This is one of the oldest discussions about lead generation. It's “quantity and quality.” Marketers, judged by the number of leads they generate, chase volume. However, high-value purchases in B2C and B2B help marketers see their ROI on fewer acquisitions, leading some marketers to focus on quality.
Even though new channels and new tactics enter the market regularly, the debate over how to do lead generation continues to rage, including social media channels.
Social media platforms are combining their vast collections of first-party data with artificial intelligence and machine learning to better serve marketers looking to connect with their ideal customers who are ready to buy.
And if you're looking for consumers who are interested in researching and purchasing your product, social media is a great place to start.
An engaged audience interested in your product or service
According to TINT research, more than three-quarters of consumers say they use social media to search or discover new products and vendors. More than two-thirds of consumers say they made a purchase because of something they saw on social media.
These highly motivated consumers also spend a lot of time on social media. According to Statista, as of 2024, his average daily social media usage time around the world was 143 minutes, or about 2.5 hours.
Not surprisingly, marketing leaders are focused on the relationship between social media and purchasing behavior. Social media spending is at its highest since the height of the coronavirus pandemic in the 12 months ending in August 2023, according to data from Deloitte, Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, and the American Marketing Association (AMA). It is expected that this level will be reached.
Marketers interested in leveraging social must make educated decisions regarding tactics. Choose from brand awareness, driving traffic, and collecting leads.
“Our lead generation products have evolved over the years,” said Becky Bui, Meta’s senior director of North American small business sales. “In 2016, they focused on high-volume, low-cost leads. Since then, we have invested in supporting quality for our customers.”
Meta saw a 16.6% year-over-year increase in lead ad submissions in 2023 compared to 2022. In 2023, there will be more than 1.1 billion lead ad submissions worldwide, making it the first time that Meta has exceeded 1 billion lead ad submissions in a single year.
Of course, social media platforms like Meta have a wealth of data. And much of the information advertisers request from prospects is already available in lead generation forms. Meta's flagship lead generation product is instant forms within Facebook and Instagram. The reader's information is automatically filled in when the form loads, and leads are generated on MetaHis platform rather than sending the prospect to your website.
If visitors have to visit an advertiser's website to fill out a form, Meta typically reduces conversions by 20%. In a test comparing instant forms to website forms optimized for website conversions, Meta found that instant forms can reduce cost per qualified lead (CPQL) by 20% over website forms.
Another advantage of lead capture forms on social platforms is that they are easy to edit. Marketers who rely on developers to make changes to their website can't immediately react when they want to change lead form questions or make visual changes. Marketers can quickly and easily modify forms with instant running meta properties.
Lead generation is often synonymous with the B2B sector in modern marketing, but big-ticket products in the B2C space use similar tactics as in B2B. These purchases include cars and home improvement services.
Lauren Petrullo is the CEO and founder of marketing agency Mongoose Media LLC. She runs lead generation campaigns on her Meta platform and generates highly qualified leads for clients in the home improvement industry. Most notably, her client was able to close her $24,000 deal in just 6 days using lead generation with Meta Property.
Petrullo has been running PPC ads on search platforms for years, but he's changing his agency's strategy.
“From October to November [2023]We’ve been eliminating form search ads across local and national campaigns,” she told MarTech.
Petrullo also found that lead generation forms on social media allowed her and her team to ask very personal questions. For example, in a campaign for a travel agency, she asked potential customers about her travel plans. You can also control questions using conditional logic to help identify the right prospects for your campaign.
Any more questions? Do you have a more personal question? Isn't this a digital marketing heresy?
“Every business is different,” Meta's Bui told MarTech. “Some companies need to reduce friction.”
Petrullo's agency is not among them.
“We added as much friction as we could,” she said. “You get better leads, more important leads. I wanted to get a $200 lead, but it costs $20.”
A long lead generation form can fail a B2B campaign, but in a B2C setting on social media, it may just fit the tone of your prospects.
“I would argue that social media is social first,” Petrullo said. “They want a conversation. People share on Instagram and Facebook what they want others to know about themselves.”
If there's a downside to instant forms that are pre-filled with information and almost ready to send, it might be that they're too instant.
“I typically avoid instant forms because they're too easy and easy to fill out incorrectly, leading to poor lead quality,” says Search Engine Land contributor and multimedia specialist agency JXT Group. says founder Menachem Ani. – Channel online advertising. “In some cases, we use the instant form and add in some limited questions. But we primarily drive traffic to landing pages.”
Ani told MarTech that he found that the challenge with lead generation campaigns at Meta was getting quality leads, and it was a matter of messaging and audience targeting. For creatives, Ani's team uses his creatives dynamically. Dynamic Creative takes multiple media assets and ad components and combines them to create campaign ads for use in low-budget campaigns. For high-budget campaigns, separate ad units are created.
Ani's lead generation efforts are primarily focused on Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising, and Meta.
Learn more: Marketers' guide to Reddit
B2B purchasing processes are often much more complex and time-consuming than B2C. This has implications for how marketers think about lead generation in general.
“Social media lead generation is about more than just what you do on social media,” says Laura Schiele. She is a past speaker at the MarTech Conference, a contributor to Search Engine Land, and head of paid acquisition at Jordan Digital Marketing.
Schiele says among the things marketers should consider are the lead's goals and what happens after the lead fills out the form. A common mistake in B2B is to think that people who fill out forms are sales-ready. Schiele calls this assumption “inconsistency.”
Learn more: LinkedIn introduces CTV ads for B2B campaigns
Schiele and her team use lead forms with closed questions to filter out irrelevant leads. She has also had success using some of Meta's Advantage+ features, which use machine learning to optimize campaigns and creative for advertisers.
But B2B prospects often require a lot of education due to the cost and complexity of their purchases and because they don't make decisions alone. Many people, including leadership, need to be on the same page.
Therefore, Schiele prefers to use social media platforms as a content distribution channel and remarket to its audience on platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook with demo offers. This approach provides more value than simply gating content with forms.
“The return on leads from whitepapers is pretty low,” Schiele told MarTech.
When it comes to LinkedIn, marketers need to realize that it is completely different from other social platforms.
“We found out that we were spending a lot of money [on LinkedIn] And we didn't get a demo,” Schiele said.
The problem, she says, is often creative, and LinkedIn needs to take that into account. Schiele's team has seen success with video and carousel ads on LinkedIn. When it comes to remarketing to LinkedIn members on Facebook, Schiele said, sometimes it works, but when it doesn't, she moves on.
“If you're not having much success with remarketing, I don't recommend testing it too much,” she says.
