With over 2.79 billion monthly active users Facebook is the largest social media platform out there. This makes it a great place to reach a massive chunk of your target audience. A combination of organic content and Facebook ads will enable you to reach as wide an audience as possible.
There’s no doubt that Facebook Ads are a powerhouse when it comes to generating both leads and sales. However, the chances of someone buying your product or service the first time they see your ad or engage with your brand are quite slim. To get people actually converting on your core offer, you need multiple touchpoints.
To ensure you’re striking an effective balance, you need a sales funnel specifically designed for Facebook to move prospects from one point to the next. Before we walk through how to develop one, let’s define what a Facebook sales funnel is.
What is a Facebook Ads Funnel?
A Facebook Ads funnel is a sequence of ad campaigns designed to take users along the buyer’s journey, from complete strangers to paying customers. Technically speaking, the Facebook Ads funnel consists of multiple campaigns with multiple ads that include different value propositions delivered to the right audience at the right moment. The Facebook Ads funnel consists of three main stages: Awareness – Top of the Funnel (TOF), Engagement – Middle of the Funnel (MOF), and Conversion/Decision – Bottom of the Funnel (BOF)
This is followed by the After-Purchase stage where your goal is to turn existing buyers into loyal customers and even brand advocates. This increases your customer connection and radically improves your advertising profitability. We’ll get into this stage in a later blog. The Top of the Funnel (ToF) is the stage where you try to improve your brand awareness among your target audience. The next stage of the Facebook sales funnel is the Middle of the Funnel (MoF). In this stage, you essentially focus on lead generation and then nurturing those leads. The last stage of the Facebook sales funnel is the Bottom of the Funnel (BoF). In this stage, your major focus will be on conversion and then retention. Simply put a Facebook sales funnel is the process of guiding people through different stages of your marketing funnel using Facebook ads — from no awareness to awareness, from interest to desire, and from desire to conversion. Now that you have a decent idea of what a Facebook sales funnel is all about, let’s discuss how to build one for your business.
Building Your Facebook Ad Funnel
Step 1: Determine What Kind of Funnel You Want to Create
First, you need to figure out why you’re creating a Facebook funnel.
- Do you want to engage with your existing email list on a new platform?
- Grow your email list?
- Drive more traffic to your website?
- Make more sales?
- Get more shares from your blog content?
Write down your motivation(s) for creating a Facebook sales funnel. Next to each of those goals, write down which part of the marketing funnel each objective is focused on — split the marketing funnel into four categories: awareness, interest, desire, and conversion.
For example:
- I want to grow my email list to 10,000 subscribers. — Awareness/Interest
- I want to generate $10,000 in revenue every month. — Conversion
- I want to get 1,000 more website visits per week. — Awareness
Once you’ve determined why you want to run Facebook ads and which part of the marketing funnel those reasons are connected to, you can move forward with confidence and clarity.
Step 2: Set Up Ads Manager
Before running Facebook ad campaigns you need to set up Ads Manager. If you have a Facebook Business Page then you already have access to the Ads Manager. You can access it to by clicking on the Ad Center in the menu on your business page. To complete the set up you’ll need to enter your credit card information because that’s how Facebook bills for your ads.
Ad Manager is where you will create, monitor, assess results, and adjust your ad campaigns.
Step 3 – Run Awareness Ads to Your Target Audience
The goal of running awareness Facebook ads is to generate more awareness surrounding your brand, your content, and your products. Practically speaking, your mission here is website visits, social media shares, and — best-case scenario — email opt-ins (Calls to Action).
There’s no sales pitch here. This kind of ad increases awareness of your brand and builds goodwill among your target market by giving them a valuable resource for free. Facebook Ad Manager has a specific ad category for generating just the kind of awareness your business is looking for.
When advertising to cold audiences, you need to be patient. Go easy on your prospects. Use Facebook ads to get noticed, introduce your brand, and warm up those complete strangers. Get them interested. Provide useful, engaging, and fun content with offers that don’t require users to do too much work. Some good examples of Awareness stage offers include getting users to:
- Watch a video
- Visit your website
- Take a quiz
- Check out your product page
- Read a blog post or a guide, etc.
