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Meta Ads for Lead Generation: Building a High-Quality Email List

A woman working on her laptop doing lead generation

Social media, and particularly the omnipresence of Meta and its platforms – Facebook, Instagram, and Threads – are still some of the best places for small businesses to get the attention of potential clients and customers. This makes the platforms excellent for lead generation, especially for email newsletters. We’ll explain the why and how of leveraging Meta ads to start communicating directly with your audience through email.

Why Email?

Social media including Meta’s platforms are excellent ways to update and interact with your audience. Yet, email has stood fast as one of the best ways for businesses to communicate directly with their audience. It’s the channel where a business has the most control in their messaging and content, and they’re able to send it directly to the inbox of their subscribers. This can be a key difference where social media content might be missed in a follower’s feed. With this stable communication, email is effective at helping to retain and maintain returning customers or clients. This is why it’s important to grow your email following with a high-quality list.

Benefits of Meta Ads for Lead Generation

There are numerous reasons why Meta is effective for lead generation when building a high-quality email following. One is simply the scale of reach, over 3.3 billion people use Meta daily and over half the population of Canada actively uses Facebook and Instagram. Meta simply provides a staggering advertising network for lead generation. Furthermore, Meta also has built in advertising specifications for lead generation. Their tools and templates help you design ads specifically honed to growing a dedicated following on your website and email newsletters.

Using Meta Ads to Build a Quality Audience

When it comes to building an email audience, quality always beats quantity. A quality audience is engaged with your emails, regularly opening them and clicking on the contents in genuine interest. A disengaged audience doesn’t open emails and may even begin to negatively impact your sender reputation. This is another benefit of Meta ads for lead generation. Meta possesses a rich swath of data about its users such as location, age, and interests. Meta uses these to create profiles which your business can then target in its lead generation ads. This helps to attract the right potential audience to your email content, helping to create an email audience that is great in both quantity and quality.

How Lead Generation Works in Meta Ads

For brevity, we’ll need to assume you have some familiarity with Meta and Facebook ads. When creating Meta ads for email lead generation, you have two main methods for this: collecting the emails directly through the ad or redirecting users to a landing page on your website.

Collecting Emails through Meta

With its built-in lead generation functionality, Meta can have users directly subscribe to your emails with a simple “Subscribe” button on the ad. When users click this, it will verify they want to share their email and any other personal information the ad requests, such as their name. If they approve, they will then be added to your business’ email audience. For this functionality, you will need to set up the Meta integration on your email marketing platform.

This is extremely convenient and fast for users looking for a one-step sign-up. However, users are not necessarily willing to provide their information through such a quick email sign-up. The easy process may raise concerns of legitimacy or safety. On the other side, the simple sign-up could also make it easier for bots to subscribe to your newsletter, bloating and reducing the quality of your audience.

Directing Users to a Landing Page

This is where the strengths of directing users to a landing page start to shine. First, users are instead taken to your website to subscribe. Here they can provide the information they want rather than what is specified in the Meta ad. Second, the landing page will help establish your business’ credibility and legitimacy. The landing page can provide more information about your business, establish a value proposition, and will allow prospective subscribers to browse the website and learn more. Overall, while the landing page might not be as simple, it can be much more effective at conversion.

Motivating Subscriptions

Whether you choose to grow your email audience through Meta lead generation ads or converting users through a landing page (or a mixture of both), there will still need to be some incentive to generate these leads. As we mentioned, a landing page will help establish the value proposition of your business and email list. However, users will still need to be enticed to click the ad. Creating effective lead generation ads will mean following good advertising practices such as captivating images and intriguing copy.

However, there are some other methods for motivating email subscriptions:

  • One-time discount: A tried-and-true tactic. Entice new subscribers with a one-time discount on their next purchase.
  • A Loyalty Program: Loyalty programs are great for customer retention and repeat business. They can also further the value proposition of your email newsletters to help motivate subscriptions.
  • Sneak peeks and Exclusive Benefits: As a direct method of communication, your email newsletter can provide subscribers with product or service updates before you publish updates on other channels. It can also provide practical benefits such as early pre-orders or access to exclusive subscriber discounts.

Beyond Meta with Lead Generation

You should have a much better idea of how Meta’s ads are great for lead generation on Facebook and Instagram to help build a high-quality email audience list. Social media like Meta’s Facebook and Instagram are incredibly potent tools for communication, but you should be leveraging that communication for conversion, directing users to other channels that you control. This can also work the other way. If you already have a substantial, high-quality email list, you can leverage your email to generate leads towards your social media channels.

If you’re looking to set up new Meta lead generation ads on Facebook or Instagram, be sure to contact Rosewood’s ads team. Our email marketing experts can also help you onboard this new audience and create captivating newsletters that keep your audience dedicated.

