Meta is testing promotional ads; a format designed to make it easier for brands to run promotions on Facebook.

According to a study in the UK by YouGov, 85% of shoppers seek out promotions or offers before making a purchase. That means there are a lot of folks out there who could be tempted to shop with your brand if you can reach them with a tidy discount.

Reach savvy shoppers with promotional ads

To help brands reach those people, Meta has started to test a new ad format called promotional ads.

Meta

“Promotional ads can help people find opportunities to save on products and offers from brands they love. Starting in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and India, select advertisers on Facebook will be able to better engage people through various features that make it easier to find, apply, and manage deals that are relevant to them such as seasonal sales, first-time purchase discounts and holiday promotions.”

The ads will be shown on Facebook, and once a user clicks on the ad to claim it, a discount code will automatically be applied at check-out. If the user doesn’t complete the transaction they will receive a reminder notification before the deal ends.

Increase sales and drive re-marketing

Promotional ads could be an excellent way to help brands increase direct sales activity on Facebook, while also letting consumers grab the latest and greatest deals. Of course, if you can find new first-time customers via promotional ads, marketers will also have an excellent opportunity to target them with re-marketing campaigns.

New led gen features

Meta has also announced new lead ads features. 

Meta

“First, we are making our lead ad products more dynamic by allowing an advertiser’s question and answer forms to update automatically based on how people respond.”

Advertisers can ask questions such as “what pair of shoes are you interested in”, and based on the answer, any follow-up questions will update to give the customer more information.

Scaled-up instant forms?

Instant forms is also getting a little makeover. Soon, brands can overlay Instant Forms on their web page within Facebook’s in-app browser.

Meta

“With this feature, people can engage with the rich media formats on a business’s web page to get more context about the business, and then easily submit their information through Instant Form using Meta’s auto-fill capabilities, which automatically pulls in a person’s information based on what they’ve provided to Meta (often, name and email address).”

An Instant Form is the form used in a lead ad to collect information from the people your ads reach in a way that doesn’t require them to leave Facebook or Instagram.

Marketers can use them to collect contact information like names, email addresses and phone numbers – as well as custom questions.

Instant Forms can only be used if your lead ad is using the leads objective. Once people click on your ad and fill in the form, the information can be found and downloaded from Ads Manager or your Facebook Page. Alternatively, you can connect a CRM system like Mailchimp or Salesforce.

Facebook’s new pages can help to generate enquiries

Finally, Facebook says its new pages experience can help “engage prospective customers and find quality leads for free” simply by adding a ‘Contact Us’ call to action button on the Facebook page.

The ‘contact us’ button will let people start a direct message conversation with the business via Messenger, allowing marketers to directly engage with people in a more personalised way.