Any action that doesn’t require commitment is a good fit for cold audiences.
Step 4: Turn Prospects into Leads
In the Middle of the Funnel (MOF), your goal is to turn prospects into leads by collecting their contact information for further nurturing. Use warmed-up audiences from the previous stage and get them interested enough to want to try out your product/service. At this point you want prospects to consider buying your products. Ideally, prospects should come to your website or landing page, get exposed to your core offer (products/service), and leave their contact info. So, make sure you have a professionally designed website with an optimized user experience. The Engagement stage is a good time to be more direct with your Calls to Action and ask for users’ email in exchange for something of value, like a downloadable pdf, special offer, free sample or trial, webinar, etc. In this stage, it’s also a good practice to have a dedicated landing page optimized for lead capturing. Here’s a sample of an MoF ad for one of our clients:
Capturing lead information is vital because you can use email remarketing to nurture leads and gradually bring them closer to the purchase. Prospects are still far away from making a buying decision, so be careful not to scare them off by being too pushy. This stage is also an opportunity to build trust. Prospects that try your products or download your lead magnets are getting up close and personal with your brand. But even more so, they get a glimpse of what it’s like to be your customer. So, ensure it’s a smooth experience.
Step 5: Create Lookalike Audiences
Similar to the Facebook pixel, lookalike audiences are another piece of marketing magic right out of Facebook’s advertising tool set. By creating a lookalike audience in Ad Manager, you can target a group of people who is similar to your other audiences.
You can create a lookalike audience based on your existing customers, your email list, or people who took a specific action on your website. Once you’ve created a high-value audience (by collecting email subscribers, conversions, or Facebook pixel events), with just a few clicks, you can create a new, near-identical audience. For obvious reasons, then, lookalike audiences tend to have higher engagement and conversion rates. Step 6: Turn Leads into Customers At the bottom of your Facebook Ads Funnel, the goal is to turn leads into paying customers. In the earlier stages, you’ve introduced your brand, got users interested, and built trust with freebies and lead magnets. And now the audience is as hot as it’ll ever be. Be sure to clearly communicate your value proposition to get leads excited and wanting your products. You also want users to act fast. The main idea for the Conversion stage is to get prospects and leads to convert to your core offer, which means to get them to buy your product or sign up for your service. Audience targeting in the Conversion stage should be very specific, focusing on Custom Audiences made up largely of your existing leads and those similar to them. You also want to make sure to exclude any users that became customers during the earlier stages. During the Conversion stage use Custom audiences to target the following users:
- All website visitors
- Visitors to specific pages
- Product page viewers (e-commerce)
- Add to cart users (e-commerce)
- Initiate checkout users (e-commerce)
- Users that completed each step in your conversion funnel (lead generation)
Set up Facebook Custom Audiences to reach past website visitors, leads, and people that interacted with your ads in the previous funnel stages. You can target all website visitors, those that stayed on your site for a specific amount of time or users that visited a specific page, such as a lead magnet Your Bottom of the Funnel is all about acquiring a customer so you should optimize your Facebook Funnel campaigns for conversions. Make sure to set up a Facebook Pixel with conversion tracking to pass revenue and conversion data back to your Facebook ad campaign. This helps FB understand what works and optimize campaigns for even better performance.
One Last Thing To Be Aware Of
Social media is a visual medium. Yes, content matters. But, when you have three seconds to capture someone’s attention you need to have a solid visual! Whenever possible use original videos and images. Here we stress original – as opposed to stock photographs or canned videos viewers respond best to images and videos that feature you. This gives them the opportunity to feel like they know you which feeds right back into the personal nature of social media.
Conclusion
Using Facebook Ad Funnels is a tremendously potent marketing strategy. With it, you can reach new customers with the right ad at the right moment, boost conversions, generate more sales, and grow your business. It’s best to plot out the entire funnel voyage before designing your Facebook campaigns. If you have any questions or comments, drop us a message. Or, if you need help building your Facebook funnel, reach out to the pros. Connect with us to learn how we can help advance your business!
