With over 2 billion monthly active users, Facebook is a great place to leverage your digital marketing efforts and reach out to a targeted audience. A ‘funnel’ is used on Facebook to capture users at different stages in their journeys until they are ready to purchase.
Mapping out your Facebook PPC funnel is a way of ensuring you are appealing your target users in the awareness, consideration, and conversion stage. We’ve explained more about this below:
What is a Facebook Sales funnel?
A digital marketing sales funnel is essentially a visualisation of the journey that your customers will take when they make a purchase. In this guide, we are going to focus on a Facebook sales funnel, which is designed to specifically convert users from the platform. To put it simply, a Facebook funnel aligns your Facebook ads and activity with your digital marketing funnel.
The funnel is divided into three parts:
Top of the Funnel (ToFu)
The top of the funnel (ToFu) is the stage where you try to improve your brand awareness among your target audience. This involves creating advertisements that increase your reach and generate interest among your audience.
Middle of the Funnel (MoFu)
The next stage of the Facebook sales funnel is the middle of the funnel (MoFu). In this stage, you essentially focus on lead generation and then nurturing those leads. You need to show them how you’re unique and why they should buy from you.
Bottom of the Funnel (MoFu)
Now we have the last stage of the Facebook sales funnel – the bottom of the funnel (BoFu). In this stage, your major focus will be on conversion and then retention. The Facebook ads used in this stage will be ones that compel your leads to buy from you and then turn them into loyal customers.
As a customer moves further along your funnel, they will build trust with your brand, and therefore be more willing to buy your product or use your service.
How can you reach users at different stages?
Let’s take a look at the step-by-step process for creating a sales funnel for Facebook.
1. Build a buyer persona
Before you can start leveraging Facebook to grow your brand – you will need to identify your target customer. This is an important step because you will need to customise your content so that it is tailored towards their preferences. Once you can create more targeted content on Facebook – you will be more likely to drive interest from potential customers.
The best way to do this is by creating a buyer persona. A Facebook buyer persona will target users who are not only most likely to interact with your ad, but to buy your product or service. Think of the following questions when creating your persona:
- How old are they?
- What is their occupation?
- Will they have interest in a specific product?
- What are their pain points?
The more specific you are about each persona, the more accurate your Facebook audience will be. If you aren’t sure how to get started, you could try one of the following strategies:
Analyse your opt-in forms
Your opt-in form has readily-available info about your customers, like their job title. You can analyze this info to build a buyer persona.
Facebook Pixel
Facebook Pixel measures a customer’s action on your site. Use this to learn more about your buyer persona’s behavior.
Conduct an interview
Gather a group of users and ask them about their occupation, interests, and why they bought your product.
2. Create High-Quality Content
Content forms the base of any sales and digital marketing strategy, – including a Facebook sales funnel. At this point, you will already have your buyer persona. That means now is the time to focus on creating segmented content that will appeal to each of your buyer personas (if you have more than one).
Remember, when building your Facebook profile – you won’t need to just focus on the platform itself. You could be working on blog posts, videos, images, infographics and more. Any high-quality content that matches your buyer persona can be used to grab your audience’s attention.
Facebook is a great tool to drive sales, but you can also use it to generate valuable traffic back to your site. For example, if you’ve created a blog post that will appeal to your Facebook buyer persona – you can share it on the platform and link users back to your site. Remember, leading more users to your website can help you drive them deeper into your funnel.
You can use the analytics offered by Facebook to measure the reach and engagement your content is delivering for your business.
3. Leverage Facebook Ads to Expand Reach
As we mentioned earlier, you will probably need to use Facebook Ads if you want to achieve maximum traffic. Once you have created your content and established your audience, you can benefit from PPC marketing to drive further engagement with your target customers.
When using Facebook ads to promote your content – it’s important to prioritise your best performing content to avoid wasting your PPC budget. We recommend looking at your content with the highest levels of interaction, shares, replies, comments etc. This type of content has performed well organically, so is likely to have a similar impact in an ad.
Of course, you will be targeting your Facebook buyer persona. Another tip could be focusing on those users who have already engaged with your business. This is sometimes referred to as your ‘warm’ audience. It’s the users who are likely to convert because they have already shown some interest in your brand.
Facebook Ads Tools:
There are various digital marketing tools designed for Facebook. We would recommend using Facebook Ads manager to keep track of your campaigns and review which content is performing the best. You can also install the Facebook Pixel onto your site, which will reveal the different steps taken by your site visitors who clicked through from Facebook.
4. Use Remarketing
We mentioned the ‘warm’ audience – this is where PPC remarketing can help. Once a user interacts with your brand – this could be a potential conversion opportunity. The more somebody is exposed to your brand, the more likely it is that they will engage with it.
You can establish a remarketing list for Facebook through both your site and within the platform. For example – those who visit your site but don’t purchase, can be targeted with a PPC ad on Facebook. This is essentially a reminder or a ‘nudge’ to encourage conversion.
Think about:
- Facebook post engagement
- Site visits
- Event interactions
- Engagement with your videos
- Custom combinations
5. Advertise to Lookalike Audiences
Facebook Lookalike audiences is a useful feature which enables you to reach an audience that is essentially identical to your existing audience. This saves time by helping you to automictically expand on your most valuable audience. We would recommend using this feature to reach out to users at ToFu (top of the funnel) level. It’s an important step when driving brand awareness.
Facebook generates the lookalike audience once you provide an audience source for it. For example, the source could be a custom audience, Facebook Pixel, or a page’s audience. When you’re creating a lookalike audience, it helps to keep it fairly small. With a smaller group, you increase the chance of your lookalike audience matching your core audience.
To create a lookalike audience for your brand, you can click through to the audience section within Facebook Ads Manager. Here is a quick run through of the form you will have to fill out:
Lookalike source – This is where you will input your seed or core audience. This is what helps Facebook generate a list of users similar to your original target audience.
Audience location – You can select one country and multiple region – as long as the location has at least 100 users.
Audience Size – Remember to consider your budget when choosing your audience size (start low).
6. Keep up the engagement
If you want to noticeably develop your Facebook sales funnel – you will need to maintain a solid relationship with users. Don’t just rely on PPC ads – respond to comments and messages to show that you are a trustworthy brand. The more you engage with users on Facebook – the more likely they will be to buy your product or service.
7. Customer Retention
The final step in the Facebook sales funnel goes beyond the point of conversion. How can you ensure that your customers remain loyal to your business? Think about the following:
- Repeat purchases
- Upselling
- Referral programs
Final Thoughts
Mapping out your Facebook funnel is a way of building a long-term strategy for your target audience. You are essentially visualising their path to your call to action – helping you to understand how to lead them towards your goals.
It’s important to continue to analyse your data as you build your Facebook funnel. This is so that you can make the best decisions for your brand and audience. We’ve summarised the steps we recommend taking below:
- Create a buyer persona
- Optimise your content accordingly
- Customise your ads
- Use remarketing
- Ensure customers remain engaged
- Analyse your funnel
Finally, don’t be afraid to make changes to your Facebook funnel throughout a campaign to ensure it is fully tailored towards you’re your target audience at different stages in their journey.