This article originally appeared in Italian here and written by Anna Kala, translated by Cosimo D’Amicis.
In this article, we explain how we got a Cost per Lead as low as 1.60€ and 0.18€,
by focusing on our clients’ values and mission
Our clients are always asking us to help them increase the number of qualified contacts while keeping the lead generation process coherent and relevant to their offer.
Three steps to advertising campaign success
To do so, we analyze the business needs, then we audit the brand and interview our client until we are perfectly aligned with their mission and values. Once done, we discuss about what we call the Marketing Key Points:
- Target definition (by demographics, interests, geolocation,…)
- Drawing the winning card from the potentially endless landscape of marketing tools, creativity efforts and so on
We immediately thought about making a Facebook Ads campaign our best ally, and we are here to show you the results we have achieved.
The economic sector is Agriculture for both companies, but they run different business, catering to different target and needs.
The first case is about Arvaia, an agricultural cooperative in Bologna founded by citizens for citizens. The second one is about AgricolBio a gardening tools e-commerce that sells and ships its goods throughout Italy.
Lead Generation and Facebook
According to Wikipedia, In marketing, lead generation(/ˈliːd/) is the initiation of consumer interest or inquiry into products or services of a business. Leads can be created for purposes such as list building, e-newsletter list acquisition or for sales leads.
And so far, I’d say that’s it!
What are the ways to implement a lead generation? The possibilities are potentially endless: a form on your web page, a LinkedIn campaign, the simplest and most trivial face-to-face “Hey you, I see you’re interested, why don’t we exchange business cards?” Among the various tools there is also Facebook which can be mainly used in two different ways:
- Traffic generation to an external landing page managed by the company, where we will have a contact form
- Facebook’s native lead generation campaign
With traffic generation, we own the landing page which is a full-blown web page which we can customize and adapt to brand guidelines. We will add text and graphic elements to help the customers understand the offer.
With Facebook’s native lead generation, there is a big advantage: we can customize the form fields and some of them will be pre-filled by the platform. We cannot customize its looks and can only add a limited amount of custom text, but the friction is greatly reduced as the user already knows how Facebook works.
From a marketer’s standpoint, the greatest thing is that Facebook lets us create custom audiences based on people which have interacted with the form (which enables us to build lookalike audiences that could make our marketing ROI skyrocket!). The generated leads can also be pushed to the most popular CRMs by Facebook, so you don’t have to manually type in things and can also fire your marketing automation!
After analyzing our clients’ requirements, their marketing stack, and their business model and needs, we have opted for a Native Facebook Lead Generation campaign type.
How to achieve a negligible CPL (Cost per Lead)
Our client: Arvaia
Let’s start with the first case: Arvaia. It is a cooperative farm in Bologna founded by citizens to go back to “a citizen agricultural model that guarantees income for those who work and healthy food accessible to all through the solidarity mechanisms of the Community that supports agriculture”. Arvaia core values are organic, proximity and ecology.
Arvaia’s objective was to make itself better known, to increase its brand awareness, and to find people interested in participating in the life and mission of the cooperative. We have agreed about these marketing key points with our client:
- geo-target the audience on a precise and limited area target specific interests related to ecology and organic food
- focus on communicating Arvaia’s unique mission in campaign creatives, betting on this as the winning card for the entire campaign
The launch day comes, and we look at the campaign design: it’s very simple. The structure is traditional with two ad groups, targeted to lovers of organic produce, with an interest in ecology. Each ad group includes two types of ads with different creativity sets, based on image variation, as you can see in the example.
The campaign lasted 9 days, but not in a row. Why? We had a problem: too many relevant leads were coming in, and our client could not handle them all! That’s why after four days we paused the campaign to allow Arvaia to contact personally all those who had left their contacts. We decided to do this to be consistent with the cooperative’s mission to recreate a community environment.
After a few weeks, we reactivated the campaign and, this time too, the contacts just flooded in! In the total 9 days of campaign activity, we managed to get 118 interested people, with an average Cost per Lead of 1.60 €, with a total expense of 188.80 €.
Our client: AgricolBio
And here we are with the second client that asked us how do we generate leads to grow our email list while keeping it cost-effective? They are AgricolBio, a retailer with strong local brand recognition in the province of Enna (Sicily), and online e-commerce of tools and everything else you need for gardening and agriculture, catering to hobbyists and professionals.
The purpose of their lead generation was, in this case, to increment the number of their newsletter subscribers, while keeping the cost as low as possible to allow for a sustainable marketing cost in the long run. We factored in product demand, and the e-commerce stats such as average order value, customer segmentation by RFM analysis, CLV and CAC, conversion rates and email marketing performance.
To make the newsletter appealing to the customers, we wanted to focus on the concept of value exchange: we worked with AgricolBio to create something of added value, something that we could distribute digitally, and something that would compare to something their customer base would buy and pay for.
After researching all these “somethings” :) we chose a technical e-book content offer about grafting and pruning was our winning card. We built two ad sets, targeted to different audiences: a simple Lookalike Audience expanded to Italy’s territory, and an interest-based target audience based on specific terms such as grafting, pruning, and agrarian/agriculture.
The creative assets were similar, based on an attractive image that attracted attention. We analyzed the pruning and grafting activities and their characteristics, to find that they are typical activities of the cold months! ;))
The ad copy was designed to be consistent with AgricolBio’s Facebook page, which is edited by the client itself. We found that their tone of voice uses a lot of emojis and capital letters, and we used those to keep the brand voice aligned to the one their audience is already listening to.
We focused on the concept of not leaving alone your garden in the winter, followed by a simple CTA: download the free guides to find out how to correctly perform pruning and grafting.
And our dear Facebook did not disappoint us this time, bringing us 210 leads in just 4 days, a total expenditure of 37.80 € and an average Cost per Lead of a merely 0.18 €!
Conclusions
Was it worth it? I would say so!
Native Facebook Lead Generation is something you really will want to integrate into your marketing. When you’re aligned with the brand’s mission and core values, it is seamless for the user to leave their contact details in this way, and it can prove really successful for the business.
If you wanna be successful as well, you have to nail the correct combination of things you ask for in the contact form.
Allow your forms to ask only for useful information for your clients such as name, email contact and phone number, without inflating it with too many requests.
Keep your title, ad copy and contact form text strictly relevant to the activity you’re pushing, and adherent to the values that you want your leads to respond to.
Facebook has proved to be an ideal ally in lead generation for B2C, without spending a fortune.
If you have come so far, leave us a comment below, and let us know what you think of the lead generation on Facebook: have you ever tried it?
Did you meet your business goals?
