How to Build Your Facebook Sales Funnel
With over 2.7 billion monthly active users, Facebook offers one of the best platforms to showcase your brand and drive sales. But while organic reach through quality content is a great way to connect with people, it’s usually not enough to convert those leads into paying customers immediately.
This is because of the rising competition for news feed space on the platform and the fact that most Facebook users aren’t actively looking to buy something while on the app. To market successfully on Facebook, you need to run ads that nurture those leads and keep your brand at the top of their minds until they are ready to buy.
This is where Facebook sales funnels come into play. But before we get into how you can set it up, let’s first take a look at what a Facebook sales funnel system is, and why your business needs one.
What is a Facebook sales funnel?
Facebook sales funnels are systems designed to capture the user journey from brand recognition to a loyal customer. Facebook users move from one stage of the funnel to the next and encounter targeted, relevant messages at each level that directs them on to the next level.
Unlike a traditional sales funnel, this one seeks to convert online users on Facebook specifically. Remember, most Facebook users log into the platform for recreation or look for something distracting or fun, but hardly ever purchase random products.
The idea behind a sales funnel is to generate demand and show users that you genuinely understand their pain points. There is one main thing to know to a successful Facebook sales funnel system, and that’s the customer’s journey:
- Top of the Funnel – Also known as the awareness stage, this is where you aim to get people to be aware of your brand and what it offers. The goal here is to expand your marketing reach and generate interest among your target audience.
- Middle of the Funnel – This is the consideration stage. It’s where your focus is on generating leads based on how much interest you were able to rack up in the awareness stage. You then nurture those leads further down the funnel by showcasing what makes your brand unique and highlighting why people should buy from you.
- Bottom of the Funnel – This is the decision/conversion stage. Here, the primary focus is on maximising conversions and optimising customer retention. Your ad messages at this stage are all about encouraging your nurtured leads to buy what you’re selling.
There’s also the post-conversion stage where the goal is to encourage existing customers into recurring buyers and even enthusiastic advocates of your brand.
Why Does Your Business Need a Facebook Funnel?
Facebook has huge market power—but you cannot tap into it without a sales funnel. It’s that simple. A Facebook ads funnel allows you to target users at every stage of the customer’s journey, which in turn, can potentially increase your conversion rates, grow revenue, and optimise the returns on your marketing expenses.
Essentially, without a Facebook marketing funnel, businesses would be wasting their ads and targeted content on the wrong audience, the type that is just not going to convert.
This is one of the most common reasons why many marketers fail at running Facebook ads, ending up with crazy high acquisition costs and almost non-existent conversions. When you go straight for the sale and pitch your products or services to complete strangers, they’re not likely to want to buy what you’re offering.
Understanding Your Typical Facebook Audience
The reality is that even if you have a fantastic product, most Facebook users are simply not ready to buy after just one ad. That’s because they need time to warm up to your brand and trust you and your business.
High-ticket conversions tend to occur after a user has interacted with your brand multiple times. The first time they come across your ad, it’s likely that it interrupted their scrolling or some funny video they were watching.
That’s why it’s essential first to understand your audience and warm them to the idea of trusting you and then spending their hard-earned cash on what you’re selling. With that in mind, here’s a breakdown of your typical Facebook audience:
- Strangers (cold audience) – These are Facebook users who are not aware of your brand and what it offers. This is usually the starting point for your Facebook sales funnel system.
- Prospects (warm audience) – These are Facebook users that have an idea of what your brand represents and have shown some form of interest in what it offers.
- Leads (hot audience) – These Facebook users are highly interested in what your business offers and have indicated their willingness to learn more about the product or service, and possibly even want to buy. This usually means they have shared their contact info with you or have made direct inquiries about purchasing the product or service.
- Customers – These are Facebook users that have purchased your products or services. They are proof of the success of your ads and your marketing funnel system.
- Brand Advocates – These are customers that are so happy with your product or service that they become regular buyers and even go as far as promoting your brand to their respective networks for free.
One of the best things about Facebook is that it is one of the few marketing channels where you can build a full sales funnel within its platform. Let’s take a look at how to build it.
Building Your Facebook Sales Funnel
You can use a mix of text, images, graphic designs, and even videos to appeal to users at every stage of your Facebook ads funnel. Either way, the end goal is always the same – creating interest and nurturing it until it transforms into a buy decision.
