Generating Leads – FB Ads Strategy

Intro

First off, let’s start off by defining what a lead actually is, as it’s a term that tends to get thrown around and confused quite often. Simply put, a lead is somebody who is interested in your product, service, or brand.** A lead can eventually turn into a customer if they’re sold on you, your product, or your service (or if you just have some really good marketing).

A lead is an individual who has yet to be converted. So, the more targeted your lead generation strategy is, the higher the likelihood that your leads will eventually turn into sales and make your business money.

In the past, leads were mostly obtained through door-to-door sales, cold calls, billboards, and print marketing. Today, however, social media has opened up an entirely new way to generate high-quality, targeted leads for your business. Facebook is, by far, the largest social media platform in the world, and it has an outstanding advertising platform for businesses.

In this article, we’ll delve into the basics of Facebook ads and how to use them to generate new leads for your business or website. If done right, Facebook can skyrocket the success of your business and take your sales to the next level!

Attracting Leads With Facebook Ads

Compared to most traditional forms of lead generation, the Facebook ads platform offers one of the highest returns on investment in the market. Traditional forms of advertising, such as television, radio, print ads, and even Google Ads can cost an arm and a leg. Typically speaking, you’d have to budget thousands of dollars per month to run a successful lead generation campaign with traditional advertising methods!

With Facebook, on the other hand, you can invest as little as $5 per day and start seeing a positive return on your investment! If you’re working with a larger budget, you can invest thousands of dollars a day and see an even better return. Ultimately, the choice is yours and is entirely dependent on the size of your business and marketing budget.

Getting leads for your business always requires a bit of finesse. You need to make sure that your ads are directed at the right demographic. Otherwise, there’s a high chance that they’ll just be ignored. For example, you wouldn’t want to direct your ads for a burger restaurant in the vegetarian community, or try to market high-end winter jackets to people living in Texas, right?

That being said, if you want to maximize the return on your investment, you’ll want to make sure that you’ve done the appropriate demographic research and testing to ensure that you’re marketing to the right group(s) of people.

Advertising 101: How An Ad Funnel Works

When it comes to creating a successful ad strategy, you need a process. In business, this is often referred to as a sales funnel or an ad funnel. As the name implies, you “catch” a lot of customers with the large top-end of the funnel and slowly filter them down to an actual sale.

For example, if your ad captures the attention of 10,000 people (10k impressions), an average of around 9% (in this case, around 900) of them will convert into customers who shop with you or take a sales-driven action on your site. The percentage of impressions that turn into sales is known as your Facebook ads conversion rate.

An advertising funnel typically has three main layers or processes that slowly drive impressions to the point of making a sale. Often, many viewers will need to be “warmed up” to your brand and may view your ads numerous times before they ever visit your site or purchase a product from you.

The three steps to an ad funnel are:

Generating brand attention.
Brand discovery and exposition.
Brand consideration and sales.

1) Generating Brand Attention

The first step is to generate brand attention. In this case, you’ll be using what you know about your target demographic to create engaging ads directed at the various groups of people who make up your core demographic of customers (or potential customers).

In this case, you’ll use knowledge about your existing customers to custom tailor ads for the type of people who are most likely to purchase your brand or use your service. For example, if you’re a local real estate agency, then you might run ads directed at local married individuals over the age of 25 who have kids.

Generally speaking, you want to advertise to a “warm” audience. This means directing ads at people who already have a good chance of being at least somewhat interested in what you offer.

Conversely, if you’re trying to offer a brand-new product or service, then you may need to invest more money upfront in order to advertise to a “cold” audience who may or may not be interested in what your brand offers. Eventually, you’ll use your advertising metrics to determine your best-performing ad strategies.

Using tools like Ranktracker’s Rank Tracker SEO tool in correlation with Facebook ads can help you determine exactly how much extra traffic you’re generating each month with your FB ads campaign. This data can be used to modify or expand upon your ad strategy.

Rank Tracker will show you exactly how much monthly traffic you’re getting to your site and how its overall performance is in search engine results.

2) Brand Discovery

The first step of running Facebook ads is to garner attention for your brand. The second step, however, is to encourage people to take a closer look at your brand. This is known as the “Brand Discovery” stage.

For this, it can be helpful to use data that you’ve obtained from Ranktracker’s Keyword Discovery tool. The tool allows you to enter in primary keywords, which can then be used to help you find some of the other secondary (discovery-stage) terms that interested individuals are searching for.

