6 Pro Tips on How to Make a Facebook Ad Funnel

If you’ve read our blog before, you’ve seen us talk about the awesome results we drive for our clients including hundreds of thousands in revenue.

So how do we create winning Facebook ad campaigns for our clients again and again?!

The key is to have a really clear and strategic Facebook ad funnel from the start. 

So today, we’re going to show you how to make a Facebook ad funnel.

And if you stay till the end of the post, we’re sharing 6 pro tips to help your Facebook ad funnel drive some serious results. 

What Is An Advertising Funnel?

An ad funnel is a visual for how you move people from complete strangers to customers and repeat customers…

…if that’s applicable given the nature of your business. 

We have another post on marketing funnels in general, but for today’s post, we’re specifically going to talk about the Facebook ad funnel.

Parts Of A Facebook Ad Funnel (And Funnels In General)

1. Top-of-funnel (Awareness Stage)

When you’re looking at the funnel, the widest part at the top is called top-of-funnel.

This is considered to be the beginning of your buyer’s journey. 

People who are top-of-funnel are not familiar with your brand. They’ve never heard of it.

These people are what’s called a “cold audience”.

Thus, they are in the awareness stage because you’re drawing these people into your funnel for the first time…

…and you’re starting to make them aware of your brand, products, and services.

2. Middle of the funnel (Consideration or Engagement Stage)

Then you have the middle of the funnel, otherwise known as the consideration stage or the engagement stage.

If people are middle of funnel, it means they are not new to your brand, they’re familiar with it.

These people are what’s called a “warm audience”.

And what’s key here is that these need to be people who are familiar with your brand and have shown interest.

You don’t want people outside your target audience taking up space in your funnel. 

If they know about your brand, they know what you offer, and they’re not interested or are an unqualified lead, boot them out. 

You don’t want to waste any time, effort, or money nurturing a lead that’s not going to convert later.

3. Bottom-of-funnel (Conversion Stage)

Lastly, the narrowest part at the bottom is called bottom-of-funnel, also known as the conversion stage.

People who have made it to this point in your funnel are considered a “hot audience”.

That’s because they’re familiar with your brand, they’ve shown interest, and they’ve taken a high-intent action. 

This could mean that they’ve shared their contact information with you…

…or they’ve been adding your products to cart, for example, but they just haven’t made the move to purchase yet.

Your bottom-of-funnel marketing materials should be made ready to close these people.

That’s because, by this point, all they need is that extra push to convert into a customer.

So those are your 3 basic parts to a Facebook ad funnel (advertising funnel, in general).

Now there’s a bonus fourth section you don’t always see talked about, but before we get into that, here’s our new social media ads webinar.

Go check it out if you’re interested in mastering social media advertising, Facebook ads included. 

4. Advocacy

So the fourth section of a Facebook ad funnel that you don’t always hear about is for people who have already purchased.

We referred to this as the Advocacy stage in our other posts.

If you’re a B2C or eCommerce company, repeat purchases may be something you aim for.

The advocacy stage is where you can nurture your existing customers to become repeat buyers. 

If you’re B2B or a service-based company like us, this stage could be used to nurture existing clients to remain long-term clients…

…and even to send a few referrals your way.

Or in either case, B2C or B2B, you might have an up-sell product or service.

This is where you can nurture your existing customers into purchasing that. 

Either way, the Advocacy stage helps you work smarter not harder. 

You’ve already worked so hard to obtain these customers, so don’t let communication just end at the sale.

Make sure you’re milking your customers for all that they’re worth to get maximum purchase value from them!

In other words, start increasing your average customer lifetime value, or LTV. 

So that’s the basic outline of an advertising funnel. 

It’s important to understand that first…

…because it will help you understand and address your customers better when you’re building out your Facebook ad campaigns. 

And on that note, let’s go ahead and start applying Facebook-specific actions to our funnel.

How To Create A Facebook Ad Funnel

Step 1: Top of the funnel

This means you are running ads to a cold audience.

This will look different depending on the nature of your business and the price point of what you offer. 

A lot of eCommerce stores, for example, can get away with directly asking for the sale here.

It’s because people don’t usually need to give a ton of thought to whether they want to buy this $10 bracelet they’re seeing in a FB ad right now or not. 

In this case, you can run conversion ads that send people directly to your website or product page because it’s a quick, impulse buy.

But if you sell higher-priced products or services…

…you’ll want to run ads to introduce your brand a little more first and more importantly, provide value first. 