Here’s a step-by-step on how to get started:
Top of the Funnel
1. Define Your Target Audience
This means figuring out who you want seeing your ads. The reasoning behind this is simple — the ad content you create must be customised to your target audience’s preferences. It needs to resonate with them and give them the impression that you truly understand their pain points. Posting targeted ad content is the first step in generating consumer interest in your brand.
Identifying and defining your target audience is often easier said than done, especially if your business promotes a new product or service that people don’t know they need yet. There are various metrics and parameters to consider.
Not everyone will be interested in your business, so identify those that will and market to them
For example, let’s say you want to market your high-end beauty salon business. From the get-go, you already know that your target audience will be primarily composed of women, aged between 15 and 65, living within the vicinity of your salon’s location, and with enough income to afford your high-end services. This is just a general example, but you get the idea.
Defining your audience means properly researching the market and segmenting it based on the parameters that most apply to your business. The more detailed you can get, the better because it means you can better customise your ad messaging to grab their attention.
2. Create and Post the Right Content
Now that you know who you’re addressing, the next step is to speak to them in their lingo and create and post the right content.
By right content, we mean the kind of content that achieves the end goal of setting up the Facebook marketing funnel in the first place – moving prospects to the next stage of the sales funnel until they become loyal brand advocates.
Regardless of the type of content you create, it should seek to cover two things – appeal to your audience’s pain points and address any objections or hindrances that they may face.
Video content has high engagement rates on Facebook | Source: wordstream.com
Since it’s for a Facebook sales funnel, it’s generally better to spice up your content with relevant images and graphic designs. Better yet, consider going for video content as those tend to have much higher engagement rates.
When people engage with your content (they like, share, or comment on your posts), it’s a sign that they’re starting to show interest in your brand. The key here is to determine which content drives the best results and then replicating it to maximise those results.
3. Use Facebook Ads to Target Your Warm Audience
Facebook users who engage with your content are now firmly in the awareness stage or at the top of your Facebook sales funnel. They are your warm audience. At this stage, you want to utilise ads to widen your reach and boost engagement even further.
If you’re like most businesses, you want to make every dollar count. That’s why it’s important to promote only the content that got you the highest engagement rates. If people have already interacted well with that content, then it’s likely to perform well as a Facebook ad too.
Remember you’re only promoting this content to people who have already engaged with your brand. The idea here is to generate even more engagement and reinforce brand recognition in the minds of your warm audience.
The people who respond well to your ads are those that you will now push to the next stage of your Facebook ads funnel.
4. Leverage Content Remarketing to Warm Up a Cold Audience
Just because people didn’t initially engage with your previous content doesn’t mean they are outright disinterested in your brand or what you’re offering.
It’s possible that they simply didn’t have time to engage with the post because they focused their attention on something else. Or perhaps the content you posted wasn’t attractive enough to get their attention. In any case, don’t write them off just yet.
Exposing your content to the same audience multiple times can help improve brand familiarisation. More importantly, it can generate engagement since the more people are familiar with your brand, the higher the chances that they will engage with it.
5. Create Lookalike Audiences and Promote Your Content to Them
The ability to create lookalike audiences is one of the features that makes Facebook marketing so attractive to business owners. As the name suggests, lookalike audiences are a target group that share similar qualities with your current audience.
This can expand your marketing reach and sales potential without too much effort. All you need is an audience source (in this case, your current audience), and Facebook will generate the lookalike audience in just a few clicks. See here for a step-by-step guide on how to create a lookalike audience on Facebook.
Lookalike audiences expand your marketing reach and improve sales potential
One important thing to remember is to keep the size of the audience small. This makes it easier to match your lookalike audience’s qualities to the parameters of its audience source.
After creating your lookalike audience, promote your best performing content to them and look at how they respond. If you can generate high enough interest, then you can add those to your core target audience.
Middle of the Funnel
6. Build and Maintain Trust
Now you have a large enough warm audience ready to proceed to the next level in your Facebook sales funnel. Here, the idea is to establish a relationship with your audience – answer their questions, respond to their comments, engage with them.
You want to earn their trust so that they feel confident and comfortable enough to buy from you. They also need to see how quickly you respond to their inquiries, and how well you handle customer problems. You’ll also want to address them directly. People connect better with a person than with a faceless brand.
Trust is the key to conversions. It is the best way to warm up your leads (hot audience) and get them to become your customers.
7. Incentivise Them to Buy
In many cases, just showcasing the immense benefits of your product or service is not enough to make people want to buy it. They need a “nudge” in the right direction. This is where you offer exclusive discounts and rebates, or even free samples of your product to get people to make a buy decision.