These results can be used to create custom-tailored ads that drive further engagement. For example, you might encourage interested individuals to sign up for an email newsletter, participate in a poll/survey, or participate in an AR (augmented reality) ad.

3) Brand Consideration and Sales

Finally, we have the third step of the ad funnel: brand consideration and sales. In this stage of advertising, you’ll primarily be driving interested, targeted leads into strongly considering your brand or, finally, making a purchase.

For the most part, this involves really building trust in your brand. You’ll want to use testimonials, share previous results, and create a smooth, seamless, and secure transaction that makes it easy for your customers to buy from you.

Getting People To Care About Your Facebook Ads

Keep in mind that your Facebook ads won’t always be the most welcome thing in a user’s newsfeed. Most users are on the platform to network with friends/family, keep up with their groups and pages, or just be entertained. Often, ads miss the mark because they don’t properly engage the user.

This means that you need to be truly creative when creating a Facebook ad. Write some good copy, use vibrant photos, action-driven videography, or ask engaging questions in your polls. The more direct you can get with your ads and the more value you offer viewers, the better of a response you’ll get.

Tweaking Your Advertising Strategy

As you advertise with Facebook, you’ll inevitably receive valuable feedback that you can use to improve your ads, customer service, and sales process. Basically, you’ll need to start by identifying your audience’s key pain points. These are problems that your brand can solve, and can also be used to create more engaging Ads.

For example, let’s say that you’re trying to advertise a brand-new electric, battery-powered lawnmower. One of the best ways to create ads that work is to address your target audience’s pain points when it comes to mowing the lawn. This could be statements in your ad copy, such as:

“Are you tired of breathing in gas fumes every time you walk into your garage?”
“Are you sick of performing expensive maintenance on your mower’s gas engine?”
“Mow your lawn 30% faster with our high-powered electric lawnmowers!”

As you continue to advertise, you may get direct feedback from your ad’s viewers. They may leave valuable hints in the comments by asking you specific questions that they felt weren’t addressed by your ad (e.g., “What makes you different from [x competitor]?”).

You may even get negative feedback, letting you know that your ad was boring, missed the point, or was insensitive.

You should take all of this data and use it to create better, more accurate, more targeted, and more efficient Facebook ads! Remember, the ultimate goal of advertising is to increase your conversion rate. This can only be done by constantly improving the quality of your ads and ensuring that your audience’s needs are being addressed to the best of your abilities.

Facebook Ads and Audiences 1.3k

So, now that you have a little bit better of an idea about how ad funnels work, it’s time to discuss the most important aspect of creating Facebook ads. Namely, choosing your audience!

During this step, you’ll use everything that you know about your existing brand audience, research new audiences, and really break down who is going to buy your brand and respond to your ads. The more time and effort you spend identifying and catering ads to your audience, the better results you’ll get in terms of conversion rates.

In fact, the world’s largest brands often spend millions of dollars researching and identifying with their target audience before they ever pay to promote ads to their target audience. Just look at Starbucks’ pumpkin spice latte!

The company spent the better part of a year working on ads and figuring out how best to advertise it… Now, they sell nearly $500 million worth of pumpkin spice lattes globally, every single year.

Point being?

If you do your demographic research and really take the time to build a niche audience for your brand, it will pay off by producing a higher return on investment and earning you more sales than you ever thought possible. So, before you get trigger-happy on launching your ad, make sure that you perform your due diligence and get your research done.

Identifying Your Site’s Existing Audience

If you already have a brand that’s seen previous success online or in a brick-and-mortar environment, then you can start with your existing data to build a target audience. For example, if you sell life insurance, you may realize that your target audience typically consists of men over 40 with children who are middle to high income.

When identifying your audience, you really want to try to break down the key aspects of your clientele. You may find that you have more than one primary audience, which is perfectly okay as well!

The aspects you’ll examine when creating an audience are:

Their age range.
Their interests (hobbies, sports, habits, etc.).
Their race or what language they speak.
Whether or not they have children.
What region they live in (urban, country, suburban).
The city, state that they live in.
Average annual income.
College graduate or not.

There are other factors, but these are some of the primary ones you’ll want to look at when examining your existing audience.

How To Use SEO Metrics and Data To Refine Your Audience

If you’ve been using SEO tools such as Ranktracker’s Rank Tracker SEO tool, then you’ll have some good data to use that’s based on the primary keywords that search engine users are using to find your site.

