Advertising
HubSpot Ad Audiences
Learn how to improve targeting with HubSpot Ad Audiences and get better advertising results with the major ad platforms in this comprehensive guide.
Transform your advertising game with CRM automation on Google, LinkedIn, & Facebook. Learn how to improve lead quality, streamline operations, maximise ROI
In the fast-paced world of digital advertising, staying ahead of the curve is essential for businesses aiming to maximise their results. As platforms like Google Ads, Facebook, and LinkedIn increasingly embrace automation and the power of machine learning, the landscape of advertising is undergoing a significant transformation. These advancements are moving businesses away from manual, day-to-day tasks towards more strategic planning and the effective use of first-party data, especially as the industry shifts away from third-party cookies for tracking and optimisation.
Automated bidding systems now rely on sophisticated algorithms to enhance targeting and bid optimisation in real-time, taking into account hundreds of signals. This not only increases the quantity of leads but, when leveraged correctly, can also increase the quality of leads generated, thereby increasing sales or reducing advertising costs.
In this blog, we will explore how leveraging CRM systems and automation can revolutionise your digital advertising strategies. From improving lead quality and reporting accuracy to streamlining follow-up processes, discover how these technologies can help you achieve superior results and a higher return on investment. Join us as we delve into the future of advertising automation and learn how to propel your business forward in this dynamic digital era.
Introduction to using Automation alonside AI in Advertising
AI and automation are revolutionising many industries, and advertising is no exception. Advertising platforms like Google Ads, Facebook, and LinkedIn are harnessing the power of machine learning to deliver superior results. These platforms now offer automated bidding systems that leverage machine learning to enhance targeting with real-time bidding that considers hundreds of signals. By setting a target cost-per-acquisition (CPA) bid strategy, these systems optimise to achieve the highest number of conversions at the lowest cost per lead.
However, while this approach is an excellent starting point, it soon becomes evident that not all leads are equally valuable. So the cost per lead does not always equate to the same cost per customer for all leads. For example, lead quality may decline if you employ broader targeting methods, such as broad match or Performance Max campaigns, while aiming to maximise lead volume. This occurs because the system may begin to optimise for an increased number of lower-quality leads that are less qualified. To use advertising AI correctly, it is important to avoid potential pitfalls of training the AI with the incomplete data - such as just the initial enquiry lead form event.
To improve lead quality, you can leverage your company's first-party data from business management CRM systems to overlay the targeting options available on the ad platform. You can further optimise your campaigns by incorporating changes in lead lifecycles from your CRM.
This approach goes beyond merely increasing the number of leads; it also focuses on lead quality, enhancing reporting and training machine learning models to prioritise high-quality leads. This allows the system to concentrate on acquiring the best leads that are most likely to become customers, rather than just increasing lead volume.
Importing offline conversions—such as customer lifecycle changes or attributed sales revenue—from your CRM system back into ad platforms like Google or Facebook ensures continuous campaign improvement. Additionally, synchronising contact or customer lists optimise campaigns in real-time to maximise your advertising spend's impact and efficiency.
Why Use Automation & AI in Advertising
To fully understand the impact of advertising automation, it's essential to delve into the key performance metrics that demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of ad campaigns. Here’s how CRM data can continuously refine and automate advertising strategies, ensuring alignment with overall sales and marketing objectives, leading to improved financial performance and transparent advertising spend.
Improved Targeting & Messaging:
Advertising automation refines targeting strategies, ensuring advertisements are closely aligned with the needs and interests of your target audience. By monitoring key metrics such as conversion rates—the percentage of leads completing desired actions—businesses can assess the resonance of their campaigns and adjust strategies to improve outcomes. Keeping your ad platforms up-to-date with the latest contact lists ensures that you are targeting the most relevant customer profiles. This accuracy in targeting not only makes your campaigns more efficient but also minimises wasted advertising spend.
Enhanced Lead Quality:
Evaluating the quality of leads and their progression through the sales funnel provides critical insights. This analysis helps in understanding how well leads fit the target demographic and their potential to convert into sales, enabling a more strategic allocation of marketing resources.
Streamlined Operations:
Automation significantly reduces the time spent on repetitive tasks, enhancing overall campaign management and allowing teams to focus more on strategic decision-making. Routine activities, such as updating contact lists or managing social media posts, are automated, improving workflow efficiency. Automation reduces the need for manual list updates, ensuring that your campaigns always target the most current audience segments. This continuous alignment with the latest audience data drives better engagement, increases conversion rates, and enhances the overall return on investment (ROI) of your ad spend. By automating this process, you ensure that your advertising efforts are consistently synchronised with real-time data, allowing for agile responses to changes in customer behaviour or preferences.
