What Makes A Successful Facebook Ad Funnel

What Makes A Successful Facebook Ad Funnel

Facebook Ads is a powerful tool for digital ad funnels but requires finesse to execute strategically and cost-effectively. In this blog post, we explain what’s involved.

The goal of every business is to turn visitors into leads and leads into paying customers – yet 68% of companies have never tried to identify or measure their sales funnel. Even if you haven’t consciously created one, your business has a sales funnel too: It’s the pathway a customer takes to make a purchase from your business. Of course, an optimised sales funnel is going to be infinitely more effective than one left to chance.

Because every business is different, the specifics of each sales journey will also vary: How long it takes to make a decision, why they need to make that decision, what they need to make that decision, and how they’re choosing you. Once you understand these things about your customers, you can tailor your advertising to resonate with touchpoints along the buyer journey, creating an ad funnel – a series of digital ads intended to move the viewer from prospect to (hopefully) repeat customer and even brand advocate.

At the top, you have everyone in your target audience – this is the awareness stage. In the middle, the consideration stage, are your potential customers. And at the bottom, the narrowest part, is the decision or conversion stage, where people become customers.

Why should you do an ad funnel?

Overall, ad funnels are far more effective at driving sales conversions than a one-off ad because they play on consumer psychology while giving prospects the time they need to make a decision. Instead of going straight for the hard sell, an ad funnel engages your prospects at multiple touchpoints, building their trust and significantly increasing your chances of success.

A survey of 100 B2B buyers showed that 95% choose a business who helps them navigate each stage of the buying process. The top three things they said created a positive sales experience were listening to their needs, not being pushy, and providing relevant information. Furthermore, companies who make the buying process easy are 62% more likely to win a high-value sale.

How do you build a Facebook Ads funnel?

An effective ad funnel depends on choosing the right campaign objective, targeting the right audience, and using ad formats and messaging that resonates at each stage of the funnel. Facebook Ads, which also includes Instagram, allows you to deliver multiple ads with different value propositions to a Saved Audience based on their demographics, location, interests, and behaviour. You can also create a Lookalike Audience from your existing customers so that Facebook can find users similar to your past buyers, including your most valuable customers based on their lifetime value.

“Who the ideal customer is, how much they’re worth, how a customer closes, how people find out about the service: All of those things require a logic and knowledge of both marketing and the business,” says Theresa Brady, director at Creative Content, an Auckland agency specialising in online marketing for local SMBs.

What are the elements of a Facebook funnel?

1. Strategy – We start with a strategy session to understand your business and your potential customers. “I’m listening to see what’s fantastic about them that can match the psychology of their client,” explains Theresa. “Then we position exactly what they do and frame it for people to get excited about.”

2. Objectives should fall out of your strategy session. Is your goal to get more leads, convert leads, or simply raise brand awareness? If you get new leads, what happens next? What is your sales process? Do you have sales staff who can follow up? Cost per lead goes up exponentially if no one does anything with them.

3. Assets – These are your ad copy, images, video, and giveaways that form the basis of your lead-generating offer. To entice prospects to share their details, make them realise they need your product or service by highlighting their interests, needs, and problems and how you can solve them. Focus your ads on the unique benefits you offer, making the early stages informational and educational.

4. Targeting – By understanding the different segments of your audience and where they are in the buyer journey, you can serve ads that speak to where they live, what they’re like, and what they’re into. If an ad fails to trigger the desired action, you can retarget a prospect by showing them a different ad with different copy.

5. Analysis and iteration – There’s more to a Facebook ad funnel than just launching it. “That might be it for the first two weeks, but then there’s a process of challenging copy, headlines, and images and then refreshing them based on what data tells you about their performance,” says Theresa. Use the feedback you get from Facebook to evolve and improve the campaign, building the management process into the logic you test.

What can go wrong?

If any step of a Facebook ad funnel isn’t done properly, the whole thing will fall down, which is why you have to monitor and analyse it. “If a project doesn’t match your goals and objectives, if you’re not really sure who’s going to follow up with leads, that’s going to be a waste of money,” says Theresa. “If your strategy is weak or you haven’t got good assets – say the images are weak and the ad copy’s average – none of that will convert either. If you’re not targeting the right audience, you’ll have a complete disaster.”

How we can help

At Creative Content, we do all these things and have been since 2013. “We’ve got successful campaigns we run all the time. We’ve got clients who are happy. We can show them what we’ve done and exactly how we did it. We are very transparent about how it all works.”

We have the knowledge, the experience, and a team who knows how to create effective campaigns and assets. To explore how we can help you expand your online reach, contact Creative Content for a free no-obligation consultation with director Theresa Brady.

Read on...

Want more?

Chat with us today about Strategy, Content and Marketing.