Rank Tracker allows you to see how your site ranks for niche keywords. This, in turn, can be used to help you identify some details about your audience. The keywords bringing your site traffic could show you key details about your audience, such as:

Whether they’re looking to buy a specific product.
Whether they’re looking to solve a specific problem.
What questions they want answered about your brand.

You can then use all of this data to help you create structured Facebook ads directed at a targeted audience, who will appreciate your direct approach to solving their problems and answering their questions before they even ask them!

How To Find A New Audience With FB Ads

You shouldn’t stop at your existing audience, though. When it comes time to create ads with Facebook, you have to keep in mind that you’ll be advertising to the entire internet! This means that your business could benefit from advertising to brand-new audiences that you may not have even thought of, in the first place.

Once you log in to your Facebook Ads Manager, you’ll be able to create niche audiences based on a number of different factors, including:

Age range.
Interests (pages followed and liked).
Country.
Gender.
...and more.

As you refine your audience, Facebook Ads Manager will present you with a small dial that will show you whether your ads are targeted or broad, as well as how many impressions you can expect to make using a given budget.

Use Backlink Finder To Find New, Targeted Audiences!

One interesting trick that you can use is to “steal” some of your competitors’ audience. To do this, you’ll need to do some research away from Facebook. You’ll need to identify who your main competitors are and check out what type of audience they’re selling to.

First, you’ll want to enter the primary keyword for your site into Ranktracker’s Keyword Finder Tool. This will provide you with some useful secondary and supporting keywords related to your own business. Record the top-performing keywords.

Next, you’ll want to plug in the keywords you found into Ranktracker’s SERP Checker SEO tool. This will show you who the top competitors are for these keywords. You’ll be able to see all of the brands that are dominating the market for the given keyword.

Now, we’re going to get into some sneaky tactics… stealing your competitors’ audience (or at least hijacking them).

For this step, you’ll want to use Backlink Checker. This tool allows you to check all of the niche pages that link back to the competitor’s main site. These are referred to as backlinks, and they can provide some excellent insight into potential target audiences for your brand.

For example, let’s just say that you happen to notice that your competitor has a lot of backlinks from athletic-oriented blogs.

You could visit each of these blogs and get a feel for the average user who’s reading through the blogs. Then, you can use that same data to create brand-new target audiences for your Facebook ads!

Remember, creating great-performing Facebook ads is all about being the most creative player in the game.

Customizing Your Target Audience With Facebook Ads

You’ll be able to choose a broad range of customization options when it comes to your Facebook ads. You can target a broad audience (e.g., Facebook users between 18 and 65 who like sports); or, you can target a targeted, niche audience (e.g., Facebook users who are males between 18 and 30 who like college basketball and the Miami Heat basketball team).

Broad, Niche, and Super-Niche Audiences

Broad ads generally provide you with a higher number of impressions and are great for generating brand awareness (step 1 in our ad funnel, described above).

Niche ads, on the other hand, generally won’t provide you with as many impressions. However, they will provide you with a more targeted, interested audience. Niche audiences typically have a higher conversion rate and are great for brand discovery and engagement (step 2 in our ad funnel).

That being said, you need to be careful about how you pick your niche audience. If you create too small of a niche and it’s the wrong one, then you’ll have wasted a lot of money on ads. This is why we recommend starting with broader ad groups and using accumulated ad data to create more specialized niches over time.

How To Create Content For Your Chosen Audience

Now, let’s talk about the next most important step: creating content for your chosen audience.

1) Work On Ideas

First, you’ll want to start with ideas. Write down each key audience and make a long list of potential types of content that they’ll like. For instance, millennials tend to prefer video ads while generation Z may prefer interactive AR-style ads. Some demographics might enjoy a comedic ad, while others may enjoy a more serious advertising style.

This is all completely dependent on the product/service you’re selling and the target audiences that you’ve identified through your in-depth research. Once you’ve created a long list of potential ad styles and interests for your target demographics, work on writing down some basic ideas for ads for each audience.

2) Create Content Based On Ideas

Now, it’s time to use your ideas to create content! Let’s just say that you’ve narrowed down that your product’s target audience mostly consists of Facebook users between 18 and 25 who appreciate comedy and satire. So, you’ll want to employ a videographer and maybe a funny friend of yours to create a funny, engaging video ad to create your ad.

Conversely, maybe your target audience prefers long-form written content, so you’ll employ a high-quality copywriter to tell a written story with your ad.

Generally speaking, it’s best to create multiple types of ads for your brand and test them side-by-side.

