Lead generation is one of the most critical components of marketing and sales operations, and unfortunately for many companies it is not performing as well as they need. According to CSO Insights, 68 percent of B2B companies are struggling with lead generation. Specifically, a recent survey conducted by Harvard Business Review Analytics Services reveals the vast majority of respondents have little or no automation when it comes to qualifying leads (80 percent) or passing leads to sales (75 percent).

The days of manually filling out online forms are quickly coming to an end. With people spending more and more time on mobile phones, it is more important than ever for marketers to deliver a frictionless, one-click experience so consumers can easily redeem offers or sign up for brand communications.

Today, Salesforce Marketing Cloud is enhancing its Advertising Studio app with Lead Capture for Sales Cloud, empowering brands to supercharge their lead-generation engine. For the first time, customers will be able to engage with ads and offers they like quickly and companies will be able to receive the lead automatically and fully populated securely into Sales Cloud.

Facebook Lead Ads are a powerful tool for marketers to help overcome the business challenges of reaching the right audiences and capturing intent from every potential customer. The ability for brands to customize a lead form in Facebook that can be pre-populated with information that individuals have already given to Facebook has helped brands to dramatically improve form completion rate and general conversion rate, particularly on mobile.

"The shift to mobile creates challenges for acquisition campaigns," said Will Platt-Higgins, VP of Global Accounts for Facebook. "Lead Ads help businesses efficiently reach and capture intent from every person interested in their services, and this integration with Sales Cloud makes it easy to follow up, gain new customers and manage those relationships."

Lead Capture for Sales Cloud will extend the power of our digital advertising offering and lead automation solutions at Salesforce, allowing brands to:

• Find new prospects on Facebook that are similar to their most loyal existing customers and target those audiences with Facebook Lead Ads
• Automate the flow of customer information from Facebook directly into Sales Cloud, making it easier for sales teams to manage lead pipeline directly; it can also kick-off marketing automation with Pardot to nurture those leads
• Use Marketing Cloud Journey Builder to ensure the sales process and customer messaging are in sync with all other across channels such as email and mobile
• Continually refresh audiences in Advertising Studio using information from leads that converted, ensuring the lookalike audiences on Facebook are based on the most up-to-date conversion information.

At Connections 2016 this past May, Salesforce announced Advertising Studio and Lead Capture for Marketing Cloud to support B2C use cases. Since then, over 70 customers around the globe have started to supercharge their own lead generation system across various industries using the power of Facebook Lead Ads and automating the lead prospect information into Marketing Cloud, including Capital One.

Salesforce has a history of leadership and innovation in digital advertising with Facebook. Salesforce is a Facebook Marketing Partner across Ad Technology, Content Marketing, Community Management and Audience Onboarding. Lead Capture for Sales Cloud will be generally available at no additional cost to all Sales Cloud customers via the AppExchange beginning at Dreamforce 2016.

Advertising and CRM were meant to work together, and can make critical business functions such as lead generation work more efficiently. To learn more about Advertising Studio, request a demo today.