Advertising Budget Savings:
By automating targeting and bidding strategies, CRM automation minimises financial waste and reduces expenditure on low-conversion prospects. This optimisation of advertising budgets, coupled with decreased manual labour costs and error rates, contributes to more cost-effective campaign execution.
Enhanced Reporting for Data-Driven Adjustments:
With advanced analytics and real-time reporting, CRM tools provide vital insights into campaign performance at a glance. Metrics like cost per customer and return on ad spend (ROAS) are readily accessible, facilitating swift adjustments and informed decision-making to enhance campaign effectiveness.
Improved Customer Experience through Responsive Interactions:
Automation enriches the customer journey by enabling timely, automated responses to customer actions, fostering higher engagement, loyalty, and satisfaction. This proactive approach not only improves the customer experience but also supports brand advocacy.
Improved Retargeting:
With updated contact lists, you can more effectively retarget existing customers or leads who have previously shown interest in your products or services. Retargeting is an invaluable strategy for boosting conversion rates and encouraging repeat business, as it allows you to engage with an audience already familiar with your brand. Lets take a more detailed look at retargeting, also known as remarketing.
These benefits highlight how advertising automation can transform your marketing efforts, ensuring more precise targeting, higher lead quality, and better overall performance.
What is CRM Advertising? (First Party Advertising)
First-party advertising involves using data collected directly by a business from its own customers and known audience to create targeted and personalised advertising campaigns. This data is gathered from various touchpoints such as website interactions, mobile app usage, email subscriptions, purchase history, and CRM systems. The growing importance of first-party data stems from increasing privacy regulations and the phasing out of third-party cookies, which limit the availability of third-party data.
Integrating first-party data with the targeting options available on ad platforms like Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook transforms how businesses manage their advertising efforts. By combining first-party insights with ad platform capabilities, businesses can target specific customer segments more effectively, based on detailed insights such as purchasing history, customer behaviour, and engagement levels.
By strategically using first-party data, businesses can achieve substantial improvements in efficiency, cost management, and overall campaign performance, maintaining a competitive edge in the evolving digital advertising landscape.
Enhanced Targeting and Personalisation:
First-party data is accurate and relevant, reflecting real customer behaviour and preferences. This allows for precise targeting and personalised ad experiences, improving campaign effectiveness.
Improved Customer Insights:
Businesses gain deep insights into customer journeys, enabling effective segmentation and targeting. These insights help create ads that resonate with specific customer segments throughout their buyer journey.
Higher ROI:
Using first-party data optimises advertising spend, focusing on high-value customers and reducing waste. Personalised campaigns tend to perform better, leading to higher conversion rates and a better return on investment (ROI).
Cross-Channel Consistency:
First-party data can be used across various advertising channels, ensuring a consistent and cohesive customer experience. It supports integrated marketing strategies, aligning online and offline customer data seamlessly.
Data Ownership and Privacy:
Businesses own the data, ensuring compliance with privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA. This control fosters trust with customers, as data usage is transparent and secure.
Streamlined Operations and Scalability:
Integrating CRM systems with advertising platforms automates key tasks such as lead capture, segmentation, and nurturing. This automation ensures that every lead is managed according to its stage in the sales funnel, enhancing scalability and agility.
Improve Lead Quality with Offline Conversion tracking
Advertising is an indispensable investment for businesses seeking to attract new customers and enhance their market presence. However, it is crucial to recognise that not all leads generated through advertising possess the same value. This disparity largely stems from the common practice of optimising advertising campaigns based on cost per acquisition (CPA), also known as cost per lead or cost per conversion.
While CPA optimisation aims to accumulate as many leads as possible at the lowest cost, it often overlooks the actual quality of the leads generated, focusing instead on quantity. Although CPA is an important metric, the quality of leads is equally, if not more, important when measuring campaign performance. A significant portion of the advertising budget can be wasted on low-quality leads that are unlikely to result in sales. Prioritising high-quality leads—those more likely to make a purchase—is essential for maximising return on investment (ROI).
To truly capitalise on advertising investments, it is vital to consider not just the cost per lead but also the value each lead brings to the business. Moving beyond basic CPA optimisation, integrating first-party data from systems like CRMs with advertising platform targeting can significantly boost campaign efficiency. Shifting focus from merely acquiring leads to nurturing and generating more sales-ready leads allows businesses to utilise a return on ad spend (ROAS) as a more comprehensive indicator of campaign success. ROAS and ROI take into account both the costs of lead acquisition and the actual revenue generated from these leads.
