Facebook, with its daily active user base of more than 1 billion, can help businesses reach new audiences they may not have been able to reach otherwise. It has become an important tool for businesses as it can help them get found online more easily, create a community around the business, help promote content and develop a strong brand identity.

Lead generation is almost always the focal point of B2B advertising. A lead can be defined as a person who has shown interest in your product or service by providing their information/details.

Here are a few steps on how businesses can use Facebook for lead generation:

CRM data

The low-hanging fruit for B2B marketers is in the data that their business already has — CRM data.

You can use email addresses of existing and potential customers to engage with them on Facebook. The custom audience and lookalike audience targeting features in Facebook ads, along with demographic, location and/or interest targeting can drive your lead-generation efforts.

But what if you only have the business email addresses of your prospects, many of whom likely use their personal email addresses on Facebook? Not a problem.

Facebook Advanced Match increases the advertising match rate of customer data using new attributes. You can target users across 14 different attributes, including primary identifiers like personal email or mobile phone number.

Facebook lead ads

Facebook lead ads have proved to be quite successful for businesses that otherwise struggle to get people to fill out forms. This is because in lead ads, Facebook automatically fills out the form with information a user has already provided to the platform (e.g. name, email, phone number, etc.).

You can also integrate/sync your CRM to provide the data to Facebook, which means more fields in the form get filled, targeting accuracy is improved and the leads directly reach your CRM system (which could reduce your TAT and help you convert the leads faster).

5 reasons your Facebook ads aren't working

Additional methods

  • Post landing pages for offers directly to Facebook, with a clear CTA and captivating headline and image.
  • Pick the blog posts that generate the most leads, and post them to Facebook.
  • Facebook posts with images see higher engagement than those without images. To turn these higher engagement rates into lead generation opportunities, consider including links to your website in the descriptions/captions for your images.
  • Facebook's algorithm favors video content. As a result, video posts have higher organic reach than photo posts. So if you're trying to increase your lead gen efforts on Facebook, you'll want to start using videos with a verbal and text CTA, for lead generation.
  • Contests and giveaways generally work well to give a push to your reach and engagement, as a result of the gratification being offered. Capitalize on this by integrating a form on the contest's landing page, which the user has to fill to be eligible/participate in the contest or giveaway.
  • Webinars and Facebook Live sessions are great formats for capturing leads. While you can promote your webinar's sign-up form by posting them to your business's Timeline, you should also create a Facebook Event with with a separate registration page on your website, to spread the word.

Note: Mobile has now become extremely important for any B2B business to win at digital advertising and lead generation. With more than a billion daily mobile users, Facebook should be a key component of your marketing efforts for lead generation.