Mastering the Art of Creating a Facebook Sales Funnel

With approximately 2.79 billion active users monthly, Facebook leads as the biggest social media platform. This makes it easy to connect with a significant portion of the target audience. The use of organic content, along with Facebook ads, will help you tap into a wide audience.

To strike an effective balance, a sales funnel tailored to Facebook users will be needed. This guide provides the steps that will help you build a Facebook ads funnel that works seamlessly. These steps will apply to every Facebook ad strategy campaign and will ultimately lead to success.

What is a Facebook Ads Funnel?

You are probably familiar with many funnel types—sales funnel, click funnel, website funnel conversion, etc. However, the Facebook ads funnel is a funnel strategy targeted solely at Facebook ads. The Facebook ads funnel is an advanced paid ad strategy that designs different Facebook ad campaigns for different stages of the funnel: awareness at the top, consideration in the middle, conversion at the bottom, and retention/repurchase stages. 

Like all the other funnels, it allows a customer to disengage from your brand and then reengage and buy from you and then makes sure the customer continues making repeat purchases. The goal is to have a tactical approach to the revenue generated by the Facebook ads as opposed to scattering random ads.

What is a Facebook ads funnel strategy?

Building a Facebook ads funnel is an ad strategy that helps brands leverage Facebook’s enormous user base. Creating an effective Facebook ads funnel strategy is not just about generating sales. On average, it takes eight marketing campaigns for a potential client to finally convert. This is why analyzing their interactions with your ads at the funnel stage is critical.

We could say that it’s a technique for identifying which products or communications are most likely to be bought by the audience. The emphasis is on user experience at all levels of the funnel. This means that rather than adopting a sales-first attitude, your primary objective would be to drive engagement and sales would come without any effort. This requires a good mix of creativity, strategizing, and technology.

Key Stages of a Facebook Ads Funnel & Their Objectives

You can look at a sales funnel as a linear structure such as a pyramid or you can view it as an interconnected wheel with a circular motion. Either way, a sales funnel consists of parts that form a whole. These different stages lead prospective customers through various processes with the aim of reaching a particular conversion goal, which in this case involves making a purchase.

Top of the Funnel (ToFu) / Awareness Stage

In this phase, a “cold audience” lies who may not know about your services or products. Your objective is to create brand and product/service awareness. At this stage, you may conduct brand awareness and engagement campaigns.

Middle of the Funnel (MoFu) / Consideration Stage

This is critical because after customers are aware of your brand, the value of your offering must be delivered so that it is worthy of consideration. Once they have demonstrated some interest in your service or product, this audience can be termed as “warm” but is not ready to buy just yet.

Bottom of the Funnel (BoFu) / Conversion Stage

This is the most important stage of the funnel. Customers at this stage are extremely interested in what you have to offer and are on the brink of using your service or purchasing your product, which can categorize them as your “hot audience.”

This can include those who may have visited the store and placed an item in their shopping cart or left the store without completing the purchase. Make sure that you have relevant content that can help convert these leads.

Retention / Repurchase Stage

Your funnel doesn’t close at the sale of your product/service. New customers are indeed difficult to find, but always remember, there are those who have already spent with your brand previously.

Actually, that collection of customers is a whole lot more likely to purchase again and bring revenue along with them. Focus on pushing them to purchase more often.

This will improve your ecommerce ROI by lowering your customer acquisition cost (CAC) and increasing customer lifetime value (CLV).

Step-by-Step Guide to Creating a Facebook Sales Funnel 

Facebook provides many advertising options that you can use to target various levels of your Facebook sales funnel. These different alternatives tend to confuse the process for you as well.

Go through the following simple step-by-step guide to create a sales funnel with Facebook for your enterprise.

Identify Your Audience

Before utilizing Facebook to target and expand your brand, you need to first define the target audience for your brand. Why, you may wonder?

Crafted content is designed to cater to a specific audience’s needs. When the consumer is more inclined towards the content, there is a higher possibility of converting the audience.

