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We all want the most bang we can get for our marketing and advertising buck. There’s pretty much agreement all around now that traditional outbound marketing – you know, those expensive TV, print, and direct mailers – doesn’t work all that well and yields a pretty low ROI. Besides that, typical website conversions hover around a pitiful 1-3%, some even lower. So what works to grab some of that remaining 99-97%? Facebook advertising, of course.
Facebook has around 1.86 billion monthly users. Now that’s a huge potential market! In addition, slightly over 71% of all Facebook users are 25 years old or older – the ones with the money to spend. Further, a 2017 study revealed that 52% of consumers were influenced by Facebook in their purchasing decisions, both online and offline.
But you’ll need a strategic approach for your Facebook ads and marketing funnel to capture your targeted portion of that market. Let’s see what it takes.
Probably the most common mistake in much Facebook advertising is jumping the gun and trying to sell to people who aren’t ready to buy yet. Most of the time, people are on Facebook to keep up with family, connect with friends, share recipes, get a little news, and so on. Generally, they aren’t there to buy anything.
That’s why you need a “funnel” – a way to gently and gradually move people from potential prospects to loyal customers. All it takes is keeping the WIIFM principle firmly in mind.
People aren’t really interested in you or your business and don’t really want to know about your products/services. What they want to know, what they ask, is this: “What’s in it for me” (WIIFM). So your job is to show them that – the benefits – and then build trust.Step 1: Attraction/Content Promotion
Your initial goal with a Facebook sales funnel is to attract visitors to your website and build an audience in a way that provides a good ROI. And you do this by offering great content that addresses their concerns and offers solutions to their problems.
There’s a ton of online content now, millions of pieces published every day. So yours has to be unique, relevant, of high quality – and, of course, engaging and a delight to read. Focus on the prospect’s problems and what their life would be like if that problem wasn’t a problem for them anymore.
This next step involves turning those website visitors into leads. You offer something of value, usually free (a lead magnet), in exchange for contact information so that you can later send out marketing emails to move them further down the funnel.
Your offer, though, absolutely must provide VALUE. Otherwise, you’ll damage the trust relationship you’re trying to establish. But done right, it will position you as a giving, knowledgeable, trusted authority in your field or industry.
When thinking about valuable content, think of something that you could charge hundreds of dollars for. Give away your best stuff. This gains trust and establishes you as the authority figure and market leader. Only the best people give their stuff away for free. They have the mindset of abundance rather than having a scarcity mindset where they hoard all of their knowledge to themselves.
This is where the automated email campaigns come in. A carefully crafted series of emails will further nurture and help build that essential trust. These emails are not newsletters informing the reader about your company. These lead nurturing sequences continue to focus on the prospect’s pain points and solving their problems. Each email points further down the funnel and closer to the “Aha Moment” where the prospect realizes that YOU are the best person to solve their problems.
Lead nurturing sequences also often involve another targeted Facebook ad campaign or two. You can use Facebook’s custom audience options to effectively laser focus additional offers and move people closer to to the bottom end of the funnel – conversion. Retargeting your audience is an effective way to get your messages in front of your prospects as them move further down your funnel.
Conversion is the ultimate goal – converting people who were once mere prospects into possible leads then to hot leads and finally to paying customers.
The key in this step of Facebook advertising and funneling is to focus your hot leads on a specific buyer persona and communicate a personally resonant and very specific value proposition. If you’ve done everything else right further up the funnel, this step should be fairly straightforward and uncomplicated.
Keep in mind, though, that these are just the major steps in the Facebook advertising funneling process. There are several other sub-steps that can’t be neglected. These are built around the standard buying cycle– opportunity recognition, discovery of alternatives, comparing solutions, making a decision, and implementing the solution – and involve landing pages, thank-you pages, automated email marketing sequences, and re-targeting efforts.
While we have seen companies try to build out funnels on their own, because of their complexity and number of moving parts, most companies struggle to create effective funnels. The commons mistakes usually lead to the teams giving up all together, throwing their hands in the air and claiming “Facebook Ads don’t work!” Well, if you want to see how Facebook Ads can predictably and consistently produces high quality traffic, leads and clients for you, reach out for a free strategy session with our expert advisors.
