Eric Deeran, who's managed $4.5M in Meta ad spend, explains how to teach Meta's algorithm what a good lead is. Use the BANT framework (Budget, Authority, Need, Timing) in your lead forms so Meta optimizes for qualified leads, not just cheap ones. This approach has improved show-up rates and conversion quality in his campaigns.
We've spent over $4.5 million on ads over the past couple of years, perfecting the same strategies that we give to our agency and our clients. And in today's video, I'm gonna be talking about how to properly qualify a lead is the biggest topic. So when you are running Meta ads, if you've never run Meta ads before, you have a brand new account. Number one, Meta is trying to bounce around to find your right customer for you, right? So the only way it knows if it's doing a good job or not is typically when it gets a result, right? So it depends on what you're optimizing for, but if you're optimizing for a lead or a booked call, whatever it may be, it only knows if it's doing a good job if it gets you a result like that. Now it can't see the quality of that lead. It doesn't know if that's the right lead for your offer. It doesn't know if it's the right type of person for your offer or business for your offer. That is all your job to tell Meta or tell ad, like tell your ads manager or whatever you're running ads on. That is your job to tell them what that looks like. And What you wanna look for is, it's an acronym from IBM, did this back in the day when they were trying to sort out whether somebody was a qualified lead or not qualified lead. It's called BANT, so B-A-N-T. And so what we do is we implement basically 4 questions that fall under BANT, so budget, authority, need, and timing. You would need to have these questions on either your lead form or on your calendar so people who are not the right fit can't book a call with you and you can't get that data sent back to Meta So it doesn't optimize for the wrong types of people because Meta is always gonna try to find you the cheapest possible lead, uh, cheapest lead possible, right? And when you are not gating your forms properly, you get bad leads. So budget, example of budget would be, um, you know, how much money is your company making or what's your current monthly revenue? What, something like that, right? That could be a budget question. It could also be, uh, do you have, you know, $10,000 a month to invest in an agency to help you with X, Y, Z? That's a more aggressive version of that. A, which would be authority, would be to confirm you are this type of business. Uh, so like to confirm if you're serving law firms. To confirm you are a law firm who's looking to implement an XYZ strategy to get more clients. That'd be an A question, right? N, which would be need, typically like a free response question, something like, you know, why is this important to you now? Or what is, you know, what is important? Tell us about your business or why this is important to you. What's your biggest obstacle? Something to just basically see, okay, is there a need here, right? And then T, timing, just be how soon you're looking to invest in a solution to get XYZ results. So It would be, you know, ASAP, within a couple of weeks, or not for a couple months. Then you DQ on that last one. Now, IBM found when they qualified leads this way, there's a much higher likelihood that they showed up to the call and then closed. And so you can take the same strategy and implement into your lead forms or call booking forms or calendar to get better quality leads, to train the Meta platform to find you better qualified people. Because if it only can get qualified leads, it will try to optimize around the cheapest qualified leads, which is exactly what we want. We don't want the cheapest leads, want the cheapest qualified leads. And so try implementing something like BANT into your forms, into your calendar, to basically get better quality leads, to train the platform around better quality people. And that should improve your quality. That's one of many things that we do with our clients to help them improve their quality. So hopefully that helps.