It’s useful in defining your target custom audience by various demographic, geolocation, and even psychographic aspects. Furthermore, find a way to form a buyer persona within the targeted group and analyze your sales funnel. This will allow you to craft content for each persona if you desire to go deeper.

Create Good Content

At the core of every sales and marketing strategy is content, and this is also true for Facebook funnels.  You will have to sit down with your marketers to prepare optimized content for each buyer persona. This could be a blog article, a video ad, an image, or even a slide deck. But what matters is that it should be of high quality and must be relevant to the interests of your buyer persona.

Most importantly, ensure that your blog posts are original, as they are the easiest to plagiarize. It’s advisable to use a plagiarism scanner like Grammarly to create unique material. The goal is to make your audience engage with your brand. In achieving that, well-crafted content is highly useful.

Ensure that your audiences will not get bored by presenting varied forms of content. Increase interactions with your content by encouraging audiences to like your Facebook page and share your blog posts. This will eventually allow you to drive traffic to your site. Once on your site, it is much easier to guide them into your sales funnel.

You need to monitor performance metrics so you can optimize your strategy. One way to track performance is through engagement and reach analytics from Facebook. Provide consistent posts and monitor which perform best. Promote posts to warm audiences to take advantage of the users who already engage with your brand. These user groups likely include your current Facebook fans or users from your website retargeting list.

What you want to do is focus on engagement levels to pinpoint the content that is driving the most purchases.

Aim for “lookalike audiences.”

Facebook has a term they coined, lookalike audiences, “who resemble your existing customers, website visitors, or Page fans.” Essentially, these are people who share similar interests, habits, and behavioral patterns with some of your existing core audience. Think of this audience as a cold audience, but one who can easily be warmed up to become leads.

Hence, these are the people whom you want to aim at.

Advertise Your Content

Do you remember the content that appealed to your warm audience the most? Now you want to take that content and serve it to the cold audience. For whatever it was, a video, blog post, or webinar—that is the content you must promote.

If things go well, a good portion of your cold audience will move deeper into your Facebook marketing sales funnel and become part of the warm audience.

At this point, they know your brand and should at least be somewhat interested in making a purchase.

Effective Remarketing

Facebook advertising is the same in concept as any kind of advertising on any medium. Converting your audience into leads does not happen as easily as you might think.

Unfortunately, this is not how things play out. In most scenarios, your audience will need to come into contact with your brand multiple times before they are able to make a purchase. How do you prime them effectively and move them down the funnel?

One word—remarketing.  This makes Facebook the most suitable platform for this type of advertising.

Engage, Engage, Engage

Another important aspect that one should not forget while building a Facebook sales funnel is to ensure that you are reaching out to your audience in their preferred channel, which seems to be messaging apps more and more. Indeed, Facebook does report that, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, daily conversations between people and businesses on Messenger (as well as Instagram) rose over 40%.

Always be available for your audience, and respond to their issues and comments in a timely manner so that you can earn their trust and credibility. Keep in mind that without their trust, it is nearly impossible for you to sell anything to them.

Moreover, if you are not solving customer issues for some people, it would discourage others from buying from you. The opposite is true as well. You need to take the steps to warm your audience up.

Enable Instant Replies and Facebook Saved Replies when dealing with recurrent issues. These features are only a fraction of how AI can redefine your selling experience.

Encourage Them to Buy

With a warmed-up audience, all you need to do is give them a little push and they will buy from you. Tactics such as posting links on your product pages will also help. In an attempt to sweeten the offer, consider formulating the posts alongside discounts and offers. These offers need to be time-sensitive so you can take advantage of their fear of missing out. The blend of these time restrictions and discounts will help in generating sales.

Also, this group of users should be added to the promotional campaigns of the ads as they have already interacted with the brand. This can increase the volume of brand conversions.

Optimize Every Stage for Mobile

As indicated in The Evolving Customer Experience report produced by Facebook, mobile phones are becoming the primary research and shopping tools of users. About 66% of the people surveyed agreed that their phone has become their most used shopping device, while 45% acknowledged purchasing more through mobile phones during the lockdown phases.

