Successful entrepreneurs know this, but the amateurs don’t: Your Sales funnel is everything to you and your business.
A strategically planned and well-designed sales funnel on Facebook can bring in boatloads of money even if there are average products.
When Facebook came out and reported its first-quarter earnings recently, it said that 4 billion videos are being served daily on Facebook right now, which is both organic and paid.
As advertisers, Facebook wants us to continue adding value to its users, ideally in the stories we tell about our business.
Gone are the days of scammy offers that did not enrich the individuals in any manner.
Considering these, Facebook video ads are a great way to add value to your customers, engage them, and grab their attention.
With so many possibilities, it is incredibly easy to mess things up. Here is how you can set up the Facebook sales funnel that will help you avoid flushing Facebook’s advertising budget down the drain.
What you need to do when 99% of visitors are ready to purchase: Average conversions through a website are 1 – 3%.
For a few business websites, it might be even lower. This means that a vast majority of, say, 97% of visitors are never ready to purchase for some reason.
So, while dealing with Facebook advertising, apply your average customer value against the low conversion rate, and what you get out of it is the expected revenue, not much to look forward to.
How will you increase this? How will you reach the other 33% of people, get them to stick together, and raise conversions from sub 1% to 3%?
You will have to create marketing tactics highlighting the value propositions for these individuals, asking about their specific needs and interests depending on the buying cycle.
For instance, I would say awareness, consideration, and decision. Every one of them goes through these stages at various speeds and times.
Most continue to touch upon them at one point or another, allowing you to use content mapping to individuals in each stage, appealing directly to their needs and tastes.
Customize Your Audiences on Facebook
Depending on the traffic you have been getting on your website, the next step here is to set up your custom audiences.
These are a combination of Facebook users who have been exposed to your brand at some point.
You can begin this by setting out your marketing audiences.
- Custom audiences – Website visitors seven days
- Custom Audiences – Website Visitors 30 days
- Custom Audiences – Website Visitors 180 Days
- Custom Audiences – Website Visitors 60 Days
- 1% Look Like Audiences – All website Audiences
- 1% Look Like Audiences – Custom Audiences
- 1% Look Like Audiences – Facebook Fan Page
- Custom Audiences – Email List
- Custom URL Audiences – Specific URL
- Custom URL Audiences – For Exclusion, people who have checked out
Facebook has also just released a new universal pixel that we can use for both audiences and conversions.
To create your audiences, you must access your Facebook ads manager, navigating audiences from the drop-down menu.
Sequence Your Message
Another powerful technique that advanced marketers are using is the message sequence.
This helps individuals by giving tips or directing them to different content based on how they interact with your first aid.
In the example below, the organization used a combination of an ad with images that went to a free mini-course and then a series of video tips.
The organization then scheduled its ads to get the same audience and used custom audiences to retarget people who had already seen the first and second video tips.
Through the image below, you might have noticed that the retargeted video views are much more expensive as the narrow audiences generally cost a bit more.
On the final day, the organization ran ads that targeted people who visited their site and had a look at all of their videos.
What resulted was an increase in the sales of 350% over the last promotion just four months earlier.
Sell to Only Those Who Can Convert
Having your products and services sold on Facebook is a great challenge. And it’s very different from Google because you might not be looking for a solution.
You are targeting by interests and demographics but not the search terms that someone has been looking out for the moment.
So, customize your audiences by connecting to your email subscribers and opting for in-and-on-offer website visitors who have viewed the page or watched the videos on your website.
Doing so will help you keep the costs down by showing ads to only those who are interested and are likely to convert.
Provide Them With Really Good, Engaging Content
As your audiences grow, you should begin creating your content. Depending on your resources, marketers are always recommended to produce content that will help you educate or entertain.
As a brand, you must offer your customers more than just selling all the time. So, how will you turn your customer’s experiences into content? This can be done through customer testimonials, unboxing videos, contests, etc.
Look at what your competitors have been doing, and see how you can improve things. If you see trends in your market regarding content, make sure you stand out in different ways of engaging people.
Videos are huge on Facebook, and they are a cost-effective way of nurturing the market audiences you are targeting.
Next, focus on how you can encourage your fans to become a part of your experiences. YouTube is a great place to start to see what brands have been creating.
Split Test and Iterate as You Go
Too often, we have encountered businesses running ads to multiple and mixed audiences in one ad set. This leads you to not knowing which audience is converting at the best price.
One of the best ways to split-test your marketing audience is breaking it down into individual ad sets so that you get to see the performance of each one.
Given is the campaign structure that Facebook sets out. We often set our campaigns with one ad targeted at many ad sets to see which audience reacts the best and how.
The next step is taking the best-performing ads and then begin to test the other parameters of your marketing campaign.
Many advertisers have ways of running out their marketing campaigns, but testing your marketing audiences is the major key to campaign success.
Break Down Reports and Spot Down the Weaknesses
Most individuals are not using the breakdown reports to see what segments are converting them for the better.
We can’t see which keywords are converting best (separating those into different ad sets if you want to compare that) and then breaking it down by placements, age, gender, and time when comparing other segments.
By using breakdown reports, you can stop underperforming segments.
In the below example of the sales funnel, mobile news feed placement converts at a 26% better rate.
You can also set out your placements in different ad sets so that the budgets are handled tightly.
When you try using multiple ads in one ad, the budget is optimized across all of them and is not spread wisely.
When you look at the ads, the right column of the placements for retargeting does much better in terms of cost per conversion compared to the newsfeed on the desktop.
The right column placement does not get visibility as this shows up only on the desktop, but it does perform well in retargeted ads as people begin to recognize your brands.
Conclusion
People use Facebook to advertise their business in many ways, increasing their sales and revenue.
But if you are looking for a logical and step-by-step approach, then it’s high time that you start viewing your sales funnel as well to
- Growing your audiences
- Engage them with the right content.
- Converting them to a subscriber and selling them your products and services.
So, what’s your approach to Facebook advertising and creating a sales funnel? Do you have a similar kind of funnel? Or do you handle things in a completely different manner?
Author Bio:
Michael is the Marketing Manager at Ampliz, specializing in email and marketing database management software, editing blogs, case studies, and guides. He tries to make the world a bit more pleasant by working on strategies that would help them prevent and eliminate spam in terms of email marketing.
