Automation is the key to saving money on marketing while getting more leads. Here’s how you can use ActiveCampaign to automate your social media campaigns.

You’re missing out if you’re not using Facebook and Instagram to generate leads.

Facebook ads have higher click-through rates than most other types of ads. Right now, the rate is 9.1% higher for mobile and 8.1% higher for desktop.

Here’s another stat – 72% of Instagram users say they’ve bought something they saw on the social network.

It pays to create lead generation funnels for these platforms. The problem comes in the time it takes to implement and execute.

That’s where ActiveCampaign comes in. This is a platform that allows you to automate much of a lead’s journey through your funnel. It offers a host of features, such as automated emails, which you can customise based on the lead’s journey.

Best of all, you can integrate both Facebook and Instagram ads into ActiveCampaign. Here’s how it works.

Step #1 – Get Started With ActiveCampaign

You’ve got to set up your account before you can get started with ActiveCampaign. The platform offers a 14-day free trial if you don’t want to commit immediately.

Once you’ve created your account, you’ll hit a screen that asks a few questions. Here, you’ll set a password and highlight the features that most interest you. Marketing Automation is the big one for your purposes. You can also discuss anything specific that you want to focus on.

Clicking “Get Started” takes you to the ActiveCampaign dashboard. Spend a little time getting acquainted with it.

Enter an address into the platform. It won’t let you send emails without one.

You now have an account. There’s a lot more to learn about the platform. However, we’re going to focus solely on social integration for the rest of this article.

Step #2 – Create Your Facebook Lead Gen Ad

Creating a lead gen ad in Facebook is a pretty simple process. Just follow these steps:

  1. Log into your Facebook account and head to the Ad Manager section.
  2. Select the Campaigns tab and click Create. You’ll get two options:
    1. Guided Creation – Facebook walks you through the ad creation process.
    2. Quick Creation – You take full control. This is ideal for people who’ve created Facebook ads before.
  3. Select Lead Generation as your campaign objective.
  4. Name the campaign. Choose a name that’s easy to identify based on the campaign objectives.
  5. Target your audience. Facebook allows you to create custom audiences based on who’s interacted with your business page in the past. This allows you to target the types of people who are most likely to show an interest in your service. You can also create your own preferred audience based on a range of demographics and options.
  6. Select your ad placements. Automatic may be the best choice if you’re new to Facebook ads.
  7. Set a budget and create an ad schedule. Facebook walks you through this process.
  8. Create the ad. Facebook offers you a wizard that takes you through the ad creation process. Here, you’ll select the type of ad and upload the content for it.

That’s all it takes. You now have an ad ready to run on Facebook.

Step #3 – Integrate Your Facebook Ad with ActiveCampaign

Now you have your ad, it’s time to integrate it with ActiveCampaign.

Automate.io is an integration suite that’s ideal for this purpose. Integrate it with your ActiveCampaign account and then follow these steps:

  1. Open Automate.io and build a Bot.
  2. Define the bot’s Trigger and Action. For this funnel, the trigger is whenever a lead comes through from your Facebook Ad. The action involves creating that same lead in ActiveCampaign.
  3. Click the “Select Trigger App” option. Navigate to Facebook and select Facebook Leads. You’ll need to provide Automate.io with access to link your accounts.
  4. After linking, you’ll hit a form. Select “New Lead” as your Trigger event and select your Facebook page. Select the Facebook form that Automate.io will pull lead data from to finish this step. You’ll see the form’s output fields.
  5. Head to the Action App section and choose ActiveCampaign from the dropdown. You’ll have to enter your API Key and API URL here. You can find those if you go to API Access in the Settings menu of your ActiveCampaign account.
  6. Choose “Add or Update Contact” as the Action.
  7. Locate the Input field and click the + sign next to it. Select the Facebook form outputs that you want to use.
  8. Save and enable the bot.

With that done, Automate.io transfers any lead that comes from Facebook into your ActiveCampaign account. You can then immediately enter that lead into your automated funnel.

Step #4 – Create an Instagram Ad

You can create Instagram ads in Facebook’s Ad Manager too.

That means a lot of the steps are similar to creating a Facebook Ad. But there are a few that are unique to Instagram.

Here’s what you need to do.

  1. Add your Instagram account to your Facebook Business Manager.
  2. Start creating your ad. Make sure you select an ad objective that offers support for Instagram.
  3. Follow the ad creation steps from Step #2.
  4. Preview the ad before confirming everything. Check that there’s a tick for Instagram in the preview.

Step #5 – Integrating Instagram and ActiveCampaign

Unfortunately, Automate.io can’t help you to integrate ads created in Instagram into ActiveCampaign at the time of writing.

However, it is a feature that’s coming soon to the service.

When it arrives, you’ll be able to follow a similar process to the one that integrates Facebook leads into ActiveCampaign.

Conclusion

The key benefit to this integration is the access to automation that ActiveCampaign provides. Once you transfer a new lead from your ad into the platform, you can immediately plug it into your funnel. ActiveCampaign then handles all of the emails and nurturing for you based on the automations you’ve created in the platform.

That means no wrestling with huge lead lists from your ad campaigns anymore.

Growth Marketing has a lot more to share with you on this subject.

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