Sync CRM Lifecycle Stages as Offline Conversions
To recap, enhancing the tracking and integration of offline interactions as conversions with ad campaigns not only increases the quality of leads but also ensures more efficient use of marketing budgets. When you integrate your CRM with advertising platforms like Google Ads, Facebook, and LinkedIn, you can sync your CRM lifecycle stage changes to optimise for lead quality, not just quantity.
This process involves updating the advertising platforms as prospects move through your sales funnel in your CRM, such as through phone calls, meetings, quotes, and proposals. Automating this process improves the ad campaigns' lead scoring accuracy by providing a comprehensive view of each customer’s interactions with your business, leading to more informed and strategic advertising decisions.
To gain maximum insights from offline conversion tracking, it is critical to delineate the conversion process into distinct stages. While each company has a unique marketing and sales process, at a minimum, three stages should be used to segment leads into good, medium, and bad quality. This improves the bidding efficacy of the ad platform, allocating more budget to the best quality leads most likely to become customers, giving you a better return on investment.
By syncing lifecycle stages as offline conversions, businesses can optimise their advertising efforts more effectively, ensuring better allocation of budget and improved overall campaign performance. Let's take a look at ways to sync your CRM lifecycle stages.
Lead:
A lead is a contact within the CRM system who requires nurturing by the marketing team and is not yet ready to be passed on to sales. Not all leads will progress to the marketing qualified lead (MQL) stage; some may not fit the ideal customer profile, while others have the potential to be high-quality but are not yet ready for sales outreach.
Ad campaigns on platforms such as Google Ads, Facebook, and LinkedIn typically optimise for cost per lead, aiming to generate the most leads at the lowest cost using advanced bidding AI and machine learning algorithms. To go beyond CPA bidding and optimise for lead quality, you need to incorporate CRM lifecycle changes within the ad platform's bidding algorithm using offline conversion tracking. This trains the AI on your ideal prospect and customer data lower in the funnel rather than just top-of-the-funnel leads- or low-quality leads that should not be in the funnel.
There are several approaches to achieve this, which we will cover in this blog post (e.g., optimising for sales revenue, a specific stage, or all stages). The best approach will depend on the amount of data you have, and you must also consider the minimum audience size restrictions set by the ad platforms when selecting your optimisation strategy.
Leads captured online are already recorded within the ad platforms using their conversion tracking scripts placed on your website, making it unnecessary to send these as offline conversions back to the respective ad platform - except in a few exceptions (e.g. when using Lead Ads, an ad format which includes forms below adverts where the conversion normally happens on the ad platform's own website, but the user converts on your website instead of on the advert form itself, and therefore a lead that is more qualified and lower in the funnel).
Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL):
Potential customers who have interacted with marketing efforts and are qualified enough to be passed on to the sales team. This is often the first offline conversion stage sent back to the ad platforms. Comparing the cost per MQL versus the cost per lead helps measure advertising health and determine which advertising channel is generating the most sales-ready leads at the lowest cost.
Sales Qualified Lead (SQL):
Leads accepted by the sales team as valid and have initiated outreach efforts. If the sales team disagrees that a certain lead is an MQL, they will reject the lead, and it will not become sales-qualified. Monitor the cost per SQL in your CRM and within the ad platform campaign manager interface of Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other ad platforms to compare ROI.
Opportunities/Deals:
Contacts or Leads where negotiations or discussions are in progress, such as demos, proposals, or quotations, moving closer to becoming paying customers. View the cost per deal in your CRM and within the ad platform campaign manager interface of Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
Forecasted Opportunities/Deals:
The best quality contacts/leads that are most likely to become customers, and forecasted with more than a 50% chance of closing/converting.
Customer:
The final stage is where leads become customers. You can also sync your sales revenue back to the ad platform, enabling ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) reporting. This takes you far beyond just target CPA (cost per acquisition) bidding to include even target cost per sale.
To summarise the importance of offline conversion tracking, sending each stage as an offline conversion helps the ad platform optimise for quality leads, not just quantity. This ensures that the ad platform focuses on attracting leads that are more likely to convert into paying customers, thereby improving the overall effectiveness of your advertising campaigns. By providing detailed feedback at each stage of the sales funnel, you enable the platform's algorithms to learn and adjust, targeting more accurately and efficiently. This strategic approach not only enhances lead quality but also maximises your return on investment by reducing wasted ad spend and increasing conversion rates.