3) Publish and Split-Test Content

Once you’ve created and edited your content, it’s time to apply them to your ads, publish them, and split-test them. Split-testing is the process of testing the performance of two different ads to see which one does better. It could involve testing two different ads with the same audience or could involve testing the same ad against two different audiences.

During the split-testing phase, you’ll want to conserve your advertising budget and spend a reduced amount. This stage is all about obtaining data. So, instead of spending $1,000 on each ad, maybe limit your daily expenditure to $20/day on each ad.

After a week of running each ad simultaneously, you’ll have some valuable data that you’ll be able to view in your Facebook Ads Manager. This will let you know which ad or audience resulted in traffic to your website or sales conversions!

4) Go All-In On High-Performing Content Ads

After reviewing the data, you’ll be able to tell which ad performed the best. Or, perhaps neither of them performed well and it’s time to go back to the drawing board. Either way, you’ll know how to move forward.

If one ad ended up being successful on the limited test budget, then the chances are that it will do great once you go all-in and invest more money into it. So, ditch the under-performing ad and invest your Facebook ad budget into the high-performing ad.

Split-testing your ads can be a bit tedious and time-consuming but it’s well worth it in the end and will save you a lot of potentially wasted money spend by taking shots in the dark.

Creating Top-Funnel Facebook Ad Campaigns

At the beginning of this guide, we explained a bit about the three different layers of an ad funnel. To review, they are:

Brand Awareness.
Brand Discovery.
Brand Consideration and Conversion.

When you’re just getting started out with your Facebook ads platform, you primarily want to focus on the top of the funnel, or generating brand awareness. This is for two reasons:

It will help generate valuable ad data to create more niche-related ads for steps 2 and 3.
It will allow you to focus on slowly leading top-of-the-funnel leads down the sales funnel.

In this section, we’re going to show you how to create and optimize ads that will generate overall brand awareness and help you stick out in Facebook users’ minds. Let’s dive in!

Creating Ads Optimized For Top-of-the-Funnel Leads

When you’re advertising to leads at the top of the funnel, you’ll generally be advertising to a broader target audience. This will ensure that your ad receives a broad level of exposure and gets plenty of impressions.

What it also means is that you’ll need to focus on your ad’s “wow factor.”

Basically, this is the first time that Facebook users are going to come into contact with your brand. And as the saying goes, “First impressions are everything.”

If you create ads that fail to establish a connection with viewers, then you risk losing a potential customer or at least failing to impress them. This will make future advertising efforts more difficult and costly.

So, this means that you’ll want to put your all into making high-quality ads optimized for your broad target audience. From creating beautifully edited pictures and videos to writing engaging, easy-to-read copy, you don’t want to spare any expense or any attention to detail here.

The type of ads and promoted content that you showcase for top-of-the-funnel leads is going to be less sales-driven and centered more around generating buzz and brand awareness. In this stage, you’ll want to focus on really nailing down the value proposition of your product:

What’s so cool about it?
Why is it the best thing since sliced bread?
What are your customers raving about?
What can you give for free (or at a discount) that will inspire trust and build awareness?

Creating An Engaging And Effective Facebook Video Ad

Video ads are, by far, the most commonly consumed form of Facebook ad on the internet. In fact, a recent study suggested that over 45% of all consumers preferred video ads and 56% of all millennials preferred video ads over image or text-based ads.

So, if you’re just getting started with your brand and you want to generate some hype and buzz, then video ads are hands-down the best way to go. If you can create an engaging and entertaining video ad with a strong value proposition, you’ll be well on your way to generating substantial buzz and garnering future customers for your business.

Who knows? Maybe your video ads get so much attention and are so entertaining that it goes viral and is shared across the platform!

With that being said, here are some great tips to create an engaging and effective Facebook video ad.

1) Grab The Audience’s Attention

First things first, you need to grab people’s attention! According to a study by Harvard Business Review, video ads typically have around 5 seconds to capture viewers’ attention. That means you need to start off with a bang. A boring conversation or irrelevant scenery won’t cut it when it comes to getting new viewers to care.

For example, if you’ve ever seen the video ads for Dr. Squatch soap, you’ll remember the first five seconds feature the protagonist yelling at the screen, saying, “You’re not a dish; you’re a MAN!” which is followed by him throwing a plate and shattering it.

Instantly, the viewer is hooked and wants to know what all the hype is about. Before long, they’ve watched an entire 8-minute-long ad without even realizing it. If you watch some of the old Oxi-Clean ads by Billy Mays, you’ll notice the same thing.

