How To Use Chatbots To Generate Leads On Facebook
Have you ever felt that the audience in your Facebook lead generation campaign has gone dry? You may have started to see your Cost/Conv. and Frequency rise, or maybe people just aren’t converting as they did initially. Well, it might be time to try out a chatbot instead of a lead gen form.
Never used them before?
We’ve got you covered here in this blog and on the Getting Granular podcast episode “How To Use Chatbots To Generate Leads On Facebook”. I’ll break down one of the best solutions we’ve found for a dying lead gen campaign, and give you the step-by-step walk-through on how you can implement it yourself.
What are Chatbots?
In short, a chatbot is a software application used to conduct an online chat conversion. The creator has the flexibility to customize what questions your bot asks and how the bot responds to various answers a user may give. There are several 3rd-party companies you can use to run chatbots (usually for a fee). However, Facebook also offers its own internal bot that has improved over the years. For the purposes of this podcast, Chris and I specifically refer to Facebook’s bot.
Tips and Tricks to Setting Up a Chatbot Lead Gen Ad
The easiest way to set up an ad using a chatbot is to create a new campaign with the lead generation objective. Note that you can also select a messages objective. However, we have found lead generation to be the easiest to use across all types of pages.
Once you select the objective, your ad set level setup will be similar to any other lead gen campaign. You want to be sure to select the correct page you want to run the ads from and then accept the terms. But be careful – once you publish, you will not be able to go back to this step.
Finally, at the ad level, you’re actually going to create the bot. Once you have your creative selected, scroll towards the bottom and click “Automated Chat”. From there, a screen will pop up and you will see how to create custom questions and build out your flow. At the end of the process, you will have to provide your website privacy policy.
Perks of Using a Chatbot
There are so many benefits of using chatbots, but here are the main ones:
- Push Notifications: You can send messages to your user’s phone – similar to a text
- Natural Conversation: Instead of filling out any old form, a user can give information in a more natural, conversational way
- Human Interaction: At any point during the chatbot flow, a human can jump in and take over the conversation
- Automation: Save yourself time and money by getting a bot to ask the qualifying questions
Chatbot Challenges
Such as most things in life, chatbots aren’t all glitz and glam; there are a couple challenges that your team may have to overcome.
- Automation: If you are using a third-party automation tool (such as Zapier) to export the lead information, beware that there may be some disconnect if a user starts a conversation and then doesn’t answer all the questions right away
- Editing: Once you publish the automated message, you cannot edit it – you would have to go back into Ads Manager and create a new one
- Multiple Ads: Although conversations are labeled with the ad ID in your page’s inbox, it can be confusing if you are running multiple ads for one page
At the end of the day, chatbots can be an awesome way to not only save you time and money, but also interact with your leads. I highly encourage you to check them out for yourself.