The Decline of Third-Party Cookie Tracking: A New Era of 1st-Party Advertising
With the decline of third-party cookies and tracking technologies due to growing privacy concerns and regulatory changes like GDPR, advertisers face significant challenges in targeting and monitoring user behaviour. Tracking is becoming more fragmented, with an increase in direct traffic sources and unknown data, making it harder to measure advertising ROI effectively.
This has led to a strategic shift towards collecting and integrating first-party data from Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems with ad platforms.
This approach offers several benefits:
Compliance with Privacy Regulations
Integrating first-party data ensures that advertisers comply with privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA. By relying on data collected directly from users with their consent, businesses can navigate the complexities of data protection laws while maintaining trust and transparency.
Ownership and Control of Data
Using first-party data grants advertisers ownership and control over their data. This eliminates reliance on third-party providers, ensuring that businesses have direct access to valuable customer insights. This control enhances data security and allows for more strategic data management.
Enhanced Audience Targeting Precision
First-party data integration improves audience targeting precision. By leveraging data collected from CRM systems, advertisers can create detailed customer profiles based on behaviour, preferences, and past interactions. This allows for more accurate targeting, ensuring that ads are relevant and engaging to the intended audience.
Improved Cross-Device Tracking
Integrating first-party data facilitates better cross-device tracking. Advertisers can link user interactions across multiple devices, providing a cohesive understanding of the customer journey. This holistic view enhances the ability to deliver consistent and personalised advertising experiences.
Boosted Retargeting Effectiveness
First-party data significantly enhances retargeting efforts. Advertisers can use CRM data to identify and re-engage users who have previously interacted with their brand. This targeted approach increases the likelihood of conversions by presenting relevant ads to users who have already shown interest.
Accurate Ad Measurement and Attribution
Integrating first-party data allows for precise ad measurement and attribution. Advertisers can track user interactions and conversions with greater accuracy, enabling a clear understanding of campaign performance. This insight is crucial for optimising strategies and demonstrating the ROI of advertising efforts.
Long-Term Sustainable Advertising Strategy
Relying on first-party data establishes a sustainable advertising strategy. As third-party cookies become obsolete, businesses that invest in first-party data will be better positioned to adapt to future changes in the advertising landscape. This proactive approach ensures long-term success and resilience in marketing efforts.
Integrating first-party data with ad platforms is a crucial solution for advertisers navigating the evolving landscape of privacy regulations and declining third-party cookies. This strategy enables businesses to maintain precision, compliance, and effectiveness in their advertising endeavours. By embracing first-party data, advertisers can build transparent, direct relationships with users, enhance targeting accuracy, improve tracking and retargeting, and establish a sustainable approach to advertising in the future.
Improve Lead Management with Automation
Effective lead management is crucial for distinguishing between leads that should be escalated to sales and those that require further nurturing by the marketing team. Some leads are ready for immediate sales interaction and should be promptly assigned to sales teams. In contrast, others may benefit from being placed in nurturing sequences to develop their potential before transitioning to sales. Leads can be captured either through your website's landing page or directly via Lead Ads on platforms such as LinkedIn, Google, and Facebook.
These Lead Ads streamline the lead generation process by capturing information on the ad platform itself, eliminating the need to redirect users to your website. This method is highly effective but necessitates a robust follow-up system to ensure your team can initiate timely follow-ups or nurture leads that are not immediately ready for sales.
By integrating your CRM with these advertising platforms, you can automate the lead management process. For instance, when a new lead is detected, your CRM system can automatically trigger custom notifications like emails or Slack messages to relevant team members. Additionally, if a lead is not yet prepared for a sales engagement, they can be automatically enrolled in a tailored email marketing sequence for nurturing, ensuring that no lead is overlooked..
Beyond just lead notifications, CRM automation expands to include broader capabilities. By setting up custom alerts and notifications within your existing marketing stack, your team can stay informed about critical events such as the acquisition of new leads or significant customer milestones. This proactive approach ensures that all team members are aligned and can respond quickly to developments, thus boosting the efficiency and effectiveness of your marketing strategies.
In conclusion, the integration of CRM and automation tools is indispensable for modern digital marketing teams. These tools not only streamline workflows and ensure rapid response times but also enhance the overall performance of your advertising campaigns, leading to improved business outcomes.
Retargeting with CRM Data Integration:
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems offer a valuable repository of data that can significantly enhance the precision and personalisation of your remarketing campaigns. By leveraging CRM data, you can create segmented audiences, which can then be uploaded directly to various advertising platforms. Here’s how to maximise the potential of CRM data for targeted retargeting:
Utilising Contact Information
Importing contact emails from your CRM into ad platforms such as Google Ads or Facebook allows you to directly target individuals who have previously interacted with your brand. This method ensures your campaigns reach those with an established interest, increasing the likelihood of conversion.