Be engaging, grab their attention, and hold it!

2) Add Video Text and Captions

These days, people require more effort to keep their attention. Otherwise, they’ll be trying to read somebody else's comment or message while they’re watching your video (which isn’t conducive to sustained attention).

So, to make your videos more engaging, throw some large-font text and captions into your video at certain intervals where you want your viewer to be fully engaged. Use power words in these captions that grab attention.

Also, keep in mind that many viewers will be consuming your content and ads while they’re at work, on the toilet, or somewhere else where they can’t play your ad at full volume. So, it’s always a good idea to add closed captions to your video, so people can see what you’re saying even if they have the volume turned down.

3) Don’t Skimp On Editing

If you want to impress your viewers, then you need to make sure that you’re creating videos with great editing. Put yourself in the shoes of your viewer… If somebody was trying to sell you something but didn’t even take the time to edit a paid advertisement, would you have faith in the product or service they’re advertising?

… Probably not.

So, download a free video editor and teach yourself some basic video editing by watching YouTube videos. Or, better yet, go on a site like Fiverr or Upwork and hire a freelance video editor to edit your commercial for you, so that you can focus on the important stuff!

4) Thumbnails Are EVERYTHING

Whether you’re creating your own video ads or contracting them out to freelancers, remember that thumbnails are everything. If your video ad doesn’t have an attention-capturing thumbnail, then nobody is going to press play and even try to watch it, in the first place.

5) Use Real Footage and Testimonials

Lastly, consider adding some real-life footage of your product/service to your video ads. Inserting clips of a customer’s testimonial is also a great way to garner some trust from the jump.

It shows that other people are on board with your brand and like what you’re selling. Using footage of your product itself is also a great way for viewers to simulate what it’s like for them to use the product for themselves.

Copywriting Tips For Facebook Ads

Creating a great video should be the first step of creating a top-funnel Facebook ad designed to attract the attention of new users. However, the copy that you write for your ad is just as important.

Writing copy isn’t just for text-based or image-based ads, either. You can attach a significant amount of copy to a video advertisement as well. In fact, you should. The better of a presentation that you can give on your brand in one go, the more effective it will be at generating a response from your viewers.

Also, keep in mind that people are used to focusing their attention in multiple directions at once. This means that many viewers will enjoy reading through your ad copy as they’re watching or listening to your ad video at the same time. The more ways that you can capture and keep their attention, the better chance you have of being remembered.

So, with that being said, here are some helpful tips to write great copy for your Facebook ads.

1) Consider The Audience’s Needs

Throughout the course of your video ad, you’ll be addressing some of your audience’s primary needs and explaining how your product/service can address them. You should also write about them and ensure that special care and attention is given to them.

This may mean discussing primary audience needs at the top of the ad copy in order to immediately grab readers’ attention. As they’re scrolling down past your video, maybe a key word or phrase grabs their attention and they’re like, “Wait, maybe I SHOULD see what this ad has to say!”

2) Create An Emotional Connection

Learn how to create an emotional connection with the viewer. This emotion can be positive, negative, or relatable (the most common). Sometimes, when you connect on overly positive or overly negative emotions, you risk turning away viewers who don’t feel that way. However, by focusing on a level of relatability, you can create a true connection with the viewer.

For example, let’s just say you’re selling a t-shirt that doesn’t wrinkle…

Instead of expressing anger at t-shirts that do wrinkle or expressing joy at t-shirts that don’t wrinkle, maybe express the relatable feeling of being in a rush to work and having to iron your shirt before you miss the bus. Everybody reading will be like, “Yep… I’ve been there before! Maybe this guy’s product is worth a try.”

3) Keep It Simple, Stupid

Ultimately, people like simple content. Most people aren’t on Facebook to read a lengthy manifesto. They’re there to consume quick, engaging content, whether it’s a friend’s status update, a funny video, OR a relatable advertisement.

So, while your ad copy should be engaging, should grab attention, and should create an emotional connection, it needs to do this simply.

Avoid lengthy 5 or 6-line paragraphs that hurt peoples’ eyes. Instead, focus on short 1 or 2-line statements. Use bullet points, spacing, and capitalized words to grab attention and make your copy easy and simple to read.

Remember, half of the people reading your ad are surrounded by noise and distractions, so the simpler your ad copy is to read, the better the chance that it’ll be read.

4) Tell A Story

Hey, people like stories. When you explain the process that led to you creating this product or how hard you had to work to create the ultimate service package, it gives people a small window into the background and history of the brand.

