your ad in places it’s likely to perform best based on your audience. This applies to Instagram as well as Facebook.  We followed Facebook’s recommendation and it did not disappoint.

Set budget based on conversions.

We set the campaign budget based on individual conversion worth, whether for one instance or for the lifetime of the customer.

This method allowed us to make sure we maximized return on investment (ROI). We set the daily budget and let it run for a month. At the end of the initial period, we analyzed and adjusted the budget based on the results.

Facebook Advertising Results

Before the Facebook Ad campaign, Pin Chasers was getting birthday leads, but none from social media. Once the campaign launched, leads from social took off! In January, our click-through-rate was over 4% and our click-to-customer rate was over 12%.

Once we started directing Facebook ads to the 15% off landing page, our birthday party leads increased 22.8% year-over-year.

Need help optimizing your Facebook ad strategy? Let’s talk.