The Social Media Marketing Funnel (made simple)
How To Use Facebook Audiences to Create a Winning Funnel
First of all, this is not a fully comprehensive, custom designed funnel. This is a simplified funnel that can get you started on the right track, and you can build from here.
So what is a funnel, why should we care and how do we use it?
A marketing (also known as a sales or purchase) funnel is a description of the journey of potential customers, from first awareness of your business and service, to the actual sale. Whether you actively use a funnel or not, the truth is that all business have a type of journey that all customers go on. The choice is to either be intentional about it, or leave it up to chance.
The funnel can be broken down into three broad categories:
Top of the Funnel (TOF)
Middle of the Funnel (MOF)
Bottom of the Funnel (BOF)
Yes, I know, very intuitive and catchy!
In broad strokes:
TOF is about Awareness
MOF is about Engagement
BOF is about Conversion
Studies show that approximately that 5% of customers are ready to buy straight away (ie impulse buyers), whereas around 51% of shoppers will research the product or service on Google (https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-strategies/search/product-research-search-statistics/), 61% will use Amazon (https://www.marketingcharts.com/industries/retail-and-e-commerce-118754) , while over 34% of potential customers will research social media before buying (https://www.business2community.com/social-media-articles/1-in-3-consumers-use-social-media-to-discover-new-products-and-brands-02419890).
If we focus all our attention on the 5%, then we’ll miss out a huge amount of potential new clients and customers.
So, we should care about the customer journey.
How do we leverage Facebook and Instagram to assist us on this?
We used to be able to focus more of our energies on re-marketing on the website side of things, but because of lots of new privacy and security updates, that’s a little more tricky to track. However, it is still possible to use Meta’s tools to help us on the client journey.
So let’s look at three broad marketing categories that match up with the funnel.
Stage 1 - Engagement - TOF
Stage 2 - Traffic (clicks) - MOF
Stage 3 - Conversion - BOF
Engagement
When you are creating a new advert (use Ads Manager, via the Meta Business Manager), you have the option of choosing the consideration of the advert. There are quite a few options, but I lean towards an ‘Engagement’ focused advert, which will create an advert that, you guessed it, encourages people to engage with the post. You can choose a video option here too, but the main goal of this post is for people to either watch a certain amount of your video or to like or interact with your content.
Don’t post a purely promotional piece of content here, make it interesting, make it stand out, and inviting for people! Here’s a post I made recently for an Eye Clinic in Solihull, England. We created a series of eye facts, but this one seemed to grab plenty of engagement!
Make sure to create a ‘saved’ audience that represents your clients/customers and aim for at least 3 days of promotion.
Change the placements to ‘Manual Placements’ and remove Audience Network as an option. Meta don’t make it easy to find, but engagements on the audience network aren’t included in custom audiences (which we talk about below).
Next, create your post. Make it as engaging as you can!
(below is an example of a post we created for an Eye Clinic, with an engagement objective)
(A little tip, make sure to add a Call To Action to these posts, like adding a button. There will be some people who will jump on to your site and possibly convert, even at this stage).
Now the really important bit— Custom Audiences. We’ll take a look at custom audiences at depth in a future post, but for now, we need to create an audience of all those people that engaged with your content recently.
Navigate to business.facebook.com and click on ‘audiences’, click ‘create audience’ and then ‘custom audience’.
If you used a video for your engagement advert, then choose video, select the source video and the amount of time we want the potential customers to have viewed it for. Thruplays is a good option here for higher quality leads.
Then select the amount of time we want to have these people in the audience. 14 days is a good place to start. (You can always create another audience with the same settings, but with a much longer retention, up to 365 days).
Name your audience and then save.
If you used an image for your post, then choose Facebook or instagram Page (depending on your placements) as your source. Then select ‘everyone who engaged with your page or posts’, and follow the rest of the setup as above.
Now we’re ready for stage two— Traffic.
The goal of this advert is to get people to move from a social platform to your website, and ideally a landing page that relates to the post you’ve just put out. Perhaps it’s a blog post or an informative article, or even an educational page about your services or products. Remember, 2/3s of potential customers will research before they buy - so here’s your chance to lay down some of the facts and education.
Head back to Ads Manager on Meta, and create an ad with the ’Traffic’ objective. Name the campaign, and when you get to the ad set level, choose website as your target. For now, we are going to choose ‘link clicks’ as the optimisation and leave the bid cap blank. We can change this later on, when we get an idea of how much it costs for a converted customer to come through the marketing journey.
Set your daily budget, and make sure to set an end date. You don’t want to forget and have your campaign running wild!
Now, when you’re selecting your audience, click ‘create new audience’ and in the custom audience box, begin to type in the name of the custom audience you just created in stage 1.
You don’t need to add any more interests or parameters to this audience - these are (mostly) the engagers from stage 1 that were within the original saved audience.
As we did in stage 1, change the placements to excluded ‘audience network’, as it doesn’t count towards our custom audiences.
Go to the ad level, and create an engaging traffic based ad, which is linked to the relevant landing page.
Make sure your pixel is selected too! (If you don’t know how to do that, we’ll create a post on that in the near future, but in the meantime navigate to ‘Events Manager’ and follow the instructions there).
Just a note, the cost per clicks with be higher in stage 2, then the cost per engagement in stage 1. This is normal, and we’re further down the funnel. The lower you go, the more value is attached to customer actions.
Publish, and away you go!
Stage 3 - Conversion
Now that we’ve engaged and educated, now it’s time to convert.
Go to Audiences > Create Audience > Custom Audience > Facebook Page > Anyone who clicked or engaged with an ad. Then select a shorter parameter for the retention, perhaps even 3-5 days. Name the audience, and make it live!
These audiences are dynamic, which means they are always syncing and updating with the lasted engagers on the page.
Once the audience is created, go to Ads Manager > Create > and then your preferred conversion objection. If you have a catalogue or a physical shop, you can use those objectives, but for now we’re going to use ‘conversions’.
Name your campaign and head to the ad set level.
Select your Conversion event location (usually website) and then select the pixel event for your website.
(Due to the current privacy changes, a third party app, like Zapier, can be used to inform the pixel of sales/leads that have been occurred. In order to do this, create a Zapier account and then use the Facebook conversions module to send a zap back to the Facebook pixel. Zapier have a step-by-step process to this - but don’t worry, we’re going to create an article soon and walk you through it!)
Select your daily budget and schedule, and then select your newly create custom audience as your target market.
Remember, in the placement section, remove audience network. It can give you more reach, but it’s just not trackable!
Click next, and now it’s time to create your ad, showcasing your wonderful products/services. This is the time to go for the sales pitch, make offers etc. You’re targeting BOF leads here, so make it count! Professional imagery or video, well thought-out copy, clear call-to-action and the correct web link to the products in the url box.