When Johnny Walker displays their ad detailing hard-working men and women in a distillery working in the early-1900s, it shows brand history, legacy, and appreciation for the hard work that goes into creating a fine whiskey.

No matter what you’re selling or advertising, there’s a story behind what it took to create it. You don’t have to bore them with all of the details, but try to explain some catalysts and breakthroughs that led to the creation of “the ultimate product.”

Free Webinars = Lots of Leads

One of the most tried and proven methods of lead generation is to offer free webinars. Webinars are basically short, detailed live-video presentations that focus on specific topics relating to your brand or service. Chances are that you’ve probably attended a few free webinars yourself!

Hosting a webinar has numerous benefits for your brand, such as:

It shows that you have valuable information to offer.
It shows that you’re an expert in the field.
It builds trust with potential customers and leads.
It builds your list of email and phone leads.
It can be used to upsell your other products and services.
It’s great for brand awareness.

Let’s just say that you own a travel agency… You could host a webinar showing people how to find low-cost, high-value activities on their trips. Maybe you own a large landscaping company and host a webinar on how to plant and care for seasonal flowers. Or, perhaps, you own an SEO agency and you host a webinar on how to use Google Analytics.

Your webinar should offer something valuable. You don’t want to BS your viewers, or else they’ll lose faith in your brand forever. This means it’s essential to provide them with useful, targeted, and practical information. This will build trust and show you’re willing to give.

However, your webinar shouldn’t give everything away for free. You’ll spend a lot of time talking about concepts or showing specific instructions to accomplish a specific task. Then, you’ll insert your upsell by saying something along the lines of, “If you want to learn more and get an in-depth view of my exact sales copy, get one-on-one access with me, click the link below to join my mastermind group.”

On one hand, you’re giving away free, valuable information… But with the other hand, you say, “Here, I have SO MUCH MORE to offer you if you’re willing to compensate me.”

So, here are some tips to create a great webinar!

Marketing Your Webinar On Facebook

Once you create your webinar, Facebook is one of the best places to advertise it. It’s best to schedule your webinar for some time in the near future (let’s just say a few days or a week in advance).

You can run a lead generation-style Facebook ad designed to get your target audience to submit their email in exchange for being able to attend your webinar.

Marketing Your Webinar With SEO Tools

Social media is a great place to market your webinar. However, it’s also a great idea to try to market your webinars with SEO tactics to get them ranking in Google SERPs results. For this, you’ll want to have a solid understanding of your target audience and the keywords they’re using to find your brand.

Ranktracker’s Keyword Finder and SERP Checker tools are great for finding niche keywords that you can use to advertise your webinar and quickly ranking it on the first page of Google.

Ranktracker’s premier Rank Tracker tool will help you track your webinar page as it ranks higher and higher in search engine results for the targeted keywords. The Web Audit tool will also show you the best steps you can take to improve your webinar landing page and how to make it rank higher and get more attention.

Remember, your webinar doesn’t have to just be a one-time event. Maybe you plan a solid webinar and offer it on a weekly basis to new leads. A single, high-quality webinar can be used and re-used over the course of an entire year if you plan it well.

It’s just like how public speakers or traveling artists repeat the same seminar or perform the same songs throughout the course of their seasonal tours. Each time, you’ll be addressing new leads, which means the content will be new to them. So, it’s worth investing time into promoting your webinar over time.

How To Create A Successful Webinar

To start with, you’ll need to create a webinar. Overall, this should be the easiest part of the whole thing. All you’ll be doing is presenting a topic that you’re already well-versed in and sharing it with others. To you, it might be old news; but to new leads, this could be vital, valuable information that they never knew existed!

Here’s how to create a successful webinar that’s guaranteed to get you tons of high-quality, targeted leads.

1) Start With A General Topic

First off, you’ll want to start off with a general topic. Save all of the hyper-advanced content for your paid webinars or your paid services/products that you’ll offer in the future. For example, if you do seminars showing people how to make money in real estate, consider offering a free webinar on what real estate wholesaling is.

It’s a generalized topic that most newcomers to the industry don’t know about. However, it’s often a complicated topic that’s best explained in a webinar-style format where you can spend 30 minutes breaking it down into simple, easy-to-understand terms.

If you’re having trouble coming up with a topic for your webinar, then pull up Ranktracker’s Keyword Finder tool. Then, enter your niche’s primary keyword into the search bar. Within 60 seconds, you’ll be presented with a long list of long-tail keywords and specific questions, key terms, and keywords that Google users are asking about relating to your niche.

