A cartoon image of four people stood around a large pink funnel throwing different things into it. On the left side of the image there is an orange rectangle with a grey rectangle layered over the top with orange text reading ‘Building Your Facebook Ads Funnel’ and on the right side of the image there is an orange circle with white text reading ‘Jo Francis’

Building Your Facebook Ads Funnel

If you’re thinking about using Facebook ads as part of your advertising strategy, you need to be clear on why you want to use them and what you want the end result to be.

Facebook ads can be absolute dynamite when it comes to bringing in new leads and generating sales, however that success comes when they form part of a sales funnel – you cannot just run a straight out sales ad campaign and expect it to result in massive success (well, you can certainly try, but I wouldn’t hold out too much hope!).

Very few people will make a purchase from an unknown business – which is why there are various stages you need to go through before you start sending out your sales ads.

Facebook Ads Funnel – the inside scoop

As with any funnel, a Facebook ads funnel is the customer journey – taking people from stranger to customer.

This requires a series of ad campaigns – and some of these will not be asking for a sale at all, or bringing any instant ROI, which can feel frustrating if you don’t fully understand the purpose.

There are three stages in a Facebook Ads Funnel:

  • Awareness
  • Consideration
  • Conversion

And you need to build out campaigns that drive people through each of these stages, taking them from a cold audience (complete strangers) to a warm audience (they’re now aware of you and beginning to be interested) to a hot audience (ready to buy).

By showing the right ads to the right audience, at the right time, you will effectively be able to move them through all of these stages, all with the power of Facebook ads.

Building up the know, like, trust factor is so important in your marketing and that applies whether you’re running Facebook ads, going out to face to face networking events, or doing any form of marketing online or offline.

It’s important to remember that Facebook and Instagram are “social networking” so people aren’t on there to shop or buy anything specifically – which means that to capture their attention, your ads have to be worthy of being noticed! At every stage! 

What does a Facebook Ads Funnel look like?

You need to remember that you are taking people on a journey.  A journey that is unique to your business and your customers, so your funnel may look very different to someone else’s and that will be down to the type of content you produce, what interests your ideal customer has and the direction you want to take them in.

The stages will be much the same for everyone though.

Top of funnel

At the top of your funnel you need to focus on awareness – warming up cold audiences and letting people know who you are and what you do. This is all about giving value – inform and educate without expecting anything back.

You can share blogs or videos.  Or even go as far as offering lead magnets if they genuinely provide value to your audience. Although be aware that sometimes people can be reluctant to part with their contact details at this early stage when they still don’t know you.

You’re not aiming for sales at all, you are just driving people into your warm audience at this stage.

And who should you be targeting?

Well, given that you are hitting cold audiences, then you can work with your lookalike audiences (these are audiences created by Facebook that “look like” your existing audience – whether that’s your Facebook audience, your Instagram audience, your website visitors audience or your contact list audience, or any other custom audience you already have created).

You can also target a saved audience – build out your ICA audience based on the demographics, psychographics and geographical location of your ideal customer.

What happens next?

Middle of Funnel

Once you have warm audiences, and these should continue to grow – it’s not just a case of running them for a couple of weeks and then stopping, you should start to think about the middle of your funnel – consideration.

This is where you want people to start “considering” working with you, buying from you, becoming a client / customer.

This is definitely the lead magnet stage. And that can be a download, a sample, a free trial, a webinar, a free masterclass or something similar.

You want people to give you their contact details, so that you can move them from Facebook (although still continue targeting them on Facebook) and into your email marketing funnel.

By having additional touchpoints (email as well as Facebook and Instagram) you can speed up the process of someone getting to know you and feeling familiar enough to become a customer.

Who should you be targeting at this stage?

This is all about your warm audiences – so your Facebook and Instagram engagers, your website visitors, your video viewers. You are going to retarget everyone that engages with you online.

Bottom of funnel

When you reach this stage, this is where you’re going in for the sale.

You’ve introduced yourself, warmed up your audience, given them some value, made them want to learn more about you and now you want to convert them into customers.

Who will you be targeting?

You’ll be targeting the audiences that have signed up for your lead magnet, visited specific pages, completed the stages in the early part of your funnel. Just remember to exclude anyone that has already converted into a customer – you don’t want to drive people mad if they have recently signed up with you / purchased from you by targeting them with ads for something they’ve already bought into.

Now is a great time to make a time limited or discounted offer.

And don’t forget, at this stage there’s plenty of scope for retargeting again if you get someone to the point of buying (perhaps they look at a specific item or they initiate checkout but don’t buy) then you can deliver more ads to them, focusing on the urgency or instilling more confidence with testimonials about your product / service and take the opportunity to tip the prospect over the edge! 

This really is a great model for turning strangers into raving fans, and, whilst the thought of it may sound a little overwhelming it does just take some planning, some great content, well thought out ads and a little patience! 

If you’d like to chat about building out your Facebook Ads Funnel, then you can book in a free 15 minute call with me below.