So providing value to a cold audience could include sending traffic to your blog site or a landing page that is content-driven…

…where the point is to provide value in the form of teaching them how to solve a problem/pain point or how to accomplish a goal they have. 

You can send traffic to your landing page or blog with the traffic campaign…

…and then just change the optimization to be for landing page views because that optimizes for a little more than just clicks.

It shows the ad to people who are likely to actually wait for your landing page to load and view it…

…as opposed to just clicking the ad and then getting impatient and moving on.

So again, you’re sending people to something like a blog, and you can have a pop-up or sidebar widget promoting a lead magnet on the page.

That is in exchange for their contact info just in case they’re confident about you and ready to take the next step.

But that shouldn’t be the focus of the page. This isn’t a squeeze page. 

The point at this stage is solely to provide value to them.

And in return, it will hopefully give them higher brand recall and build a little foundation of trust in your brand.

Another option is if you have a great video that provides a lot of value, you can then run a video views campaign. 

If you have a YouTube channel full of valuable videos for your audience, like we do…

…you can repurpose those videos into a Facebook video campaign to get more views, engagement, and brand awareness. 

Just be sure to actually upload the video directly into your Ads Manager as a video campaign. 

Don’t just link to your YouTube channel.

That’s because Facebook wants to keep users on its platform and will favor the native video ads better than ads that link elsewhere to a video.

A third campaign you can run to help generate some awareness is an Engagement campaign…

…which can break down either into Page Likes or Post Engagement.

Page Likes ads prompt people within your selected target audience to like your Facebook page which does a couple of things. 

• Gaining more likes can have a snowball effect on making your brand look more credible to others…

…thus making it easier and easier for people to like your page.

• It allows you to put some content in front of them organically moving forward. 

Post Engagement ads take your existing social media posts and extend their reach…

…by putting them in front of more eyeballs within your selected target audience to get more likes, comments, and shares. 

If you post a lot of social media posts every day or every week, and you’re providing a lot of value to your audience there…

…either of these two campaigns could be a great option to drum up some brand awareness and engagement. 

So those are some ways to start drawing some top-of-funnel people in on Facebook. 

But alright now let’s move on down to the middle of the funnel. The next Facebook ad funnel is the consideration stage. 

Step 2: Middle of the funnel

In here, you’re trying to take the brand awareness and engagement you’ve received so far to the next level.

The people in this part of the funnel are familiar with your brand, they’ve had positive brand association from the free value you’ve provided…

…now it’s time to get them more invested. 

Again, this part will look different for different businesses, but let’s look at a few examples of what this could mean. 

If the structure of your business is such that you need to communicate with leads one-on-one before they can become a customer or client…

…then maybe lead generation is the next step for you.

If that’s the case, there are several Facebook ad campaigns you can perform. 

If you have a squeeze page or landing page specifically designed for collecting leads and contact information…

…you can send people there and track how many people from Facebook completed your landing page lead form with a conversion campaign. 

Alternatively, Facebook has its own lead generation campaign.

This is where people can fill out your lead form all right there within Facebook, without ever leaving the platform.

The leads’ contact info is stored in your Facebook Ads Manager for you to download manually or for you to automate into your CRM.

We have a whole post we made just around the setup and execution of the Facebook lead ads.

So if that sounds like something of interest to you, we’d highly recommend you read that post next.

Another option is you can also automate a Messages campaign.

This is where the goal is to get them messaging directly with your Facebook page via Facebook messenger.

You can set up a few automated and conditional “if they say this, then send this” type prompts within your Facebook Ads Manager.

This is so interested leads can get the information they need from your Facebook ad instantly…

…and be prompted to schedule an appointment to speak with you, for example.

Another good campaign to use depending on the nature of your business could be the app install campaign.

That is if your app allows users to make an account for free. Because, again, we’re not asking for a sale just yet. 

The middle of the funnel is all about getting them plugged into your brand a little deeper. 

So if your business does not require having a meeting or phone call with a lead prior to the purchase…

…you can still use some of these same campaigns, but for a different purpose. 

For example, you can still use these lead gen campaigns to get their contact information in exchange for a different kind of lead magnet such as:

• coupon code,
• have early access to a new product launch, or
• eBook that’s related to your product or service. 

Meanwhile, the contact information you receive from them can be funneled into your email marketing campaign.

As well as be retargeted on Facebook, which we’ll get into in a second. 

But overall, with this part of your Facebook ad funnel, you want to be able to say:

“Okay, now that they have completed XYZ or taken this action, it makes sense for me to ask them for the sale.”