You can easily find a common theme in the search queries and make a webinar addressing it! In fact, the more popular the question or search query is, the better your webinar will do.

2) Plan Your Webinar’s Content Around Your Target Audience

When creating your webinar, you’ll want to ensure that the content itself is geared towards your target audience. This means you’ll want to be thoughtful about your presentation, how you speak, what terminology you use, and how advanced the topics you’re speaking about are.

For example, if your key target audience consists of Facebook users over the age of 45, then you may want to be a little less technical when speaking about technology. Conversely, if your target audience is between 18 and 30, you’ll want to be more active, engaging, and funny.

Really try to put yourself in your viewers’ shoes. What are they like? What are they curious about? What are their goals and aspirations? How can your paid products and services help them grow?

3) Get To The Point, Fast

When you create your webinar, it needs to get to the point fast. This is for several reasons, among them:

People have short attention spans (and it’s even shorter when it’s something they didn’t pay for).
You don’t want to be boring.
You want to seem like a professional who can break a topic down quickly, not an amateur who’s still learning about the topic themselves.
You want to give the appearance that your time and knowledge are valuable. A 2-hour-long webinar just says that you have too much free time on your hands.

At the end of the day, the faster that you can convey value, the more valuable you’ll be in the eyes of your viewers.

Think of the last time you were at an ice cream shop… yeah, the ice cream is good, but is it really worth waiting in a super-long line for? Eventually, the content itself loses value when it takes up too much of the viewer’s own valuable time.

Plus, you want your viewers to stick around until the end, where you focus on upselling your other products and paid services. If they don’t even make it to the end, they’ll never see the upsell.

4) Offer Value

One of the worst things that you can do in a webinar is to fail to offer value. This is where a huge portion of online webinars absolutely fail. They promise to offer “insider knowledge” or an “in-depth break down” or “top secrets” just to spend 30 minutes talking in circles.

If somebody gave you their email address and sat down to take time out of their day, then it’s your obligation to reward their effort with something valuable. Not only is it the right thing to do, but it will build trust and motivate your leads to convert into sales.

5) Upsell Services and Products

Lastly, if you’re giving away something for free, then you’ll want to upsell your other services and products as well. The goal of your seminar should be to give your viewers a kind of “sample” of what they’ll get with your actual paid content. It should still be valuable, but it shouldn’t be the whole enchilada.

For example, perhaps you offer a webinar on how to close a sales call. You give some great, valuable sales information. Then, towards the last 5 minutes of the webinar, you mention how your mastermind subscribers will have access to hundreds of specific sales scripts that you used to build your successful business.

See? You provided value and hit them with the upsell at the same time.

Streaming Your Webinar

Lastly, you’ll need to stream your webinar. There are a number of ways to go about this, but the best way is to create a Zoom meeting. By now, you should all know about Zoom… After the COVID-19 pandemic, almost every major school and business in the world was using the virtual meeting platform.

So, basically, you’ll want to set up your webinar’s landing page with an email submission form. Then, you’ll create an auto-reply message that will automatically send subscribers an email with the link to your Zoom call, so they can access your webinar.

You could also have private webinar-style videos uploaded to a private, un-indexed URL of your site. Then, you could email your subscribers the link to that particular private link.

How subscribers access your webinar isn’t quite as important as the webinar itself.

Building A Landing Page For Your Webinar

Once you’ve decided on the content of your webinar and how you plan on presenting it, you’ll need to build a landing page for your webinar (or pay somebody else to do it). The landing page for your webinar is very important because it has the power to either turn visitors away or get them to submit their email addresses.

Your webinar’s landing page will primarily receive traffic from your Facebook and other social media ads. However, if you do your SEO correctly, you can also get your webinar to rank in Google SERPs results, allowing you to get two birds with one stone!

Here are some helpful tips for building a solid, results-driven landing page for your webinar.

1) Create An Optimized Landing Page

If you’re going to do something, you may as well do it right. So, yes, even though your landing page is primarily going to receive traffic from social media ads, you should optimize it for SERPs ranking as well.

Why? Well for one, you’ll be able to re-use the same landing page for future webinars. So, if you take the time to rank it once, then you can periodically change the copy or title of the webinar to fit a new, similar webinar you’ll make in the future.

Ultimately, it just opens the door to receive more organic traffic from Google in the future. We’ll be using tried and true SEO techniques and tools to help your landing page rank organically in SERPs results.