Tracking Website Interactions
Using tracking scripts from ad platforms on your website, or your CRM system's own tracking script, you can monitor user behaviour across your website via cookies, from page visits to session duration. By analysing this data, you can segment audiences based on their engagement level or interest in specific content. This segmentation enables more tailored advertising that resonates with the unique needs and interests of each user group.
Leveraging CRM Lifecycle Stages
Understanding where a potential customer stands in your sales funnel—whether they’re a new lead, a hot prospect, or near closing—allows for dynamic retargeting strategies. For example, you can customise your ads to offer promotions or special offers to those who are at the decision-making stage, thereby increasing the chances of converting leads into paying customers. Alternatively, you can re-engage old leads that did not progress with more informational content such as free guides and tips.
Dynamic Ads
Use CRM data to create ads that dynamically change based on the user’s past interactions with your brand. For instance, if a user has viewed a particular product or service page several times, your ad can emphasise this, along with a special offer or discount to encourage purchase.
Predictive Analytics
Implement predictive analytics by integrating advanced machine learning algorithms with your CRM data. This approach can forecast future buying behaviours based on past data, allowing you to proactively target users with campaigns that align with their anticipated needs.
Cross-Platform Retargeting
Coordinate your retargeting efforts across multiple platforms to maintain consistency and frequency in messaging. For example, a user who abandoned a cart on your website after originating from Google can be retargeted on social media platforms with ads reminding them of their unfinished purchase.
By effectively integrating CRM data into your retargeting strategies, you can significantly enhance the relevance and efficiency of your campaigns, leading to better engagement, higher conversions, and an improved overall return on investment (ROI) in your advertising efforts.
By effectively integrating CRM data into your retargeting strategies, you can significantly enhance the relevance and efficiency of your campaigns, leading to better engagement, higher conversions, and an improved overall return on investment (ROI) in your advertising efforts.
Google Ads with CRM Automation
CRM systems offer a wealth of automation possibilities for companies using Google Ads. Whether you're integrating Google Ads with your CRM to improve lead quality, automating follow-up actions to enhance lead management, or synchronising contact lists to refine ad targeting, automating tasks with Google Ads delivers better results, reduces manual work, improves accuracy, and ensures consistency in your advertising efforts.
Let’s explore how you can use CRM to automate Google Ads while maximising your advertising potential.
Enhanced Offline Conversion Tracking in Google Ads
Offline conversion tracking bridges the gap between online campaigns and offline outcomes by tracking offline interactions that occur after the initial lead enquiry. Examples include phone calls, email correspondence, proposals, payments, or other non-digital engagements. This provides a holistic view of your marketing performance.
Sending each stage progression as an offline conversion helps Google Ads optimise for quality leads, not just quantity. This ensures that Google’s AI focuses on attracting leads more likely to convert into paying customers, thereby improving the overall effectiveness of your advertising campaigns. By providing detailed feedback at each stage of the sales funnel, you enable Google’s AI algorithms to learn and adjust, targeting more accurately and efficiently. This strategic approach not only enhances lead quality but also maximises your return on investment (ROI) from Google by reducing wasted ad spend while increasing the conversion rate of the best quality traffic.
Setting up and Managing Google Ads Offline Conversions
Integrating your CRM system with Google Ads allows you to automate repetitive tasks and focus on higher-level advertising strategies, ensuring your campaigns are well-optimised for better results and increased ROI. Here’s how you can integrate and monitor these stages within Google Ads to refine your marketing strategies:
CRM Integration
Start by linking your CRM system with Google Ads. Some CRM systems, like HubSpot and Salesforce, offer direct integration, while others may require a third-party tool like Zapier or Make. This setup facilitates the automated import of offline conversion data into Google Ads, enabling you to track each stage of your sales funnel (e.g., MQL, SQL, Deals, and Customer conversions) as separate conversions within Google Ads.
Tracking Mechanisms
Ensure your CRM or payment platform records the Google Click Identifier (GCLID) as a hidden field in your forms. This is used to match the original click, tying offline conversions back to the specific ad/keyword interactions that generated them. This connection clarifies which ads are not just generating clicks but actual business results, ensuring your budget is allocated wisely and validating that you are achieving the best results.
Ongoing Data Synch
Set up an automated transfer of conversion data from your CRM into Google Ads. This data should detail the conversion stage each lead has reached and, ideally, include the sales revenue value so this can be tracked in Google Ads.