In our other marketing funnel post we mentioned…

…we compare the funnel to a relationship, in the sense that you wouldn’t ask someone to marry you on your first date.

But then after dating for a while, getting to know each other really well, and falling in love, then you move on to marriage. 

The middle of the funnel is the dating portion.

It’s the connecting bridge between addressing a stranger, and building so much brand trust that they now wouldn’t be afraid to buy from you. 

And that brings us to the bottom of the funnel.

Step 3: Bottom of the funnel

The people in this part of the funnel are a hot audience because like we just talked about, they’ve already taken a high-intent action with your brand.

So this is where you start closing them with your Facebook ads.

In most cases, we use the conversion campaign for this.

But, you could also use catalog sales or store visits depending on what makes the most sense for your business.

Overall, you just want to be able to track:

• how many people saw your Facebook ads,
• clicked to your site or came to your store, and
• converted, aka completed a purchase. 

Now you may be wondering, how are you going to find those people again on Facebook if they didn’t complete your lead form?

Every action your audience has taken up to this point can be retargeted. This includes your:

• page likes,
• video views,
• post engagement,
• website traffic, and
• leads.

All of it can be created in a custom audience inside of Facebook Ads Manager to be retargeted. 

If some of them already converted a little earlier in your Facebook ad funnel and are currently a client with your company…

…then you can create an audience of those existing clients or recent purchasers to exclude them from your retargeting audience.

This is so that you don’t waste money delivering ads to people who have already completed the action. 

Or on the flip side of that, you can deliver new ads exclusively to that audience to upsell them like we talked about earlier in this post.

We show you how to set up all of this in our Facebook Ads Targeting post so be sure to read that next.

But overall, your bottom of the funnel Facebook ads need to be direct.

You’ve educated, provided value, instilled brand trust, now it’s time to ask for the sale or the upsell. 

So that is what your Facebook ad funnel can look like.

Now, we’re going to share a few pro tips for you to keep in mind as you start to put your Facebook ad funnel together.

6 Pro Tips On Setting Up Your Facebook Ad Funnel

Tip #1: Make any landing page you direct traffic to easy to read.

Whether it’s a blog that you’re using in the awareness phase, or a squeeze page you’re using to collect leads…

…you need the page to be formatted in a way that’s easy to digest.

Don’t clutter up your pages with huge blocks of text because that’s one of the best things you can do to skyrocket your bounce rate.

Instead, use bullet points, images, infographics, and more to make your page easy to skim.

Tip #2: You will need your Facebook tracking pixel installed on your website and landing pages for any and all of this to work.

If you don’t have that set up yet, you need to do that before you do anything else.

Here’s our tutorial on how to install and set up your Facebook Pixel.

Tip #3: As far as what the ads themselves need to say or look like, they should always be customer-centric.

Yes, you read that right. It should not be company-centric. 

You want everything to address something they care about.

This usually comes in the form of tackling one of their pain points or achieving their goals, and the solution for either being your product or service. 

We have a post on some of our top Facebook ad examples and another one on how to create Facebook ads.

And both of those would be a good read for you…

…especially if you’re kind of at a loss as to what your Facebook ads should say at any given point in your Facebook ad funnel.

Tip #4: Make a list of any and every objection your audience may have to buy from you that you can think of. 

This will help guide you in what some of your ads need to say along the way to break down those barriers. 

Tip #5: A/B split test your ads.

We have a whole post on this Facebook ad testing so we’re not going to dive into too much detail here.

But running different ads for the different parts of your funnel isn’t enough. 

You need to run different ads for the same parts of your funnel to A/B split creatives, copy, audiences, offers, and more…

…to find what’s going to get you the most results at the lowest cost at each level of your funnel. 

Tip #6: If you’re completely new at this, it may take some time to start filling your Facebook ad funnel with people.

But once you’ve got a bit of a rhythm going, you’re going to be juggling multiple campaigns at all different levels at the same time. 

So here’s what you can do:

• Keep your campaign and ad set names labeled in an organized way so that you can tell what they are at a glance.
• We usually recommend allocating about $20 a day to Facebook ads to start with.

And then, you scale up once you’ve got a good handle on which ad sets, ads, and offers are performing the best. 

So that about wraps up everything that we had for you today!

If you’re interested in talking to an expert Facebook ads consultant to help and guide you on your Facebook advertising efforts, give us a call.

Contact us now at 404-596-7925.

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