No doubt you’ve come across these offers on your Facebook feed every now and then. Some brands offer free shipping, others offer percentage discounts, while some even offer the product for free. In any case, this “nudge” goes a long way in making the sale.
An example of an incentivised offer | Source: Facebook
After selecting your incentive, link the ad directly to the product page to complete the purchase. Make sure the checkout process is smooth, and there are no unnecessary stops that can cause them to think twice about their purchase decision.
To make the offer more compelling, you can create a sense of urgency by including a limited time offer. This can drive more sales within that time frame.
Bottom of the Funnel
8. Leverage Existing Data to Replicate Results
At last, your Facebook sales funnel system is starting to yield some much-needed results. But the work doesn’t end there.
Now you know what works and what doesn’t – what are you going to do with that information? Tweak the process to maximise your sales. Remarket your ads to capture any stragglers, then switch up your incentive offers to make it more appealing.
You can also test out new strategies now that you have the right audience.
9. Create a Loyal Customer Base
This is the final step in the Facebook sales funnel. It is all about making sure your customers buy from you again the next time they need whatever solution your product or service provides. There are a number of key factors here, but the two most important ones are quality and feedback.
Make sure that what people are buying from you is of high-quality and that you are always receptive to their feedback.
Low-quality products will earn your business a bad reputation and will all but ensure that people don’t buy from you again. On the other hand, feedback management is a crucial aspect of customer service. Just because people have bought from you doesn’t mean they won’t have post-purchase questions.
By responding quickly to feedback and providing any necessary after-sales support, you can nurture your existing customers into repeat buyers and brand advocates. You can even encourage them to generate more sales for you through upselling and referral programs that incentivise them to promote your business.
Moving Users Through Your Facebook Funnel
You’ll notice that the bulk of the Facebook ads funnel revolves around your audiences. That’s because getting users to move from one stage of the funnel to the next involves creating Custom Audiences.
A custom audience simply means you have included and excluded certain parameters in your target audience based on specific actions.
Snapshot of custom audience creation on Facebook | Source: Facebook
For example, suppose you’re looking to move users from the consideration stage to the funnel’s conversion stage. In that case, you could create a custom audience that includes users who had visited the product page before but didn’t convert and exclude users who have already converted into paying customers.
This allows you to create customised targeted content (rebates, promo offers, discounts) specifically for this audience to move them to the conversion stage.
Setting Up Your Sales Funnel in Facebook Analytics
You could always refer to your preferred sales funnel software when setting up your sales funnel; but did you know that you could create funnels directly with Facebook Analytics? These funnels comprise measurable steps in the form of events.
You’ll want to make sure your Facebook Pixel is successfully installed and reporting relevant data before starting this process. Here’s a quick help on how to install Facebook pixel code.
To set up the funnel:
- Open Facebook Analytics and select Activity from the menu on the left.
- Click on Funnels and select Create Funnel.
- Select Add Funnel Step then choose what events you want to measure.
- You can refine your choices and edit the parameters for each event.
For instance, you want an event that only comprises your audience members who engaged with your content using their mobile devices. You could refine that event by Device Type, select mobile and apply the change to the step.
- You can also remove the step from your funnel or reorder the steps based on which order you want users to move.
- Add as many funnel steps as needed to capture the customer’s journey fully.
- Save your funnel by selecting Save in the menu and entering the name of the funnel.
You’re all set up with your marketing funnel. The next thing is to look at the data and whether the funnel is producing expected results. If not, refine as needed.
Final Thoughts
Facebook sales funnels are an industry game-changer. They can drive sales, maximise returns on your ad spend, and establish a loyal customer base. The only thing is that a Facebook sales funnel system must be executed properly.
The process is not challenging, but it does require some technical knowledge of how remarketing and custom audiences work. Don’t get quickly disheartened when the expected results are not rolling in right away. In most cases, you’ll need to tweak the variables a couple of times before getting the funnel going.
You can also build your retargeting sales funnel outside of Facebook, and we can help with that too.
Got any questions or comments? Feel free to drop a line in the section below.
Need help building your Facebook funnel?
Reach out to the experts at HC Funnels today. We are a team of high-conversion funnel architects and professional CRM specialists with a single goal – to maximise your business’ ROI.
Contact us to learn more about how we can create the right Facebook sales funnel and optimise it to elevate your business.