First, we’ll open Ranktracker’s Keyword Finder and SERP Checker tools. We’ll use the Keyword Finder to identify high-value, low-competition keywords and secondary keywords that your webinar page can rank for. We’ll then use SERP Checker to double-check how competitive each keyword is.

Then, we’ll take note of these keywords and use them to write our webinar landing page’s copy.

Next, we’ll open Ranktracker’s Web Audit tool to audit our landing page. This will let us know if there are any outstanding errors that can be fixed to improve the overall optimization of the page.

With any luck, your landing page for your webinars will rank within a couple of months. This, in turn, means more organic traffic, more brand awareness, and future marketing opportunities for your site.

2) Make Your Page Pop

Now that we’ve gone over the basic SEO aspects of creating a webinar landing page, it’s time to create a great-looking page. For this, you may want to enlist the help of a UI/UX expert. If you don’t have those type of funds, then consider using a platform like ClickFunnels, that’s designed to create a “funnel” driving each visitor to submit their email.

Use lots of bold text, colors, video, images, and insert tons of testimonials. Pretend you’re putting on a live concert. The more hyped you are about the free webinar you’re hosting, the more value that visitors will attribute to it and the more likely they’ll be to attend.

3) Use Engaging, Sales-Driven Copy

As the viewer scrolls through the page, taking in all of the media, they’ll need to be slowly guided down the page until the eventual form submission. This is accomplished by writing engaging, sales-driven copy. Obviously, you’re not selling them a product or service at this time, but you are selling them on yourself and your webinar.

Why should they take the time to give you their email? Why should they listen to what you have to say for 30 minutes? What makes you an authority on the matter? Answer all of these questions as you guide each visitor down the page.

4) Call-To-Action and Registration

One of the most important aspects of the landing page is to create a great call-to-action towards the bottom of the page. You may want to include multiple CTAs throughout the page if you have a longer page.

Your CTA should be something along the lines of, “This won’t be free forever. Sign up today to reserve your spot in my FREE webinar on [xyz topic]!” Obviously, use your own words; but you get the picture.

5) Auto Reply Email System

The last and final aspect of your landing page is that it should be linked with an auto-reply mailing system. There are a number of different services you can link to your landing page’s email submission form, but the most popular is MailChimp, as it easily integrates with most website-building platforms.

Basically, as soon as a lead submits their email to your form, you’ll want the system to generate an automated reply thanking them for signing up and sending them instructions for how and when to access your webinar.

Advertising Your Webinar On Facebook

Once you’ve put together a solid plan for your webinar, you’ve identified your target audience and constructed a landing page, it’s time to start advertising your webinar! As we mentioned earlier in the guide, it’s always a good idea to split-test multiple ads targeted at different audiences or that feature different sales copy or ad styles.

Use Facebook’s Ad Manager to create several ads with the intent set to ‘lead generation.’ Then, run them simultaneously on a low budget for a week. Whichever ad generated the best results and metrics, invest your marketing budget into it.

Ranktracker’s SEO Tools Can Help You Grow!

By following the steps we’ve outlined in this guide, you’ll be able to generate a large number of highly targeted leads for your business. On one hand, you’ll be using Facebook ads to generate overall awareness for your brand. Then, you can use free content such as a webinar to provide your ad viewers with a value proposition.

Remember, it’s all about value. The more value you can offer, the more your ad’s viewers will trust you, and the more likely it is that they’ll convert into paying customers and clients one day in the future.

So, what’s our value proposition?

Well, that would be our groundbreaking Ranktracker SEO toolkit. Your subscription gets you access to four powerful tools, including:

Rank Tracker (tracks a URL as it moves up or down in Google SERPs results).
Web Audit (performs a full, 100-point SEO audit on your webpage, telling you what needs to be fixed).
Keyword Finder (helps you identify long-tail keywords and secondary keywords relating to your brand’s primary keywords).
SERP Checker (lets you check how competitive each keyword is and view key metrics on the top competitors’ sites).

We also offer the Backlink Checker tool, which allows you to effectively scan any site on the internet for a complete view of their backlinks. You can then use this information to steal backlinks for your own site or to identify brand-new target audiences that you can target with Facebook and social media ads.

Facebook is currently the world’s largest social media platform, and it’s quickly approaching 3 billion global users. So, if you’re not advertising on the platform and optimizing your webpage content with Ranktracker’s SEO toolkit, then you’re missing out on one of the biggest opportunities in modern history!

The question is, “Are you ready to rank?”

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