How to Generate Leads with Facebook Groups (Growth Guide)

If you’re working on your omnichannel marketing strategy then you have to start thinking of Facebook as one of the many funnels that you can create.

It’s still the largest social network in the world, and there’s no doubt that most of your prospects are probably on the platform already.

Lead generation on Facebook is a whole topic altogether, their numerous features allow you to create multiple funnels within the platform itself.

Today, we’ll take a look at how to generate leads with Facebook groups and how you can leverage these groups to bring in a consistent number of leads.

Check out our article on Facebook group lead nurturing!

Building a Following on Facebook Groups

First and foremost, you’ve got to build a following.

That’s critical in getting new leads in.

Every time a new prospect joins, they immediately become a lead.

But, here’s the thing, if you build a huge group, you need to be able to the number of leads that you’ll be bringing using the strategies that we’re going to outline in this guide.

And, that’s not always a good thing.

Sometimes you could get a lot of people coming through, but if your team won’t be able to handle it you’ll be faced with a situation where quality goes down and you put people off.

The “Existing Friends” Strategy

The first market you should pay attention to is your own list of friends.

If you’ve been spending time growing your Facebook numbers, then you should already have a semi-decent following. Now, it’s time for you to consider how many of these Facebook friends should be on your Facebook group.

It’s time for you to capitalize on the fact that you already have an existing connection with these “friends”.

Here are a couple of ways to do it:

• Create an outreach campaign that targets your existing friends with a subtle hello combined with an invitation to join your group. However, you can’t use a “copy-paste” campaign and it has to start with an organic “hello”.
• You could simply post an inivitation for people to join your group and tell them what they’ll get about it.
• Tagging friends in a post also works wonders because it highlights specific people that you want talk to.

The Hot Giveaway Strategy

Sometimes people need an incentive to join your Facebook group and that’s not a good thing.

Here’s why.

You can use the incentive to prequalify people who are actually interested in the things that you can offer in your group.

So for example, if you gave away a sales guide that is directly related to a specific niche, say B2B coaching, the people who join because of the incentive are most likely to be in that field and interested in the paid services that you give out.

So, then comes the question of what should I be giving out.

You could do infographics, whitepapers, and case studies, but based on our experience on the platform, the best thing you could give out is a PDF on an actionable topic.

Actionable topics are materials that provide value almost immediately because prospects can “do” something about them immediately.

Why do we stress that they should be PDFs? Simple really. PDFs have always been seen to be a more formal way of sending documents that are actually important. So, if your prospect sees that you’re giving away a PDF then they know subconsciously that it’s a serious document and your group is responsible for that.

Also, it’s just the simple rule of reciprocation. If you want someone to do something, then you’ve got to offer something in return.

Rules

• Tell them to comment on the post first before they join your group. You can send them the link to the resource as soon as they join and it also the opens the doors to having a conversation wiht them on Facebook Messenger.
• You absolutely cannot do this just once, you need to have a strategy in place for you to do this at least a couple of times a month. This doesn’t just so consistency, but it also tells your other friends that you group provides value consistently.
• Make sure you’re tracking the documents you send out via a UTM tracker or just hosting them on your website, this allows you to monitor which giveaways are making most of the difference in your lead generation efforts. Remember, “you can’t growth hack, if you don’t track”.
• Use different giveaways that appeal to the different customer profiles that you’re targeting.
• Each post that you put out has to match the customer profile being targeted, make sure that you create highly personalized posts. That’s the only way you can stand out.

The Live Hot Giveaway Strategy Part 2

If you don’t want to do a PDF and want to engage with people directly, then we have a treat for you.

Use a free live training session as bait to lure them into your funnel.

This might be much more difficult than a PDF and require more resources, but it’s a better way to engage with new people who are just joining your group.

Why?

You get to talk to them directly and depending on how you deliver the training, you can lure them in with a little charisma and charm.

Since training does take up resources and time, you could keep them to half-an-hour sessions. Talk about a topic that you’re well versed in and instead of a Q&A, invite them to engage with you personally through your Messenger.

The Referral Strategy

No user acquisition strategy would be complete without referrals. Your group has to be good enough for you to ask your friends and business connections to refer people to check it out and join.

We like this method because it allows you to reconnect with people and get them to check out the new things that you’ve been up to. It’s a surefire way to come up with new collaborations with old connections, too.

Another quick way of doing this is leveraging other groups.

The Website Strategy

Make sure your Facebook group features prominently on your website.

Feature it with a CTA to get people to join and make sure you make a big deal about it.

Why?

Because it is a big deal.

A Facebook group – that is being run well – can be leveraged to create an actual community of people who are dedicated to helping each other out. It doesn’t just benefit your bottom line, but it also means that you’re making a difference.

Don’t just stop at your homepage and make sure you take it a step further.

You want to be able to integrate a CTA for your other pages as well. You could do this on the footer or add it in between the pages.

Another good way to do this is to make sure that you’re integrating the invitation to join on blog posts as well. This ensures that you have a well-thought-out strategy.

The Retargeting Strategy

We love Facebook Pixel because it does wonders for your retargeting and remarketing strategy, plus it really helps bring in people to your Facebook group.

What happens if they see your CTA, but don’t do anything to join your Facebook Group? Retarget them on Facebook itself.

This way you truly have an omnichannel marketing strategy that you can use to get people to come through no matter where they see you.

You can even make this even more subtle by doing a brand awareness campaign first, and then hitting them up with an invite to join your group.

Sometimes people need to be told twice before you can even get them to do anything for.

And, that’s not a bad thing.

