Over 60 million businesses in the world have Facebook pages. Of these 60 million, 4 million are actively advertising on the platform, and that number continues to rise with each passing day.
But what is a little more difficult to decipher is how many of those businesses are marketing effectively on the platform. In order to utilize Facebook to its fullest potential, having a finely tuned marketing funnel is a must. But how do you set one up? How do you implement it? That is the focus of this blog.
Here we share the most important elements of a Facebook advertising funnel that brings ROI and gets your customers taking action.
The Pixel is Paramount
A Facebook Pixel is a tool that allows you to measure the effectiveness of your advertising. Without it, measuring the impact of your marketing efforts becomes much more tedious and much less definitive. Your Pixel allows you to see how many people interact with your ads at each point along your funnel, and also allows you to group these people into categories that you can later retarget with additional advertisements. For more information about how to set up a Facebook Pixel, see this article from Facebook.
Value-Added Content
Once your Facebook Pixel is set up, it is time to start thinking about what you can offer to potential customers. What can you share with your audience that will benefit them and strengthen their trust in your brand? Remember, this content shouldn’t promote the ultimate sales offer you want to make. This content is purely educational or entertaining, with no obligation or commitment required. All you want is your audience to engage with this content so that their information is gathered by your Pixel. Once that information is collected, you can then begin targeting this audience specifically with further content. Some great ideas for value-added content are:
- How-To Guides
- White Papers
- Free Webinars
- E-Books
- Informative Videos
- Free resources
Whatever form of content you choose, its primary purpose should be to educate, inform, and raise awareness amongst your target audience. Avoid making these initial pieces of content too “sales-y”. Now is not the time to sell. Now is the time to warm up your cold audience, expose them to your brand, and gently introduce the solutions you offer.
Nourish Your Pixel
When your content is finalized and you are happy with how it represents your business, it’s time to share it. It is recommended to share this content with your warm audience first (people who like your Facebook page, your client list, etc.) but you can also send it out to a targeted audience based on your ideal customer. For example, if you are a business that sells infant clothing, you could promote your content to women from the ages of 21 to 40 who are parents of new-borns.
At this stage, it is important to split-test your Facebook ads, showing them to various target audiences. This is essential because it will allow you to find which audience takes the most action. You may discover that 40 per cent of your sales come from young mothers aged 21 to 30. In this case, it would make more sense to drive your advertisements to this group.
But that’s not it! Once you have narrowed down your highest converting audience, you can then build a Lookalike Audience.
Pull quote: “Facebook’s Lookalike Audiences feature allows you to find more customers who share the same traits as your most valuable current customers.”
A Lookalike Audience is one of the most powerful ways to reach new customers who are already likely to buy from you. By targeting these people with more value-added content, you get them into your funnel – exactly where you want them to be.
From Interested to Opt-In
This is a crucial step in your Facebook marketing strategy. It isn’t enough to simply pull quality leads into your funnel; you have to motivate them to act. How do you that? You make them a special offer that they can take advantage of in exchange for minimal commitment. The latter part of that sentence is critical. Your audience, while aware of your brand, may not be ready to invest all of their trust in your brand or make a purchase. So, you want to make your offer easily attainable, with as few barriers as possible. If you present these potential clients with long forms to complete or multiple steps to take, they will likely close out of their browser. Make it simple!
One of the easiest opt-in steps is entering an email address. For example, you could offer a limited edition E-book to your audience, requesting only that they enter their email to receive the download link. This is what is referred to as a micro-commitment; a small step that your audience takes that moves them closer to your brand.
Take time to determine what your opt-in offer will be. What is a small issue that you can solve for your target audience? What will they find most valuable? What is the simplest way to offer it to them?
Re-establish Trust
Not everyone who initially entered your funnel will opt-in right away. But there are steps you can take to increase the likelihood of your audience taking the next step. The most impactful way of all is to re-establish trust with those who have interacted with your content in the past.
How do you do this? The possibilities are endless. One method is to share testimonials from satisfied clients or share statistics about the success you have seen thus far. This reaffirms your brand with your warm audience, establishing credibility and providing tangible evidence they can use to base their buying decision on.
Creating ads with these confirming elements and targeting them at the people who have not yet opted in to your offer is one of the most fruitful ways to move potential customers further into your funnel.
Play Hard Ball
Now that you have ran several retargeting ads and nourished your Pixel with a substantial amount of data, it’s time to do what you set out to do from the beginning: sell. This is the time to make your core offer. Build captivating ads with conversion-focused copy, and begin sending them out to your funnel.
Your Pixel will capture the information of anyone who makes it to this step. If an audience member completes this step (whether its registering for a webinar, purchasing a product, or contacting your business), they are now a part of your client list! A valuable list of people whose information you have collected (including phone number, email address, profile and more).
