Facebook is the largest social media platform out there with over 2.79 billion monthly active users. This makes it a great place to reach a massive chunk of your target audience.
A combination of organic content and Facebook ads will enable you to reach as wide an audience as possible. To ensure you’re striking an effective balance, you need a sales funnel specifically designed for Facebook. Before we walk through how to develop one, let’s define what a Facebook sales funnel is.
What is a Facebook sales funnel?
A Facebook sales funnel is a path that guides Facebook users toward a desired action — in this case, making a purchase through Facebook. Unlike a traditional sales funnel, it is designed to specifically convert users from Facebook.
The funnel is divided into three parts, as illustrated below. Let's take a closer look at each part.
The top of the funnel (ToFu) is the stage where you try to improve your brand awareness among your target audience. This might involve creating advertisements that briefly introduce your products and promoting them to Lookalike audiences, running a referral contest, and posting a variety of content — like blog posts, videos, infographics, and ebooks — in order to appeal to different segments of your audience.
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.
To show customers how you’re unique and why they should buy from you, you might answer questions in the comments section of your ads and posts, push out content that details your products in more depth and has performed well in the past, and run retargeting campaigns. Such a campaign might be a video ad for users who have already clicked on a blog post or another type of content from your Facebook page.
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The last stage of the Facebook sales funnel is the bottom of the funnel (BoFu). In this stage, your major focus will be on conversion and then retention. Thus, 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.
These ads might feature special discounts and offers, like a free trial, to provide a final incentive for users to make a purchase or take another action (like opt in to your newsletter). They should also be highly targeted to promote products that users have already viewed or complementary products based on users' purchase history.
Now that you have a decent idea of what a Facebook sales funnel is all about, let’s discuss how you can build an effective one for your business.
How to Build a Facebook Sales Funnel in 9 Steps
Facebook offers numerous ad types that you can use at different parts of your Facebook sales funnel. However, these different options can make the process confusing for you too.
Let’s take a look at the step-by-step process for creating a sales funnel for Facebook for your business.
1. Define Your Target Audience
Before you can start leveraging Facebook to reach your audience and grow your brand, it’s essential to figure out who your brand’s target audience is.
Why, you might ask?
Because the content that you create needs to be customized to their preferences. Targeted content has better potential to generate interest and convert consumers.
You should set your target audience based on various demographic, geographic, and psychographic factors. It’s also advisable to create buyer personas among your target audience and analyze your sales process. As a result, you’ll be able to customize your content even further for each persona.
2. Create High-Quality Content
Content forms the base of any sales and marketing strategy, and the same stands true for a Facebook sales funnel.
You’ll need to work with your marketing team to create segmented content that can appeal to each buyer persona. It could be a blog post, video, image, or even a slideshow. But what matters is that it should be of high-quality and must be relevant to the interests of your buyer persona.
You should especially be careful while creating the content for blog posts as it needs to be free of plagiarism. It’s advisable to use a plagiarism checker like Grammarly to write unique content.
The idea is to get your target audience’s attention and get them to engage with your brand. Good, targeted content plays a central role in this task.
What should you do?
Make sure you mix up the content to provide variety to your audience.
Get them to interact with your content on Facebook and also share links to your blog posts so that you can direct them to your site as well. Remember, getting them to your website can help you drive them deeper into your funnel.
You will, of course, need to figure out which content tends to drive the best results for you. This can be done by observing its reach and engagement using the analytics offered by Facebook.
For example, note how HubSpot uses videos and images to engage their followers on Facebook.
3. Leverage Facebook Ads to Expand Your Reach
Once you’ve started getting some engagement on your content, you need to start leveraging Facebook ads to boost your reach and engagement even further. Video ads will be particularly effective considering 82% of mobile traffic is expected to be video in 2021. Here's an example of a great video ad by Perrier.
It's important to use your ad budget well. For this reason, it’s crucial to first promote only your best-performing content.
But why?
This is the content that people have interacted with the most, so it’s most likely to perform well as an ad too. It's worth noting you shouldn’t promote this content to your entire audience. Instead, focus on those people who’ve already engaged with your business.
This is your warm audience that’s more likely to re-engage with your content as they already have some interest in your business. Ideally, these will be your Facebook followers and people who have visited your website in the past.
To track the traffic you’ve received from Facebook on your website, you can install the Facebook Pixel on your website. It can show you all the actions taken by people on your website once they visit it from Facebook.
Now that you have the target audience set for your Facebook ads, you can promote the content to this larger audience. To manage these campaigns, you can either use the Facebook Ads Manager or one of the many marketing tools for Facebook.
You should regularly review the analytics of the posts to figure out which type of content is performing the best.
Free Sales Plan Template
Outline your company's sales strategy in one simple, coherent sales plan.
- Target Market
- Prospecting Strategy
- Budget
- Goals
Download Free
All fields are required.