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Do You Look Legit? The Psychology Behind Website Design & Credibility

A black man holds a phone as a white woman sitting next to him looks at the screen and both smile, an example of an imaged used in positive psychology web design. Both have coffee cups in their hands.

There are countless websites on the internet, and while we aren’t as much in the Wild West days of a few decades ago, there are still plenty of security risks that make users careful. That caution is entirely reasonable. However, businesses want to give an immediate trustworthy impression on their website or else cautious users are more likely to close the tab. One of the best ways to instill that immediate credibility is to understand the psychology behind website design. In this blog we explain some key design practices for how your business’ website can instill trust and credibility.

Keeping Cognitive Load Low and Trust High

Psychologically, the human brain can only process so much information at once. This is obvious when someone is trying to speak with another person who is reading. Although they can hear them, they don’t cognitively process anything they say. This cap or limit of what we can process is our cognitive load. If cognitive load is overwhelmed, it can be confusing and even paralyzing. That paralysis can lead to an immediate sense of distrust for users.

For website design, you can manage your user’s cognitive load by organizing information into categories and groups. Rather than providing all the information about your business and every one of its services or products all at once immediately at page load, you start with an overview and/or some key recommendations (your users would then click on what they need/want). These should also be legible and visually organized, so that users can easily understand them.

Similarly, rather than listing every single page on the website, the menu is organized hierarchically, allowing users to first pick a larger category and then find the more specific page they want there. These website designs apply the psychological principle of Hick’s Law, which observes that humans make a choice from various options by subdividing into groups and reducing the available options speeds up their decision making. Thus, reducing cognitive load and using hierarchical designs allows users to speedily navigate it without becoming cognitively overloaded.

Keeping It All Connected – No Broken Links

Along with ease of navigation by not overwhelming your users, you also don’t want to perplex them with links which lead to the wrong page or a page that no longer exists. These broken links immediately impact a website’s credibility as users find themselves on a page they didn’t expect or one that doesn’t exist at all. It can feel like a trick or raise questions about the website’s maintenance, and thus its reliability. Broken links can also be detrimental to a website’s SEO.

There are a few ways to prevent and repair broken links. If they are to your own website’s pages, be sure to update these links or create redirects that will immediately take users to the right page. There are also tools that will help you find broken links. These can be plugins, website audits, or even using Google’s Search Console. Any of these will help you find those pesky broken links.

Optimizing Performance

Another maintenance tip that helps to improve a website’s credibility is to ensure all pages load quickly and run smoothly. When a website takes a long time to load or chugs along at even the simplest interactions, users begin to lose trust and patience. Just like broken links, it raises questions of credibility around the website’s maintenance, which in turn raise security and quality concerns that transition to their impression of the business itself. Psychologically, poor performance can also make users feel that they are not in control of their experience on the website, which will further harm their trust of the website. Ensuring your website operates efficiently on all devices, including mobile and desktops, helps to secure credibility for your website and business.

The Trust in Words and Brands

Along with functionality and performance, there are numerous other methods for psychologically fostering trust in your website’s design, including the good word of others. Testimonials from customers help to establish trust and credibility in a few ways. First, is that they simply act as evidence for your business’ quality of services/products. Psychologically, attaching images or videos of smiling clients to these testimonials further establishes trust and credibility, as humans naturally have positive associations with happy faces.

Along with testimonials, you can also feature the logos of companies your business has collaborated with on the website’s home page. If users trust these brands, they will immediately transfer some of that credibility onto your business. As well, psychology has demonstrated that humans have innate positive associations with images they recognize. Seeing brand logos they know, even if they do not have a lot of experience with them, will inherently increase the credibility of your business and website.

Verifying Security

Another way to visually improve the credibility of your business’ website is through security verification. For example, an SSL or TLS certificate indicates that the traffic on your website has been encrypted, making it safer for users. These encryptions are then verified by various services, such as Let’s Encrypt and  Google Trust Services, to tell a browser. Today, if a website isn’t encrypted, browsers will often warn the user and advise they not load the page. That won’t fare well for your business’ reputation as users are directed away. Thankfully, if you’re using a service like WordPress or Shopify for your business, they include such security (so long as you keep your website updated).

There are also other security features that comfort users to build website credibility along with increasing its security. Such services include reCaptcha, which protects websites from malicious bots, preventing fraud and attacks. When reCaptcha is added to a website, it also adds a badge, informing users the website is being secured. This immediately supports a business’ credibility as users see the website is more secure.

Open Information is Essential to Credibility

If someone thinks information is unclear or being kept from them, they immediately become less trusting. That’s no different for users on websites. Open communication and clear information are critical for a business’ credibility on the web. Clear links to all policies and providing all relevant information on products or services builds and establishes trust. Also, providing clear and direct contact information is essential to a website’s credibility. When users see there is a clear physical address, email, or phone number they can contact for more communication, their trust increases. Conversely, if these contact methods are not included on a website, customers immediately become suspicious of a business.