It makes for more fulfilling relationships with your clients.

What to Do Once They’ve Joined Your FB Group

Here’s the fun part.

We’ve written a guide on this that you can check out here, but there are other things you can start employing to make sure you’ve started a proper lead generation funnel.

There’s a bunch of things you can do, but let’s focus on the most critical parts so that you can start communicating with your prospects.

1. Fix Your Group Questions First

Your group questions serve three purposes:

1. Filtering people coming in – you want to make sure that you only have select group of people in your group, this allows you to ensure that the content your releasing resonates with the right people. The other consideration is for you to avoid non-converting or inactive participants in the group
2. Lead qualification – group questions also allow you to prequalify people who are coming through your group by checking if they’re ready to be marketed to. You see, you can allow some cold leads to enter and just nuture them with the group’s content, but you need to find out who to prioritize first.
3. Luring them in – questions are also a great way to show people what your group is about, it gets them excited about what you’re doing.

I would advise a maximum of three questions for a Facebook group.

That’s the right balance between qualification and not boring them to death or intimidating them with a lot of questions.

2. Add Them as a Friend on Facebook

Take the hot leads aside and add them as a friend on Facebook.

Now you don’t want to do this right away because it might appear a little pushy, you want to be as subtle about it as possible.

Adding them as a friend on Facebook opens the doors to a conversation with them.

A good time to send them a message is after they’ve engaged with something in the group itself.

But, more on messaging in a bit.

3. Tag Them (Collectively) In a Welcome Post

Want to get them to engage right away?

Then, create a welcome post.

This helps get them involved with the community that you’ve created right away and that really does wonders for your lead nurturing efforts moving forward.

Every couple of days or a week or so, create a new post in the group with the names of all the new members tagged on it.

Make them feel like they’re welcome and encourage them to participate. If they comment on that post, make it a point to reply to those comments, that gives you a lot of room to talk to them soon.

4. Tag Them in Other Posts From Time-to-Time

If you’ve recently posted something about a particular industry and you know someone who’s a part of the same industry in the group, make sure you tag them.

This is another conversation opener that you can leverage to generate warmer leads inside your group itself.

It might be a little intimidating at first so make sure you target the “chattier” members of your group.

To make things easier, don’t pressure them, you want to make it subtle and ask for their opinion in the comments. Don’t tag them straight up, you already did this when you welcomed them.

5. Send Them a Message

Now, it’s time for you to send your new group members a message making them feel welcome to your group and starting a conversation with them.

There are different ways for you to start a conversation.

When They First Join

You can start the message with:

“Hi! Glad to have you on our group!”

Introduce yourself and get to know them a little bit.

You can then bring up one of the answers to their group join questions in the chat and you use that to talk about their business and how you can help them out in the future.

For example:

“I saw that you’re heavily in need of B2B tech lead generation, how’s that working out for you?”

This is a good approach because it allows you to create some personalization by leveraging the questions.

This allows for conversations that resonate with the prospect.

When They Comment on Your Content

If they make a significant comment about the comment, make sure you hit them up to continue the conversation.

However, don’t turn it into a sales triage call right away.

Take your time and talk about the comment that they made, make it as organic as possible. This way you don’t come off as a salesman but rather someone that actually cares and wants to build a relationship with them.

When They Engage With Your First Post

Personally welcome them into the group – if you haven’t done so already.

However, also make sure that you introduce yourself.

By showing them that the founder of the group is personally reaching out to new members, you can show people that you’re hands-on and care about building relationships.

6. Post Content

You need to keep posting.

It doesn’t matter what you post as long as it resonates with the audience members in your group.

When you post content, be mindful of the different types of customer profiles that you have within the group and try your best to cater to each segment.

If you’re posting for customer profile A today, make sure you post for customer profile B on the next day.

Once you keep going, don’t stop. People don’t like inactive groups because they’re a waste of Facebook space.

Engage, Then Engage Some More

Whenever someone engages with your post, make sure you continue the conversation.

it doesn’t matter if you comment back or engage with them on Messenger, the conversation has to flow.

Make the engagement about them and get them to talk about their ideas, this is one of the best ways to make prospects feel heard.

You want them to feel like your group is a safe space for them to talk about their ideas, dreams, goals, and pains with their business.

Warm Up Your Facebook Account!

Whatever you do, don’t start a Facebook group without warming up your Facebook account or you’ll end up in Facebook jail.

Warming up your Facebook account entails getting their algorithm to recognize that you’re not a bot, but just really active.

If you don’t do this beforehand and ramp up activity, Facebook could ban certain uses of your account and this could result in a lot of issues for you.

This really puts a wrench into your lead gen efforts and destroys good momentum.

Don’t Use Generic Messages

Never copy and paste messages that you send out.

Never.

You want to make sure that you type the messages yourself and create little variations.

This also helps to prevent the aforementioned Facebook jail problem and has the indirect effect of ensuring that all the messages you send out are personalized.

Now the question becomes, “how about if my message is too long?”

And, the answer to that is simple.

Shorten it.

We’re not telling you to be lazy with your lead gen, but if you feel like your message is too long to type, then you’re not doing it right.

Long messages are best reserved for emails and Facebook Messenger is a casual platform.

So keep it short and sweet.

The longer your message is, the more your prospect will feel like you’re doing Facebook lead generation instead of building relationships.

Takeaways

Building a Facebook Group for lead generation is critical for any omnichannel campaigns.

It ensures that you’re using the platform to the fullest.

And, it’s a casual place.

You need that.

You need to show your prospects that you’re easy to talk to and that there’s a different side to you.

Happy growth hacking!