By Kristin Connell
“I love filling out forms!” said no one, ever.
And 63% of marketing and sales professionals surveyed named “generating traffic and leads” as their top marketing challenge in Hubspot’s 2017 State of Inbound Marketing report. Hubspot’s report also pointed out that 74% of people say they use Facebook for professional purposes, and Facebook content consumption has increased by 57% in the past two years.
So what are marketers doing differently in response to this lead generation challenge? How can we as marketers create an optimized user experience for our future customers? One that minimizes friction for the user, while providing value for us in the lead generation process…
With these stats rolling around my mind, I reached out to one of my customer’s that had expressed an interest in using Facebook Lead Ads with Eloqua. We decided to set it up and run some tests. While the tests are still running, I wanted to share what we’ve done to date to help point others in the right direction.
Here’s how we did it and what you’ll need to do to get started:
- Facebook and Eloqua administrative access (If not, you know someone who does that can hook you up)
- Small-ish budget (For the purposes of our tests, let’s say $1000, but that’s relative)
- Engaging content + creative (I’m assuming both were created with your future customer in mind)
The first step is to create your Facebook Lead Ads campaign. As a B2B marketer using the platform, I appreciate its user-friendliness as well as the options to choose from multiple formats, real-time ad previews and an advanced option to add your own URL parameters for tracking. And the options for identifying and segmenting your audience are on target (pun intended). If you’re already familiar with Facebook Lead Ads, you’re ready to roll – but if you’re not, no worries, here’s a great post to help you get up-to-speed quickly: The Beginner’s Guide to B2B Facebook Advertising.
Quick tip 1: I recommend you consider the new-ish “Create Split Test” option that allows you to A/B split test your creative, placement, audience or delivery optimization strategies. This feature makes my marketing nerd heart so happy. Like, happy-dance happy.
Quick tip 2: The lead form itself allows you to select from a number of Facebook profile fields, all of which will be auto-populated as part of the friction-minimizing process. You can also create up to three custom fields. This is a key part of our testing, right? Presenting enough of the right questions to the right audience to ensure you have a qualified lead without pushing it too far causing them to drop-off.
Next, you’ll need to install Eloqua’s Facebook Lead Ads app in your Eloqua install. Easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy.
The third step is to create Eloqua’s Campaign Canvas with the configured Facebook Lead Ads app and your preferred lead flow, here’s how: Collecting Facebook Lead Ads data.
So let’s take a moment to address the canvas configuration in more detail… It’s one thing to drag and drop a few campaign elements onto a canvas and activate it, but I recommend we think about with the end in mind. Basically, how do you want to manage the Facebook lead traffic? Here are some points to consider:
- When configuring the Facebook Lead Ads app, you’ll need to select and map “Email” from the Facebook form to Eloqua, however, if you want to capture “Work Email” too, you’ll need to create a custom field in Eloqua to do so and map it. (Note: What’s the next step here? We’re still running tests to determine how many personal vs professional emails will be captured – stay tuned for an update).
- The Facebook Lead Ads app simply adds a new Eloqua Contact to the database. If your lead management process requires form submits to segment, score, nurture or otherwise track, then you’ll want to include the Eloqua Form Submit Action app to your Eloqua install and your canvas following your ads app.
- If you decide against using the Form Submit Action app, then you’ll want to validate the steps you’ll need to add the canvas instead, ie, Update Rule, Add to CRM Integration Program, etc…
- If you require additional information to qualify a lead to move from Eloqua to your CRM, you may want to consider an app that will support real-time data appending, such Synthio Smarter Data.
Finally – with the setup complete – activate the Eloqua Campaign, the Facebook Campaign and start monitoring the performance. As of today, our tests are still running.
I suggest testing Facebook Lead Ads with Eloqua’s Facebook Lead Ads app for yourself and let us know how they perform for you. I’ve had customers ask me to share results from others to help them make a decision, but honestly – different platforms and ad types are going to work differently based on products/services, even campaign goals. That’s why it’s important for you to experiment to determine what works best for you.
If you’d like to learn more about integrating Eloqua’s Facebook Lead Ads app with your Facebook marketing, please reach out to us and we’ll help you get started!
The post Integrate your Facebook Lead Ads with Eloqua appeared first on Sojourn Solutions.