Trusting Credible Design

You should now have a good sense of some essential business for website credibility and its importance. Even then, there’s still more psychological principles to learn for web design, such as colour associations. Nevertheless, by considering the psychology behind website design, you can trust that your business’ website will establish its credibility. If you’re looking to improve your website’s credibility or create a new, trustworthy design, contact our web design team at Rosewood Marketing. You can trust their expertise.

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AI and SEO: How Artificial Intelligence Impacts Search Rankings

Glowing AI Button on top of a slate brick background

AI is increasingly everywhere these days. Considering AI seems to be doing so many different things, the term AI has become a bit of a confusing catchall and buzzword. Nevertheless, you now find most apps and programs are now including and loudly featuring some kind of AI tool or functionality. You’ll also find AI write-ups from Google’s new search AI, Gemini, at the top of many searches. It shouldn’t be a surprise that AI is now having a significant role and impact on SEO. Since search rankings are critical for any small business to expand its discovery on these platforms, we explain some of the ways to consider how AI impacts SEO.

How AI Has Changed SEO

AI and learning algorithms have drastically changed how internet searches work over the past decade. You will want to consider these when creating web pages that are optimized for search engines.

Moving Beyond Keywords

Search engines like Google have been using learning algorithms (i.e. AI) to move beyond simple keyword searches. These algorithms help identify word associations and larger concepts to create semantic based searches. Semantic search considers phrases and the associations between specific words. More advanced semantic searches will also consider previous searches, location, and the user’s profile for a more complex meaning. These are the same kind of semantics we use to understand language and meaning. Google began using these semantic searches in 2015 with RankBrain. They grew in sophistication when they launched BERT, and last year they launched an even more advanced semantic model with the AI MUM.

Understanding Pages

Search engines like Google have also begun to use the same AI tools on the web pages they crawl. Rather than searching for certain words that indicate a topic, Google’s algorithms now try to more fully understand the information and/or content on pages. The information and meaning they gleam from the page is then used to rank the site according to the semantic meaning in a search. This is to try and provide more relevant results for searches rather than just targeting what most fits those individual keywords.

Together, this semantic shift means that small businesses need to move beyond considering individual keywords to target certain phrases and start considering more complex connections. For example, you could consider, what is the kind of information or resources people might be searching to want this page? Is there a certain question or need that the page or your website answers? What related phrases are people searching that you could connect to your business’ website?

AI’s Getting to Know Us

Another way search engines are using AI that has a direct impact on search engines is understanding users rather than individual pages and searches. Along with monitoring search semantics, Google’s AI tools monitor how and what users search to personalize their results. These AI profiles are designed to help predict and re-rank sites according to that user’s calculated interests. However, these AI profiles are also beneficial for smaller businesses as they allow them to consider target audiences and profiles for their SEO. With these in mind, businesses can start to tailor their webpage’s content and SEO to users in whose searches they would prefer to rank higher.

How Gemini is Changing Search

One of the most recent developments of AI in search engines is Google’s Gemini. MUM, and BERT before it, who were already trying to extract immediate answers or quick summaries from high-ranking search results. However, Gemini is a generative AI, which uses language model functionality to produce a written-up summary and answer. Rather than quoting from a single page, Gemini consults multiple high-ranking sites and tries to combine these for a single ultra response.

While Google does link to the source pages Gemini used, there are drawbacks for websites. Ultimately, this result is not designed to motivate users to visit the actual page. Google has given the answer and users are expected to be satisfied. However, Gemini is often wrong. Most generative AI tools still suffer for any specific topic and tend to provide inaccurate or false information. In turn, this means users may still be motivated to visit specific pages for more accurate information from a human.

The other important thing to consider is that Gemini results like these are still more tuned to general research searches like “where do salmon migrate.” Gemini cannot put together products or services. Instead, if searching for products or services with Gemini, it will direct users to local businesses. Users will still be visiting and browsing the specific pages of small businesses.

Keeping an Eye on AI and SEO

As we mentioned, Google and other search engines have already been using more advanced algorithms for nearly a decade. However, we also can’t deny that the recent surge of generative and other AI tools has led to a rapid shift in SEO with significant impacts on search rankings. Small businesses will need to keep monitoring this active landscape to ensure their websites continue to rank high. Of course, that’s also the benefit of a dedicated marketing team, like Rosewood Marketing. We continue to actively monitor how AI and SEO are actively changing. If you’re interested in revising your SEO strategy or ensuring a new website will rank high in this new AI frontier, be sure to contact us.

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