4 tips for advertisers to find quality leads and drive sales

For businesses that need to build a customer pipeline by responding to or creating demand, social environments like Meta's apps can offer what traditional lead generation methods like direct mail or search can't: personalized connection with people open to discovery who are not searching for a specific product or service.¹ In fact, two in three online shoppers agree that social media makes them likely to try new brands and products. Businesses can create and respond to demand with Meta's lead generation products.

Meta's lead generation solutions are focused on helping advertisers find customers that are most likely to engage, convert, and remain loyal to the brand. Most recently, they're evolving to help advertisers drive a high volume of quality leads. In a 2023 study, Meta's instant forms product delivered a 20% lower cost-per-qualified lead (CPQL) when compared to website forms.² This means that with native lead generation products, many advertisers can focus their attention on their highest value potential customers at a lower cost. 

Take Panoramic Doors, a high-end windows and sliding doors retailer based in Dallas, Texas. They use instant forms that allow customers to share simple information like name, email, and budget to generate quality leads that drive sales. The brand recently closed a $24,000 sale in six days with an instant form lead. 

To make the most of Meta's lead generation solutions, consider these four tips.

1. Take advantage of seasonal trends

New Year's resolutions, spring cleaning, and summer vacation are all prime moments when potential customers will be more likely to be interested in your services. Last spring, between the months of April and June, there was 19% year-on-year growth in Meta lead ad submissions.³ Take advantage of these peak seasons to find new customers to grow your business.

2. Make it easy with instant forms

Using tools that eliminate friction for your potential leads and don't require your customer to click off site –  such as auto-filling user info or quick loading on mobile – can prevent leads dropoff. According to Aly Gomez, a Capacity Interactive Consultant, clients are finding instant form leads to be stickier than the leads generated from their website. She recommends focusing on making the form as short as possible by only requesting the user's name and email address.

3. Use Meta's advanced AI to find your target campaign audience 

For small business advertisers, ad sets that use Advantage+ audience with instant forms had 8% lower cost-per-lead, on average, compared to ad sets that used the original audience experience.⁴

4. Improve performance and lead quality with new features

Generating more valuable leads is easier than ever with new features like conditional logic, which can help qualify leads by creating an instant form containing multiple questions within a question flow. John Wai Martial Arts sought to elevate the quality of its leads while minimizing cost-per-quality lead. Leveraging conditional logic, the team streamlined lead submissions by instantly pre-filling prospective customers' details from their Facebook profiles after clicking on an ad. This enabled quick follow-up by the John Wai team and increased the conversion rate from lead to customer by 62% compared to using the instant forms alone.

For lead generation advertisers, integrate your CRM with Conversions API, which can enable a business to leverage their CRM data to drive performance. This works by creating a direct connection between a business' marketing data and Meta's ads delivery systems. A recent analysis of instant forms campaigns found those that had a CRM optimized for conversion leads and connected to the Conversions API cut cost-per-quality lead by 15% and increased those quality lead conversions by 44% on average.⁵ To support businesses of all sizes with CRM integration, Meta has expanded the roster of low friction Meta Business Partners to include Hubspot and Zoho. And for smaller businesses that aren't ready to integrate their CRM, Meta Business Suite (MBS) now includes a free, lightweight CRM system, available to all businesses on Meta, that's designed to simplify lead management from instant forms or click-to-message ads. 

Watch the video to hear more tips from advertisers who are driving quality leads at scale with Meta's instant forms, or learn more here.

This post was created by Meta with Insider Studios

¹ "Discovery-Led Shopping Study" by GFK (Meta-commissioned online survey of 12,000+ respondents ages 18 - 74 in the AU, BR, CA, FR, DE, IN, ID, MX, SK, JP, UK, US, Q2 2022. Qualifying respondents shop online at least twice a month and made an online purchase of beauty, furniture, electronics and/or apparel in the past 3 months at the time of the study.

² Analysis of 15 global 3-cell A/B tests run from Nov 2022-Feb 2023 where advertisers self-reported results and used website forms that were similar to their Meta forms. 86% confidence level. Test compared instant forms campaigns using the conversion leads performance goal against website forms campaigns optimized for website conversions.

³ Year-over-year analysis of over 500M global lead ads submissions across all verticals between April 1, 2022 - June 30, 2022 and April 1, 2023 - June 30, 2023

 ⁴ Analysis based on 9K randomly sampled observations of ad sets from small business group advertisers using Advantage+ audience or the original audience experience that were optimizing for lead generation and quality leads; Oct - Nov 2023.

⁵ Results based on A/B tests on 273 advertisers, with ads delivered globally from Jan 11-28, 2024, and included incentives. Results were statistically significant at a 95% confidence level. Performance may vary. Conversion from lead to quality lead occurs when a user takes a qualifying, lower funnel action identified by the business, which moves them into a "quality lead" status. Qualifying actions or events vary by business, based on their individual sales funnel event stages.