“The hardest part of social ads is not getting good results, but rather keeping them over time while scaling”, says Kévin Bucher, Facebook and Native ads expert and freelancer on Malt.
Every marketer today understands that social media ads are an important lever in customer acquisition and lead generation. But what’s the right strategy to go with? And how can you scale without exploding your budget?
To find out, we spoke with Kévin Bucher, Facebook and Native ads expert and freelancer working through Malt. Watch the video below (in French) or read the english transcript of the video below.
This video is part of a series called ‘The Free Experts’ where we shine a light on the expertise of our community of freelancers. Discover another video in the series, in which Francoise Terrenes discusses Customer Experience and its increasingly important role in 2023.
Transcript
Q: Can you tell us a few words about yourself and your career?
Hi, I’m Kévin Bucher. I’ve been working in the digital field, and more specifically in acquisition, for more than six years. I worked at Pichet and Dolead, two big players in lead generation, where I had the opportunity to set up the Facebook ads and native ads divisions. That’s where I specialized in acquiring new customers on these two networks.
Q: Does lead generation on social networks really work?
The answer is yes, 100%. Social ads are very complementary to Google and they don’t overlap with Google’s volume. What’s interesting with Facebook and other social networks is that they are push marketing networks. That’s the big difference with Google.
Google generally targets users who are in an active process. On the other hand, with social ads, since it’s push marketing, we target people who haven’t necessarily made an active request to see this ad. So, in theory, the volume is unlimited. However, in practice it’s limited by the number of active users and the number of people interested in the product or service.
On these networks, like on Google, it’s possible to control growth by mastering your acquisition strategy in a number of ways. The first is to optimize for the volume of leads generated. The goal here is to get more incoming leads to collect data and leads to process. Second, you can optimize for acquisition that is more profitable. This means buying at a lower cost thanks to campaigns that put that metric first. And finally, optimized for lead quality. By quality, I mean how intentional the generated leads are. Intentional leads are those that have intention in their action and are in an active process of taking action. This all works towards finding a better final customer acquisition cost.
Q: How can you control lead volume and acquisition costs?
To increase volume without exploding costs, you need to improve your CPL (cost-per-lead). To do this, you need an acquisition strategy, with a continuous improvement approach. Keep in mind that results gathered from Facebook, like those gathered from other networks and Google, will not be good immediately. They’ll necessarily need testing. I always use a continuous improvement method called the T.A.I method.
The first “T” stands for test. This consists in adding new ideas to be tested by the machine.
Then the “A” is analysis. After the test you analyze the results of everything you’ve tested to understand what is working and what isn’t.
The ‘I’ is the iteration phase. Once you have understood what is working, you can try to find out what can still be improved and then start new tests.
This method can be used continuously to improve all the time. It’s ideal for acquisition, since you have a lot of data, and you know exactly what works and what doesn’t work with a small budget. Once you have that in mind, you need to know what to test on.
I recommend always starting from the creative axis as a base. The creative axis represents the central idea of a campaign that aims to reduce an obstacle or, on the contrary, develop a motivation for the target. It’s really about illustrating the promise made to the targeted prospects via the messages you put forward.
Once you have this in mind, you need to build a funnel adapted to each creative axis with landing pages and optimized assets for the arguments you want to put forward. A very simple example in the renewable energies sector is that of solar panels. There are many different personas who could potentially purchase this product. There are people interested in ecology, people interested in savings and people interested in new technologies or the latest generation of solar panels. It’s important to adapt the landing pages and assets to each persona to get the best results.