Optimising Campaigns with Offline Data
With granular conversion tracking, you can fine-tune your Google Ad campaigns based on leads that reach specific stages in the sales funnel:
Bid Adjustments
Adjust bids manually or use machine learning to bid higher or lower based on the quality of the lead, not just quantity. For example, when leads reach the opportunity/deal stage, they are of higher quality and more likely to become customers. Increase your bids for keywords or audience targeting that generate more revenue. This approach ensures you allocate your budget towards the most promising leads. For automatic bidding, also known as machine learning or AI optimisation, you can use target CPA or target ROAS as the default conversion bid strategies. Target ROAS is generally more effective but requires a minimum of 50 closed sales per month. CPA bidding, which requires at least 20 conversions, does not consider revenue amount but identifies which leads are more likely to become qualified and won.
Tailored Ads
Develop customised ad strategies for different funnel segments: awareness, consideration, and conversion. Use awareness-focused content for higher funnel targeting options to capture leads needing nurturing. Then use middle-of-the-funnel content like guides and how-to articles to increase consideration rates. For keywords more likely to become opportunities right away, create decision-support content like free demos and consultations. This approach ensures your messaging is relevant to the lead's position in the buyer journey, increasing the likelihood of conversion.
Reporting Insights
Regularly assess which keywords, audiences, ads, and campaigns effectively advance leads through your sales funnel. This analysis can pinpoint strengths and weaknesses in your approach, facilitating targeted enhancements. By understanding which elements drive success, you can refine your strategies to improve overall campaign performance and maximise ROI. Use Funnel Visualisation Reports to observe the flow of leads through various stages, identifying potential bottlenecks and optimisation opportunities. Segment your conversion reporting in Google Ads to view conversion types and construct custom dashboards in Google Looker Studio that concentrate on offline conversion metrics, offering a real-time overview of how different campaigns are driving sales revenue.
Building More Targeted Audiences
Synchronising your contact lists from your CRM with Google Ads enables you to create customer-match audiences by combining your first-party data with Google Ads' third-party targeting options. This valuable automation allows for more targeted advertising campaigns, enhancing lead quality and overall campaign performance.
Improving Lead Management with Automated Follow-Up
Another common automation for Google Ads involves creating custom alerts for follow-up actions when new leads are generated. If a lead is cold, it may need an email marketing sequence to nurture until they are ready to be passed to sales. If a lead is hot, alert your sales team promptly so they can take action to convert leads into customers. This automation helps streamline communication and ensures that leads are not overlooked, improving your chances of conversion. New leads from Facebook Ads are then automatically incorporated into your CRM, enhancing the lead management process.
For a more detailed understanding of Google Ads, read our blog post: Google Ads with HubSpot CRM
Facebook Ads CRM Automation
Integrating your first-party data offers numerous automation possibilities for Facebook advertisers. Automating tasks with Facebook Ads improves lead quality, saves time, reduces manual work, and ensures consistency in your advertising campaigns. Whether you are integrating Facebook Ads with your CRM, automating follow-up actions, or synchronising contact lists as custom audiences, these automations can significantly enhance your advertising efforts.
By establishing CRM integrations with Facebook Ads, you can focus on strategic tasks while automating repetitive processes. This improves lead management, enhances advertising results, and boosts ROI.
Using Offline Conversion Tracking to Improve Lead Quality from Facebook Ads
Offline conversion tracking in Facebook Ads is crucial for businesses aiming to link their digital advertising efforts with real-world outcomes. This functionality enables marketers to gauge the effectiveness of Facebook campaigns in driving high-quality leads that are more likely to become customers. It can be used with two campaign types: Website Conversions and Lead Ads.
Using it with Lead Ads is a more recent development that allows this campaign to be optimised for bottom-of-the-funnel events. You can choose to optimise for quantity higher in the funnel without using offline conversions, or with offline conversions for quality. Let's take a more detailed look at this.
Facebook Lead Ads Optimisation
Leads Optimisation: Set a performance goal to maximise the number of leads generated from your ad. Your advertisement will be targeted towards individuals within your audience who are most likely to contact you and become leads.
Conversion Leads Optimisation: Set a performance goal to enhance the quality of your leads. Your advertisement will be directed towards individuals within your audience who are most likely to convert into customers.
CRM Integration
Connect your CRM system with Facebook Ads. If this integration already exists (e.g., HubSpot or Salesforce), use it. Otherwise, you can use the Facebook API manually or employ a no-code third-party integration tool like Zapier or Make.com.
