Optimising Lead Generation on Meta: A Strategic 4-Stage Approach

*By Saira Smith, Paid Social Account Director*

When we think of Lead generation across the digital landscape, the first thing that comes to mind is usually CRM and email marketing lists, not Paid Social activity. And if we do think about Lead Gen in a paid social context, it usually begins with LinkedIn or those clunky in-platform lead forms on Facebook.

But Meta actually has a whole stack of lead generation tools that can help businesses grow and develop their lead quality.

Acquire

Every single person who works in marketing knows what acquisition is. Meta has consistently been known for creating and capturing interest from potential customers. It’s the number one social media platform, after all.

But they can also help B2B and service based businesses reach new customers, flexing across destinations to meet user preference across different touch points along the lead gen journey.

We’re all familiar with the in-platform lead forms, but these are only scratching the surface when it comes to Meta’s capacity to meet users. Meta now has the ability to have website forms that seamlessly integrate with your website, as well as instant form add ons.

Meta also offers messaging across Messenger and Instagram chat, where businesses can immediately engage with their users - the perfect way to begin a lead is with a conversation.

And then there is Meta’s ability to allow users who prefer to speak to a person to directly contact the business through call ads and call add ons in lead forms.

And the best bit about all of these options? You can combine them to make sure the ads feel personalised to the user and allow them to communicate with your business in whichever way they find most comfortable.

Qualify

Just like sales, some leads are more valuable than others. And just like sales, getting high quality leads depends on a few different factors. These include:

Creative

Social media is an inherently visual channel. You may hear this all the time but your creative really does determine a lot of your performance. This is true across all marketing objectives in Paid Social, and some would say even more so for Lead Gen.

Meta’s ever increasing stack of AI tools is helping to ensure that even the least creative product can still compete in the auction. Tools such as Advantage+ creative, Advantage+ catalogue ads for lead gen and Advantage+ placements all allow the algorithm to find the most relevant leads for your businesses objectives.

Conditional Logic

Another less known way to qualify and filter your leads is to apply conditional logic to the forms.

You can add this to your instant forms to better qualify leads. You can also set up dynamic question and answer flows for different types of customers. These are great if you’re identifying different quality criteria about potential customers or you want to personalise a product or service recommendation based on interests.

First Party Data

We all know nothing can guide business decisions better than first party data. This is the best information we as advertisers will ever get about the behaviours of customers and the same is true for the Meta algorithm. The easiest way to give it this information is to connect your CRM lists through audience integrations and by implementing the CRM CAPI. By doing this we can ensure we have the most qualified leads for our individual business needs.

Nurture

One of the biggest challenges advertisers face isn’t acquiring a lead, but getting the lead to convert. The best way to nurture a lead into a conversion is to follow up on the lead as quickly and clearly as possible. Meta has a variety of ways we can do this as advertisers, though as a word of warning some of these are currently only available in the US with a UK/EU roll out planned for this year.

CRM Integration

The first way to nurture a lead through Meta is being able to identify them. The best way to do this is through your CRM integration. Meta now has direct integrations with many CRM platforms that will enable you to directly connect your audiences with the platform, thus allowing the platform to make real time decisions based on your first party data.

Following up

Once we’ve identified the lead, we need to follow them up fairly quickly to make sure they don’t become disengaged.

Meta has a variety of options available, from creative tailored to the user through AI and automation, to a call back option through WhatsApp and Messenger. They also have the option to run ads with multiple destination options and gated promotion options. And you can combine multiple options to ensure the follow up is always tailored to the customer's individual needs.

Manage

Similar to nurturing the leads once we’ve acquired them, it's important to continue managing them to ensure we maintain contact once the lead is complete.

Word of mouth is a very important tool in marketing. Converted leads and happy customers can organically grow into finding new leads more easily.

But how do we continue re-engaging existing leads to maintain this relationship? Once again, Meta has the solutions.

In the pipeline for 2025, Meta’s Lead Gen road map includes destination optimisation and gated promotions, leveraging their Advantage+ stack, and leaning into AI to provide fast, automated and conversational replies to customers 24/7.

With all these solutions available it's not hard to understand how Meta continues to dominate the paid social media landscape. Businesses really should lean into the options Meta has made available to hit their overall business needs, and advertisers like myself can really work these tools into our ongoing strategies.