Hunting Leads is a private newsletter for B2B founders and marketers. If this was forwarded to you, you can subscribe here.
Hi! This is Moby.
I love Meta ads for B2B, and am currently managing $110,000/month for clients on the platform.
I want to share what I know.
What you can expect in this email:
Everything important I know about Meta targeting
How to actually pull qualified leads from Meta
The 5 numbers that matter
My new, hopeless addiction to Claude Code
Enjoy!
P.S: My website is now live: https://mobyrunsads.com/ - let me know what you think?
#1 Everything Important I Know About Meta Ads
Don’t Worry About Finding The Perfect Targeting
2 years ago, you had to be very careful when running ads and target your audience with interests or job titles:
That’s no longer the case. Meta now finds your audience based on:
Who has interacted with your ads before
What you say in your ad copy / image headlines
What you say in your videos (it’s reading the transcript)
Who interacts with your ad copy
Who ends up becoming a lead
It’s reading your ad copy:
It’s reading your ads:
Take-away = Don’t stress too much about targeting. Add relevant keywords (interests, job titles) IN your ads.
Meta Can Target SMB & General B2B Markets VERY Well
You want to target board swaths of Dentists? Operations Managers? Agency Owners? Construction CEOs? Heads of Marketing?
Meta will do that for you.
It has so much data on us that it's f***ing scary:
It follows us around the internet and catalogs everything we do
It buys data from other companies constantly
It’s algo gets better and better at understanding who people are
It knows who we are.
Use that for your own gain.
But Meta Ads Cannot Do Account-Based Marketing
On LinkedIn, you can hand the platform a list of named accounts and it serves those companies.
Meta doesn’t work that way.
You can reach general B2B titles on Meta, i.e. Operations Managers, Agency Founders, SaaS Founders, Heads of whatever.
But you cannot target specific companies, unless you use a tool like ProspectPulse / Primer.
Side-note: Want My LinkedIn Ads Breakdown Instead?
I gave a 68-min talk about LinkedIn Ads at Red Fridge Society recently, and it’s available on Youtube now. You also get the slides + transcript in the description.
#2 Everything Important About Lead Generation
Meta Doesn’t Control Lead Quality, You Do
Anyone can go ahead and run a Meta ad and get “leads”.
But you want qualified people, i.e. people with certain job titles, budgets, and qualification metrics.
Getting 100 leads for $15 each is a crap outcome if only 3 are worth pursuing for you.
On the other hand, getting 10 leads for $150 leads is a great outcome if 9 of them are worth pursuing.
You influence lead quality by:
Saying who this is for, in your ads
Saying who this is NOT for, in your ads
Saying who this is for, on your landing page
Saying who this is NOT for, on your landing page
Asking questions in your website form that allow you to qualify people
Not letting people who are not right fits (based on their form submission) book meetings
That said, don’t worry about the Cost per lead number as much 👇
Cost Per Lead matters less than Cost Per Qualified Lead
People obsess about Cost Per Lead.
Doesn’t matter.
Measure what matters = Qualified Leads.
It’s way better to pay MORE for a pool of leads which ends up getting you more qualified people:
If you’re NOT getting quality leads on Meta, it’s because of you and:
Your ads, copy, and landing page aren’t specific enough to let the algo find the right people
You’re not asking enough questions in the forms to disqualify people
Get Leads to Fill Out a Website Form, NOT a Facebook Form
You want people to convert on your website via a form, not on a native form.
Native forms get you volume of leads, but they’re almost always bad quality with low intent. It’s because it’s too easy to fill out that form (takes 5-10 seconds), and people forget they filled out a form.
Just use your website form:
Also, on a website, you can redirect form submissions to a booking page where they book a meeting.
This will get 50% of people to book a meeting right away, saving you time and effort having to follow up.
These Are The 5 Numbers to Pay Attention To
Link Clickthrough Rate - this tells me if those seeing the ads resonate with the messaging. Aim is to be above 1%
Cost Per Lead
Qualified Lead Rate - this tells me how many people fill out the form qualified
Meeting Book Rate (how many leads booked a meeting?)
Meeting Show Up Rate - this tells me if there's something wrong with our appointment setting system
If you know these numbers, you can influence and control your program like nothing else.
Calling Leads Fast Is VERY Important
You can run your ads and have people fill out a form. Some of them book a meeting, and then some of them show up. That's your baseline.
What you want to do is improve all the numbers there:
Increase the number of leads who book a meeting
Increase the number of people who show up to the meeting
If you do that, it will lower your:
Cost per booked meeting
Cost per shown meeting
The best thing to do here is call every lead, as fast as you physically can.
Same-day is good, <1 hour is great, <10 mins is the pinnacle.
If all you do with your leads is call them within 10 minutes, you're going to win.
Summary, Summary, Summary!
Toastmasters taught me to tell people to summarize.
So here’s it is:
Meta finds your audience off your copy, your video transcripts, and who actually converts. Put your keywords (interests, job titles) IN the ads.
Meta finds broad SMB and general B2B audiences, but cannot do ABM
Meta doesn't control your lead quality. You do.
Cost Per Qualified Lead is the number that matters.
Send people to a website form, NOT a native Facebook form. Then redirect submissions to a booking page.
Know your 5 numbers:
Link CTR
Cost Per Lead
Qualified Lead Rate
Meeting Book Rate
Meeting Show Up Rate
Call every lead as fast as you physically can. Same-day is good, under an hour is great, under 10 minutes is the pinnacle.
#3 P.S. I’m Now Hopelessly Addicted to Claude Code + Second Brain Stuff
I've known about Second Brain as a concept for years, but it felt like a lot of productivity mumbo-jumbo, so I kinda ignored it.
This year, Claude Code + Obsidian started blowing up. I tried it. Meh. Didn’t really understand it.
I was happy with my Claude Chat.
Then I went to a workshop at Red Fridge where Thomas Lentine walked us through his whole setup…. and I’ve been hooooooked.
It has all the context I can possibly give it, and it’s self-editing.
I wish I could understand it enough to talk about it in detail and explain it to you, but I'm still wrapping my head around it. So I asked it for an explanation:
I then asked it to list the agents involved:
Idk if the above are actually “agents”. They feel like smart workflows to me. Maybe I’m dumb for thinking that.
It's been very cool. Do follow Thomas for more of this.
And if you’re in Austin and want to build your own second brain, check out Thomas’s next FREE workshop. Hurry - it will be waitlisted soon.
Are you using such a system? Enjoying it?
- Moby | Austin, TX
P.S. I run paid ads for B2B tech companies as a fractional paid acquisition lead. $6K to $3M in revenue over 2 years for one client, $2M to $3.7M ARR in 6 months for another. If your ads are spending and not working, hit me up.