This is done using Facebook’s Offline Conversions API to relay data about offline interactions back to Facebook, matching CRM-recorded transactions with Facebook user actions. Regularly upload comprehensive contact lifecycle data from your CRM to Facebook Ads, categorising each lead based on their stage in the sales funnel.
Optimising Facebook Campaigns Using Offline Data
Utilise offline conversion data to refine your Facebook campaigns:
Bid Adjustments:
Adjust your bidding strategy for each campaign separately based on lead quality, increasing bids for ad sets that are more effective at generating high-quality leads.
Ad Content Customisation:
Tailor your ad content to suit specific stages of the funnel. Create awareness-focused campaigns for leads higher in the funnel that require more nurturing or content suited to consideration and conversion targeting options to drive leads closer to purchase.
Insightful Performance Analysis:
Employ Facebook’s analytics to assess how different advertising strategies affect progress through the sales funnel, identifying which ads and target audiences excel at generating high-quality leads and facilitating conversions.
Funnel Visualisation Tools:
Use your Facebook Pixel to view the progression of leads from one stage to another, helping identify drop-off points and successful conversions.
Implementing offline conversion tracking in Facebook Ads empowers marketers to bridge the gap between online activities and offline results effectively. By thoroughly tracking and analysing each stage of the conversion process, you can tailor strategies to improve ad spend allocation and achieve superior business outcomes. This ensures that your Facebook advertising efforts are both measurable and highly effective in driving significant business growth.
Synchronising Contact Lists with Facebook Ads
Synchronising contact lists with Facebook Ads is a valuable automation strategy that creates custom audiences from your existing contact lists, leading to more targeted advertising campaigns. You can also create a Lookalike Audience on Facebook using your customer list as the seed audience to allow Facebook to find and target the most similar people.
Improve Lead Management with Automating Follow-Up
Creating custom alerts for follow-up actions when new leads are generated in Facebook Ads ensures your sales team is promptly informed, enabling them to engage leads effectively and increase the chances of conversion. With this setup, new leads from Facebook Ads are automatically incorporated into your CRM, enhancing the lead management process. They can either be sent to sales right away or left with marketing to nurture through automated email sequences.
For a more detailed understanding of Facebook Ads, read our blog post: Facebook Ads with HubSpot CRM
LinkedIn Ads CRM Automation
Integrating your CRM with LinkedIn Ads offers numerous automation possibilities for LinkedIn advertisers. By integrating LinkedIn Ads with your CRM, you can improve lead quality, automate follow-up actions, and synchronise contact lists as matched audiences. This saves time, reduces manual work, and ensures consistency in your advertising efforts.
Establishing CRM integrations with LinkedIn Ads allows you to focus on strategic tasks while automating repetitive processes, thus improving lead management, enhancing advertising results, and boosting ROI. This integration ensures a smooth flow of data, enabling efficient tracking of leads and monitoring their progression through the sales funnel to enhance lead quality, improve reporting accuracy, and optimise your overall advertising strategy.
Use Offline Conversion Tracking to Improve Lead Quality on LinkedIn
Offline conversion tracking on LinkedIn allows marketers to connect their online advertising efforts with tangible offline outcomes, such as in-person meetings, phone call conversions, and other non-digital transactions. This tool is crucial for understanding how LinkedIn advertising impacts actual business results, effectively closing the loop between online engagement and offline sales activities.
Synchronising Contact Lists with LinkedIn Ads
Synchronising contact lists with LinkedIn Ads is a valuable automation strategy that creates custom audiences from your existing contact lists, leading to more targeted advertising campaigns. You can also create a Matched Audience on LinkedIn using your customer list as a hashed seed audience, allowing LinkedIn to find and target the most similar people on LinkedIn.
Synchronising Company Lists with LinkedIn Ads
LinkedIn Ads offers a unique feature not available on other leading ad platforms like Google and Facebook. You can upload lists of target accounts/companies that visit your website and retarget them. This is done by identifying companies that visit your website from their IP addresses and then uploading the list to LinkedIn. The best way to do this is by using a CRM that offers this feature or tools such as Lead Forensics. Automating this process ensures the list updates automatically each day.
You can filter the company list by combining this with LinkedIn Ads' native targeting, such as job titles. For example, if you sell a marketing product or service, you can target people in the marketing department who are directors or managers. This allows you to target everyone on a buying committee, even if only one person visited your website. With contact lists or website cookie lists, you can only target the person (or device) that visited your website.