4. Use Remarketing
Content remarketing is one of the best ways to warm up a cold audience.
How, you ask?
It helps you expose them to your brand multiple times. This can improve your brand awareness. After all, you can’t expect them to engage with your content the first time they come across it.
When they are repeatedly exposed to your brand, it’s likely that they might engage with it, hence becoming a warm audience for you. Just like you’re marketing to people who’ve already visited your website, you should remarket to those who have engaged with your content too.
The various methods through which you can do Facebook remarketing for your brand is:
- Engagement
- Website visits
- Event interactions
- Engagement with your videos
- Web page visits
- Custom combinations
The increased interaction with your brand might nudge them to become your leads or conversions.
5. Promote to Lookalike Audiences
One of the best features offered by Facebook is that of lookalike audiences. It’s a feature through which you can reach an audience that’s identical to your current audience.
This can take the guesswork out of the picture and help you expand on your best audience without much effort.
Facebook automatically generates the lookalike audience when you provide an audience source for it. The source could be a custom audience, a Facebook Pixel, or even a page’s audience.
You can also choose a location for the lookalike audience and select the percentage of the population you intend to reach in that location between one and 10 percent.
To create a lookalike audience for your brand, you can head to the audience section in the Facebook Ads Manager.
When you’re creating a lookalike audience for your brand, it helps to keep the audience size small. With a smaller group, the chances of the lookalike audience matching your core audience is better.
6. Engage, Engage, Engage
Yet another important thing to keep in mind when you’re developing your Facebook sales funnel is that of engaging with your audience in the medium they prefer — which is increasingly becoming messaging apps. In fact, Facebook reports that in 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, total daily conversations between people and businesses on Messenger (as well as Instagram) grew more than 40%.
Remember, you need to be there for your audience when they need you.
Respond to their comments and messages and resolve all their problems as quickly as possible to win their trust and increase your credibility. Without earning their trust, you’ll never be able to get them to buy from you.
Also, if others see that you’re not solving customer’s problems they’ll be less inclined to buy from you, and vice-versa. The idea is to nurture your audience to make it warm.
To save time when answering frequently asked questions, you can take advantage of Facebook Saved Replies and Instant Replies. These Facebook features are just one example of how AI can streamline your sales process.
7. Provide Incentives for Purchase
Once you’ve got a warm audience, all you need to do is nudge them to purchase from you. This can be done through posts that direct them to your product page.
To make the offer sweeter, you should consider adding discounts and offers to the posts. It also helps to make it a limited time offer so that you can leverage their fear of missing out (FOMO). This urgency combined with the discount can help you generate sales.
Additionally, you should promote these posts to target all those who have engaged with your brand in the past. This wider reach among your warm audience can help you generate even more conversions.
Note how Inkkas has a Facebook ad with an 25% discount offer. The post directly takes you to their product page to complete the purchase.
8. Optimize Every Stage for Mobile
According to The Evolving Customer Experience report by Facebook, users are becoming increasingly reliant on mobile devices for both researching and purchasing products. 66% of respondents said that their mobile device is becoming their most important shopping tool, with 45% of people also noting that they shopped more via their smartphone during the global lockdowns.
That's why it's so important to optimize every stage of your Facebook sales funnel for mobile. Facebook has a few recommendations for adapting assets to mobile, including:
- turning static images into slideshow ads
- trimming ads to 10-15 seconds
- creating 9:16 ads to fit vertical screen space of mobile devices
- Overlay text on videos so users can watch with sound on or off
- Begin and end with your brand or business message
9. Work on Customer Retention
The last step in the Facebook sales funnel is ensuring that your customers remain loyal to your brand.
For this, it’s crucial to provide stellar customer service to them using customer service best practices. This can ensure that they’ll remain satisfied with the services provided to them.
You should strive to make sure that you address all of their problems efficiently.
It’s also critical to drive them to generate more sales for you. This can be done through:
- Repeat purchases
- Upselling
- Referral programs
For upselling, you can achieve it by running ad campaigns based on the purchase history of your customers. When they see similar products or services, they might be inclined to buy them. Similarly, for repeat purchases, you can retarget your customers with new offers to get them to purchase from you again.
Lastly, you can motivate them to refer your brand to others by posting about your referral program and its benefits on Facebook. You can use both organic posts and ads for this.
Driving Customers through Your Facebook Sales Funnel
If you want to generate sales through Facebook marketing, it’s essential to have a Facebook sales funnel. Doing this helps you plan how to make your audience aware of your brand. You can also chart out how to approach your cold audience and nurture it to make it warmer. For this, you can use remarketing, lookalike audiences, and engage with them in comments or direct messages.
Once the audience is warm, you should give them incentives to buy from you.
Finally, pay attention to customer service and work on repeat purchases, upselling, and referral programs.
Editor's note: This post was originally published in September 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.
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