A sales lead refers to a person or business entity that is currently not a client but may eventually become a client.

A sales funnel is a step-by-step process that allows you to bring your potential customer one step closer to your offer and a buying decision through a series of marketing actions like automated emails, videos, articles and landing pages that will do the selling for you.

Facebook ads are paid messages from businesses that are written in their voice and help reach the people who matter most to them. Advertisers create campaigns that have specific goals, which we call advertising objectives and they create ads within those campaigns to help them reach those objectives.

• “The money is in the list”
• Your website is leaking money
• Help beat your competition
• Start a conversation
• Build trust
• Increase brand awareness
• Generate leads

The lead generation process typically starts when a website visitor clicks on a call-to-action (CTA) located on one of your site pages or blog posts. That CTA leads them to a landing page, which includes a form used to collect the visitor's contact information.

Lead ads offer people the chance to learn more about your business and can help you find customers most likely to make a purchase. Lead ads offer people the chance to learn more about your business and can help you find customers most likely to make a purchase.

1. Native Functionality
With Lead Ads, users can submit their information through an auto-filled form without ever leaving the platform. You avoid disrupting the UX by keeping your lead on Facebook instead of switching from the platform to your website and back again.

2. Mobile Responsiveness
Facebook Lead Ads are particularly beneficial for mobile. The app is already set up for mobile users, so you can rest assured that your ads will be, too. That means that no matter which device your leads view your ads, they'll be able to complete your form without any issues thanks to its responsive design.

3. Simple Data Collection
Lead Ads are also beneficial for the advertiser because they capture potential customers’ information without having to create a new landing page or conversion path. Everything you need to obtain a new lead is in the platform, and that data can easily integrate with your CRM.

4. Highly-Targeted Segments
Facebook Lead Ads allows for highly targeted segmentation, like interests, demographics, and more. This means that the leads you acquire from your Facebook Ads are already highly qualified for your product or service.

1. Owning The Conversation & Being On The Same Page
Some clients ask me, “Why should we bother writing about these topics, they are so basic and not our ideal customer.”

The answer I give is that all customers start off with questions at some point.

Even if they are not an ideal customer now, if your company starts educating them on terminology and your processes through blog posts and emails, you can establish a solid foundation.

2. Brand Awareness & Being Top Of Mind
A brand that educates and adds value consistently will become the default place potential customers will go to when they have questions.

A quality content strategy can cement your brand at the top of the mind of potential future customers so when they are ready to hire somebody you will be the first person they contact.

Your sales people will have to do less work because your content did it all for them.

3. Building Trust
With every quality piece of content that you put out, you are building trust with new members of your audience who are at the beginning of their journey of finding a solution to their problem.

Consistently adding value to people builds trust in your brand and establishes your company as an expert in the space that can keep you top of mind for years.

But, just because you’re top of mind, it doesn’t always mean it’s a good thing. We have all had bad experiences that make us not want to ever work with a company again. (If you’ve ever had food poisoning from a restaurant, you know exactly what I’m talking about.)

As long as you’re always getting consent to email subscribers or not overloading them with Facebook ads, the trust will always be growing.

4. The Evergreen Snowball Effect
One of the greatest parts of content marketing is that it is evergreen, meaning that it will add value for years to come.

Everyday people wake up trying to find solutions to problems that your company solves.

You are probably familiar with Frequently Asked Question (FAQs) pages that have a list of the most common questions that they are often asked by their customers along with a quick answer.

These FAQ pages can be a great outline for the top of funnel pages that your company should create because oftentimes a customer’s questions cannot be answered in just a couple of sentences.

For questions that you get asked repeatedly should get its own dedicated page to fully answer that question. Having an entire page allows you to optimize the page to rank as a solution to that question and fully explain it to new customers.

As you create quality content consistently over time they can start to rank organically for these common questions. We call this the snowball effect because overtime this content gains momentum and eventually becomes an avalanche of new visitors and potential customers.

5. Low Competition
As we mentioned before, most companies only focus on the bottom of the marketing funnel.

This is what makes search engine optimization (SEO) really difficult for newer companies because they need to catch up against the competition who have been doing it for years.

By focusing on the top stage of the marketing funnel topics you are usually competing with websites like Quora or Wikipedia that Google uses to fill in gaps in search results. This low competition is a good opportunity for a company to come along with great answers to overtake these types of sites that are generalists.

Everyone is competing at the bottom of the funnel, which is expensive
Everyone is competing at the bottom of the funnel, which is expensive.—Source

6. It’s A Fast Pass For Customers
Have you ever been to a busy amusement park like Disney World or Six Flags? The lines are so long that you end up waiting for hours to get on the latest ride that lasts less than a few minutes. Such a bummer.

But then an amazing invention came around called the Fast Pass. These fast passes allow you to skip the mainline and go into another much shorter queue. This can turn a three-hour ride line into a much shorter fifteen-minute line which makes people really happy.

A well-crafted piece of content can do something similar for your potential customers. It helps them jump from the research phase directly to signing up for a demo or purchase.

This is amazing because you actually are turning them into customers before they even attempt a bottom-of-funnel search. You just got them to bypass the tough competition at the bottom of the marketing funnel and become a customer.

7. Create Assets For Your Sales Team
Your sales team’s time is extremely valuable. They have their own sales funnel to worry about.

The less that they have to create or explain, the less selling they have to do. Saving the time of your sales team is going to decrease the time it takes to convert a lead and therefore bring you even more ROI.

All the content that you’re creating for the top of the marketing funnel are assets that your sales team can link to.

Having a one-pager available to them with quick answers to common questions along with links to your quality top of funnel content will also help your sales team to give consistent answers.

8. Improves Your Email Marketing
When somebody comes to your blog post through a top of funnel piece of digital marketing they are usually not ready to jump into purchasing OR scheduling a demo.

We don’t want to lose the opportunity to add value or reconnect with this potential customer so having some kind of email capture like an ebook or cheat sheet is a great way to grow your email list.

Having a content strategy paired with an email capture and digital marketing strategy is an incredibly powerful passive way to keep your sales funnel full of potential customers.

9. Improves Retargeting Marketing
Lastly, if you are getting a lot of traffic from organic to your blog, even if they do not convert or give an email, you are still able to get value.

By potential customers visiting your website you are able to pixel them and start retargeting.

With smart retargeting campaigns, you can easily get them to come back and become a customer.

In 2018, 41% of shoppers abandoned a transaction at a virtual check-out. They went all the way through the process to check out and abandoned it at the last second.

A simple retargeting campaign in your digital marketing could bring a large chunk of that 41% right back to their cart and finish checking out.