Facebook Funnels — Just Like in the Kitchen

Marketing Tutorials

Finer Facebook Funnels

In the kitchen, liquids move from the wide top of the funnel, along the narrowing sides, to the perfectly-sized bottom, and into the container. There are no stops along the way.

In marketing, a wide audience also gets narrowed down to eventual conversions — but it does require several steps. Here's how you can market your content and match it up with your Facebook Ads to build more effective Facebook ad funnels.

Step 1: Avoid Common Mistakes

Choose a conversion objective that occurs roughly 50 times each week per ad set, recommends ads expert, Susan Wenograd. In this way, Facebook can optimize for it.

You want to look for actions that are at the top of the funnel — aka your coldest audience — so that you can give Facebook sufficient data to identify probable 'converts' earlier on.

WATCH OUT!

• Your campaigns might take 5 - 7 days for Facebook to "learn" and get their algorithm working for you, so try not to change too much when you're working with your ads; give them time to "bake."
• If you change your ads, such as pictures, start/stop, or change the budget, and make any major changes, you might have to start from scratch again because you'll be disrupting the algorithm. Kind of like when you're a nube at baking (like me!). If you mess with the ingredients halfway through your baking, you're better off to start from scratch than trying to fix things in the middle.
• Educate yourself if you need more info with Facebook's Blueprint, Facebook's free course.

Select a conversion campaign type that meshes with your needs and budget. With conversion campaigns, more expensive is not necessarily better.

Common conversion campaigns for top of the funnel might be

• Video views
• Brand Awareness

Step 2: Build Funnels From the Content Up

Inventory the content you have already. Take a look at all the content you've created while you've been busy helping your customers:

• your client's fav blog post
• a great video tutorial
• infographic
• slideshow
• ebooks
• pdfs
• webinars

Make sure it’s on your website — high quality, engaging, and relevant to the specific product you’re promoting. After reading all the different types of content you need to run your ads effectively, find out where your content gaps are and fill in the blanks.

Step 3: Identify Your Audiences

Got an email list? Tracking visitors to your website? Make sure you have Facebook's pixel installed on your website.

Take all your top-of-the-funnel, brand awareness efforts and check out the numbers and traffic. Then, use this data as your retargeting square one to build your lookalike audience.

What's a look-alike audience. My favourite way to explain it is, Facebook Ads are like Tinder for customers. It takes all the data you provide about customers who were interested in your brand, and finds more people like them.

You can give Facebook all their details like email, phone number, birthdate — whatever info you have — and Facebook will find more people like them. And those emails and details that you put into Facebook for lookalike audiences — they don't contact anyone by email, they just use the emails and data to match them and find more cool people like them.

TIP: When you pull in your customer database, try to pull in as much info as you can provide to get even better results, for example, phone numbers and birth dates.

Starting from scratch? First pinpoint interests and build from there.

Jon Loomer has a really great and comprehensive article on Facebook Custom Audiences

Don't forget to take the temperature of your audiences.

• Cold audiences are newbies. You and they have never shared any previous interaction — so start them off with brand awareness.
• Warm audiences have typically done something connected to you — watched all or a part of one of your videos, signed up for your emails, downloaded a PDF, etc. This is your engagement retargeting population.
• Hot audiences are at the bottom of your funnel and close to conversion.

Step 4: Match Your Content to Your Audience

Start cold audiences off on 'hello' content: who you are, what you do, content that gives quick value, nothing asked for in return. These are the appetizers.

CONTENT IDEAS

• checklists
• pdfs
• tutorial videos

Serve warm audiences items that welcome them back, expand their knowledge about you and your products/services but don't pressure the sale. Give them tons of value. My favourite way to explain this is to tell them the "WHAT" without explaining the "HOW." This is the dinner.

Neil Patel recommends that you try out some personalized videos for this part of the funnel “Thank you for checking out [X content], but you’re missing out on some key information that’s available on my landing page. [list benefits and key information here.]”

CONTENT IDEAS

• Webinar
• Video Series
• Free Trial

Hot audiences will feel comfortable getting sales-oriented content because you and they already have a good relationship. They're the ones who've been engaging with you but haven't bought yet — they need that extra little nudge. This is the next desert.

Your Ad copy here might be something like: “Thanks for checking out [ "dinner" content], but for some reason, you didn’t buy [my product].”

CONTENT IDEAS

• This is where you sell your full course or high-end product. And now to wrap up the Kitchen analogy, your full course should teach them the HOW, list all the ingredients and the step-by -step.

Step 5: Keep the Flow Going

You want people moving through your funnels at reasonable speeds. Our recommendation is to map it all out with Excel before actually setting up the Facebook process. Once things get going, use analytics to make changes and optimize, and re-iterate, re-iterate, re-iterate.

CAMPAIGN BREAK UP: (Our excel has a ton of stuff on it, but in a nut-shell, this is what we talk about.)

• Top of Funnel/Cold: Budget %, Ad Pictures, Ad Copy — What are we offering?
• Middle of Funnel/Warm: Budget %, Ad Pictures, Ad Copy — What are we offering?
• Bottom of Funnel/Hot: Budget %, Ad Pictures, Ad Copy — What are we offering?

There you go. From my Facebook Kitchen to Yours.

1. Understand how Facebook's Algorithm works. Educate yourself if needed.
2. Match your funnels with the right kind of content, based on what you already have or build the right kind of content if you need to.
3. Understand all the different types of audiences you can leverage. Use your existing database or create one for yourself.
4. Match your content to your audience, Cold-Warm-Hot.
5. Map everything out and keep optimizing.

Good luck with your campaign!! If you need help, check out our complimentary assessment.

Written By: Dafne Canales

Founder and CEO of the innovative digital marketing software company, Spartan Spark, Dafne Canales Lees has earned her reputation as the Data-Driven Digital Storyteller. Her 7-Second Trust Formula uses behavioural marketing strategies to create client trust via digital marketing platforms for a more personalized user experience that translates into additional sign-ups, sales and increased profits.

A member of the Neuromarketing Business and Science Association and the Society for the Advancement of Behavioural Economics, Dafne travels monthly to California to attend meetings with her advisory board. A sought-after speaker and facilitator, this creative innovator never stops giving of her time and talent, even teaching corporate in-house marketing teams the latest digital marketing strategies.