Improve Lead Management with Automated Follow-Up
Creating custom alerts for follow-up actions when new leads are generated in LinkedIn Ads ensures your sales team is promptly informed, enabling them to engage leads effectively and increase the chances of conversion. With this setup, new leads from LinkedIn Ads are automatically incorporated into your CRM, enhancing the lead management process. Depending on their lead score, they can either be sent to sales immediately or left with marketing to nurture through automated email sequences.
If you have any questions about setting up CRM integrations or need additional automation ideas, I'm here to help. Feel free to reach out for guidance on your specific requirements. By embracing automation, you can transform your advertising efforts and achieve the efficiency and results you aim for.
Use Offline Conversion Tracking to Improve Lead Quality on LinkedIn
Offline conversion tracking on LinkedIn allows marketers to connect their online advertising efforts with tangible offline outcomes, such as in-person meetings, phone call conversions, and other non-digital transactions. This tool is crucial for understanding how LinkedIn advertising impacts actual business results, effectively closing the loop between online engagement and offline sales activities.
Synchronising Contact Lists with LinkedIn Ads
Synchronising contact lists with LinkedIn Ads is a valuable automation strategy that creates custom audiences from your existing contact lists, leading to more targeted advertising campaigns. You can also create a Matched Audience on LinkedIn using your customer list as a hashed seed audience, allowing LinkedIn to find and target the most similar people on LinkedIn.
Synchronising Company Lists with LinkedIn Ads
LinkedIn Ads offers a unique feature not available on other leading ad platforms like Google and Facebook. You can upload lists of target accounts/companies that visit your website and retarget them. This is done by identifying companies that visit your website from their IP addresses and then uploading the list to LinkedIn. The best way to do this is by using a CRM that offers this feature or tools such as Lead Forensics. Automating this process ensures the list updates automatically each day.
You can filter the company list by combining this with LinkedIn Ads' native targeting, such as job titles. For example, if you sell a marketing product or service, you can target people in the marketing department who are directors or managers. This allows you to target everyone on a buying committee, even if only one person visited your website. With contact lists or website cookie lists, you can only target the person (or device) that visited your website.
Improve Lead Management with Automated Follow-Up
Creating custom alerts for follow-up actions when new leads are generated in LinkedIn Ads ensures your sales team is promptly informed, enabling them to engage leads effectively and increase the chances of conversion. With this setup, new leads from LinkedIn Ads are automatically incorporated into your CRM, enhancing the lead management process. Depending on their lead score, they can either be sent to sales immediately or left with marketing to nurture through automated email sequences.
If you have any questions about setting up CRM integrations or need additional automation ideas, I'm here to help. Feel free to reach out for guidance on your specific requirements. By embracing automation, you can transform your advertising efforts and achieve the efficiency and results you aim for.
For a more detailed understanding of LinkedIn Ads, read our blog post: LinkedIn Ads with HubSpot CRM
What is HubSpot Ads?
HubSpot Ads is a comprehensive ad management platform that enables businesses to create, manage, optimise, and analyse their advertising campaigns across multiple channels from a single, unified interface. With HubSpot Ads, businesses can effectively manage campaigns on platforms like Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn without the need to log into each platform individually. This centralised approach simplifies ad management and enhances the ability to track and optimise performance and apply everything we have discussed throughout this guide. See our blog post to learn more about how to use HubSpot Ads.
Conclusion
In today's fast-paced digital advertising landscape, platforms like Google Ads, Facebook, and LinkedIn are revolutionising the way businesses approach marketing by embracing automation and machine learning. These advancements enable businesses to transition from manual, day-to-day tasks to strategic planning and the effective utilisation of first-party data, especially as the industry shifts away from third-party cookies.
Integrating CRM systems with advertising platforms significantly enhances campaign effectiveness by generating higher-quality leads, improving reporting accuracy, and automating follow-up processes. This seamless integration ensures a smooth data flow, enabling real-time adjustments and more targeted advertising.
By implementing offline conversion tracking and synchronising contact lists, businesses can optimise their advertising spend for maximum impact. Automation simplifies complex processes, reduces operational costs, and enhances lead quality, ultimately driving better campaign performance and higher ROI.
Adopting CRM advertising strategies not only streamlines operations but also enhances the scalability and agility of your campaigns. As digital advertising continues to evolve, leveraging these technologies is crucial for maintaining a competitive edge and achieving sustained growth. By embracing automation and AI, you can transform your advertising efforts, ensuring efficiency and superior results in this dynamic digital era.
For any questions about setting up CRM integrations or exploring additional automation ideas, feel free to reach out for guidance tailored to your specific requirements. Embrace automation to transform your advertising game and achieve the efficiency and results you've been aiming for.