Should Facebook be part of your B2B lead generation strategy?

Everyone loves website traffic; especially those whose jobs revolve around B2B lead generation. The more visitors you can get on your website, the more likely you are to convert them into leads and eventually sales. But with 3.77 billion internet users and more than one billion websites now active, where can business owners go to convince people to visit their site in particular? Well, you could try Facebook.

Facebook captures 10% of all internet visits, with visitors spending an average of 28 minutes on the social media site. Even more revealing, 50% of Facebook Fans prefer brand pages to company websites. .

Stats like this may lead you to believe that your  focus should be solely around a Facebook page, but think this through. You have no control over Facebook and the future of the site, whereas you have absolute control over your website. Don't build your empire on property you don't own. Rather, use Facebook as part of your B2B lead generation marketing strategy for sending traffic and leads to your website.

How to generate leads on Facebook

You can generate leads on Facebook in one of two ways:

Direct leads are generated by sharing content that links directly back to a landing page on your website where visitors can submit their contact information in exchange for an offer - an ebook or webinar, for example.

Indirect leads are generated by using Facebook as a notice board for your content. For example, if you share a blog post that contains a call-to-action to a landing page at the bottom of the post, your initial Facebook share will help to generate visits to your blog and ultimately to the landing page and form, whereby you can capture the visitors' details.

While directly promoting landing pages is an instant generator of leads, providing content without a form as part of an overall marketing campaign should make your Facebook presence a more trustworthy, likeable home for content that your fans will want to come back for.

Measure your Facebook marketing success

53% of social media marketers don't measure their success. By taking the time to analyse that performance of individual Facebook posts in terms of the clickthrough rate, you can find out which type of content performs well on your page. By doing this at Axon Garside, we are able to cut out what isn't working and post more of what is working, helping us to continually improve our offering and our conversion rate.

We use Hubspot's sources tool to measure our success by analysing the following:

1. Track the volume of overall traffic Facebook is sending to your website

2. Track the number of new leads, also called contacts, you are generating from your Facebook marketing efforts

3. Over time, you'll also want to assess the overall percentage of customers generated through your Facebook marketing.   

For more information on how to generate more and better quality leads, download our free 'social media audit template' below.

This blog was originally published in December 2014 and has been updated where possible for accuracy and comprehensiveness in June 2017.