This is why every single mobile device optimization is crucial to all levels of the Facebook sales funnel. Facebook Pixel has a few recommendations for adapting assets to mobile, including turning static images into slideshow ads, trimming ads to 10-15 seconds, and creating 9:16 ads to fit the vertical screen space of mobile devices.

Videos should have the option of being viewed on mute or with sound with text so that users can enjoy the content regardless. Your brand or business message should be the first and last thing they see.

Work on Customer Retention

The order of activities directed toward the customer at this stage is aimed at reinforcing their loyalty to the brand.

To achieve this goal, make sure that you utilize customer service best practices to maintain stellar customer service. This will greatly improve the chances of customers being satisfied with the services they are offered.

You should strive to approach all of their concerns in the most efficient manner possible.

It is important to motivate them to drive and generate more sales for you. This can be done through:

• Repeat purchases
• Upselling
• Referral programs

For upselling, you can achieve this through ad campaigns that focus on the purchase history of your customers. When customers see some products or services that they already have, there is a high chance that they might purchase them. In the same way, for repeat purchases, new customer offers can be used to retarget customers so that they make a purchase from the company again.

Finally, post your referral program and its benefits on Facebook so that you can entice users to refer your brand awareness to others. This can be done through organic posts and paid ads manager.

Best Practices for Facebook Ads Funnel

To construct a properly functioning funnel from Facebook Ads, it is important to create strategies to seamlessly move your prospects from simply knowing about your product to eventually buying it. If you enhance marketing efforts during awareness, consideration, and decision stages, you will be able to obtain more sales. If you implement good targeting and ad creation, together with retargeting, your funnel will be efficient and inexpensive. Some tips are listed below to assist you in creating a funnel that performs optimally with Facebook Ads.

Make Mobile Your Primary Focus

According to Statista, 97% of Americans prefer to access Facebook via their phones rather than desktop devices.

Your ad creatives, along with the website and landing pages, should be targeted towards mobile users. See Meta’s guide on how to optimize your ad creatives for mobile devices.

Research Using Facebook’s Ad Library

The Facebook ad library enables you to create ad campaigns and is a great starting place for your brand research. Look up other companies in your niche and see how they outperform their competitors. 

Analyze their ad creatives, messaging, and audience engagement to identify trends that work. Incorporate these findings to develop powerful advertisements and images that speak to the people you need to reach out to. Persistently improve your approach by experimenting with various variations in ad types and positions.

Use A/B Split Testing on Facebook Ads

A/B split testing on your ad sets for Facebook Ads lets you know which ad set will likely provide the best results and therefore deserves more of your budget. There are various methods of performing A/B tests on your ads. You can have different creatives, copies, or even discount offers for your split tests.

Incorporate Video Ads

As an engaging form of ad content, video ads perform well. In a survey, 30% of mobile shoppers in the US reported that “video” was their preferred format when learning about new products.

Ensure the video is uploaded natively onto Facebook/Meta Ads Manager instead of using external platforms like YouTube. Like many other social media platforms, Facebook prefers to keep its audience within the wider network.

Build a Good Relationship with Your Audience

Running ad campaigns isn’t the only way you should utilize Facebook. You should strive to properly connect with your customers and to achieve this, you need to interact with your audience or potential customers.

By showing empathy toward your audience, you increase the trust and credibility of your brand. And in some cases, you may assist the customer directly by solving their messages.

Analyze your Analytic Stats

You need to know how each campaign is performing on a template funnel. So, analyze these stats and metrics to the left:

• Conversion Rate
• ROAS (Revenue over Ad Spend)
• CPM (Cost Per Mile)—price charged for a thousand impressions of your ad.
• CTR (Click-Through Rate)

Conclusion

Creating a successful sales funnel that converts on Facebook requires you to tailor your approach for your brand’s audience. What may work for your competitors is not always guaranteed to work for your business. Therefore, testing specific parts of your strategies, market research, and tool analysis is crucial.

This refers to locating anything that assists in determining the core of your brand’s identity. It’s just a matter of being patient and allowing Facebook to do its job. The best part is the level of automation that’s involved once you’ve created your basic content, landing page, and remarketing ads.