How Automation Can Help Companies Make The Most of Lead Generation Veo, an innovative camera company, processed thousands of leads per month with Zapier and Meta technologies

For many companies, identifying and nurturing prospective customers (or leads), a process known as lead generation, can be essential to long-term success. That success can present new challenges for time-strapped marketing teams. As campaigns scale and leads come in faster and faster, it's important to maintain efficiency and ensure quality at scale. Finding ways to automate processes can mean the difference between an interested prospect or converting them into a customer.

We sat down with lead generation expert Lars Christensen to hear what works when it comes to garnering and nurturing interest from prospective customers, and how automation helps make the most of lead generation campaigns. Lars is the social ads specialist for Veo, a company that sells an innovative camera — built using AI and machine learning — that allows grassroots sports clubs to simply, affordably and easily record and livestream sports matches without a camera operator.

Leveraging lead generation tools from Meta technologies, Lars receives information from thousands of leads a month — all of which need personalized follow-up. To help manage the high volume, his team uses Zapier, a code-free automation and integration tool, to streamline processes and make the most of the leads they acquire.

Let's set the stage. What is Veo aiming to achieve with lead generation?

The goal is always to increase our customer base (coaches and decision makers of grassroots sports clubs), and raise awareness about our affordable and high-quality camera solution so that we can make technology in sports available to all levels. With our lead generation strategies, we can encourage potential customers to contact us when they're first interested, introduce them to our product and then nurture our relationship with them through marketing emails. The end goal is to have them book a sales call with us or buy the Veo camera on our webshop.

Our potential customers are most often part-time coaches, so our audience is a hybrid of B2B and B2C. We primarily use lead ads on Facebook and Instagram to connect with thousands of prospective customers a month. With lead ads, potential customers can complete a mobile-first contact form (or instant form) to easily provide information without leaving the app.

That's a lot of leads. How are you managing that volume?

As you can imagine, generating that many leads creates a lot of repetitive day-to-day tasks for our marketing team, so we automate many of our lead generation processes using Zapier, which connects apps and helps automate work that doesn't require technical expertise. We used it to transfer new leads from Meta technologies to our customer relationship management (CRM) tool. This means we can automatically send the leads from Meta technologies directly to our CRM tool without having to manually export the data as we used to and filter the high number of leads we get into the email flow that's right for each lead.

It's helped us accelerate our sales cycle like crazy — and saved us thousands of hours, and costs, because we didn't have to hire a developer to make multiple systems talk to each other. Now we can spend that time focused on sales and marketing.

What are some of the challenges and benefits of using lead generation tools?

A challenge with lead generation tools is that they may require a fair amount of technical skills to get started. The benefits are plenty, though. We can scale at a much faster pace and we are able to personalize each customer's experience by setting up automations. For example, we generate a high number of leads globally in order to grow our customer base, and each lead needs to be put on a specific email campaign according to their country, sport, role and the campaign they came from. We've now automated that entire process.

Zapier and Meta technologies help us leverage and utilize our leads in the best possible ways. To make sure people get an optimal experience in our customer flow, we have set up highly personalized and configured automations.

Can you dive deeper into the results you've seen using lead ads from Meta technologies and how Zapier helped make things easier?

Previously, we were seeing an average cost of $15 a lead over the last year, with a conversion rate between 6-8%. We ran a lead ad campaign in July 2022 that generated over 10,000 leads at $12 a lead, which is $3 less than our previous average. Because we used Zapier to integrate the lead ads with our CRM, all those leads were moved into the right email campaign instantly. We were then able to convert 7.5% into paying customers, enabling us to hire more employees.¹

There were some choices we made that I think made the campaign especially successful:

• Showcased the product in action with a short video so that our prospects could get a clear idea of what our camera could do.
• Reduced friction with the customized contact form, or instant form, so that leads could give us key information without ever leaving Facebook or Instagram.
• Filtered the leads by quality so that we could focus our follow-up efforts on the decision makers who were most likely to make a purchase.

What are the best next steps for a business that wants to get started with lead ads?

First, it's important to know your audience before you get started with lead ads. This helps get your ads in front of the people most interested in your product or service to increase your chances of converting them into buyers.

Second, be specific on what you want to do with the leads you generate, so you know what questions to ask to qualify your leads and help them to make a purchase decision. Do you want them to download an ebook or reach out for more information? Be sure to say so with a strong call to action.

Last, if you're looking to run lead ads on an ongoing basis, consider automating your workflows where possible. Lead generation can create a lot of administrative work to export and import the leads if you're doing it manually, and Zapier is a great tool that can help in this regard.

Interested in getting started with Meta lead generation tools? Learn more about lead generation tools on Meta technologies and how to automate workflows with Zapier. To learn more about Veo's live-streaming solutions for your next sports match, visit their website here.

¹ Results are unique and provided by the featured business. Success story results will vary, as they depend on a variety of factors.