If the user completes the action to take advantage of your core offer, they move into your customer funnel.
If the user does not complete the action, you continue with your efforts to convince them to act.
Sweeten the Pot
You will have users who visit your core offer page but do not act on it. That is okay! There are several ways to motivate these users to return to complete the action, including:
- Offering an additional benefit – For example: Book within the next 3 days and receive a promo code for 10% off the price.
- Retargeting with client-focused ads: For example: We noticed that you did not complete your registration. Don’t miss out on this informative class! Register today.
- Entering these users into an email drip campaign follow up and continue exposing them to your products and brand.
- Offer a free trial of your product for a limited time.
There are an unlimited number of creative ways to entice people to return and act upon your offer. The most important thing is that you continue to track them, targeting specifically to those who have not yet acted.
To learn more about how to exclude people who have acted on your offer to ensure you only advertise to those who have not, see this article by MuteSix.
Mind Your Manners
Your mother probably told you to always say thank you. All these years later, you should still be listening to her! One of the most counterproductive mistakes you can make in your Facebook marketing funnel is to lead people through your entire funnel, only to forget to show your appreciation!
Sending a thank-you email or having a thank-you landing page can turn your customers into brand ambassadors for your company. If customers feel valued and respected by you, they are more likely to share their positive experience, and since customer reviews are the most influential pieces of marketing material you can have, you want this to happen!
After you have made your customers feel appreciated, it is the perfect time to ask them to share their experience. You can ask them to:
- Leave a Google Review of your business
- Rate your business on Facebook
- Like your Facebook page
- Follow you on other social media accounts
- Share your offer with their friends
- And more!
Keep Your Audiences Organized
For each action that an audience can take, a custom audience should be created. For example, if one of the steps within your Facebook funnel is for people to subscribe to your blog, a custom Facebook audience should be created called “Blog Subscribers”. If one of the actions you want your audience to take is to visit a specific page on your website, a custom audience should be created called “People who have visit (insert web page link here)”.
Check out this article from Adspresso for a fantastic straight-forward guide to creating custom audiences.
You’ll be thankful when you move on to your next advertising campaign that all of your custom audiences are saved neatly within Facebook and that you can target ads to them with just a simple click!
Put Your Results to Good Use
The benefit of a dynamic Facebook funnel like the one we’ve described is that it allows you to follow your customers through each step of the buying process and determine where your successes are, and what parts need to be improved on. Because your funnel is laid out, your Pixels are set up, and your funnel path is clear, you no longer have to guess where you lost a potential buyer or what is preventing people from opting in.
The more you use your funnel, the more you can fine-tune it for optimum conversion. And the best part? You can use your funnel structure for years to come! All that is required to begin a new campaign to your target audience is switching out the content.
Facebook offers a variety of tools so you can monitor your advertising efforts. We recommend using the following:
- Ads Reporting
- Audience Outcomes
- Cross-publisher reach reporting
- Conversion Reporting
- Conversion Lift
- Brand Lift
Facebook has a page dedicated to these tools and how to utilize them. It goes without saying that the more conclusive data you draw from running your funnel, the better oiled your marketing machine becomes. Without monitoring, it is difficult to know which parts of your funnel you can trim, which parts you should build upon, or when to adjust your direction.
BONUS TIP 1:
Eventually, when your Facebook funnel has been optimized to its fullest potential, you can implement Facebook Automated Rules. This advanced advertising feature from Facebook allows your funnels to run the way you want them to, without your constant oversight!
By setting automated rules, you can:
- Turn off adverts, ad sets or campaigns at a specific time or date
- Send a notification (but not take any action)
- Adjust the budget up or down
- Adjust the manual bid up or down
- And more!
This provides businesses with a safety net when it comes to advertising on the Facebook platform, an especially beneficial bonus for businesses that run multiple funnels and advertising campaigns at a time.
You can even have multiple rule sets for one campaign! For example, if you wanted to increase the bid amount for ad sets that are performing well, while simultaneously lowering the big amount for ad sets that are under performing, and also pause ads that aren’t converting, you add each of these rules into your rule set and they would all be applied.
With a perfected funnel and carefully automated rules, the potential is endless. It’s not impossible that you could sit back and watch customers move through your funnel, all while being hands off.
Bonus Tip 2:
You can use free and inexpensive tools to create your ads. Websites like Pikwizard offer thousands of royalty free images that are completely free to download and use in your ads. If you are creating image ads on a budget, freemium tools like Design Wizard can help you create awesome professional images to use in your ads, you can even choose a free image that you like from Pikwizard and edit it in Design Wizard.
We’ll stop this article here, since you’re probably day-dreaming about all the things you could do with the time you’d save!