Understanding the Facebook Marketing Funnel

With 1.86 billion monthly users, Facebook provides a phenomenal marketing opportunity and yet many businesses struggle to harness the marketing potential that Facebook offers them. So where are they going wrong? Poor advert creatives, ill-defined offerings, generic audience targeting, wrong advertising placement methods and misuse of metrics can all contribute to a lack of user response and uptake.

Facebook is an extremely versatile advertising tool, with a wide variety of marketing options available. You can build brand awareness, increase engagement and direct potential customers to where you want them. If these tools are used well, they can provide great strength to a marketing strategy.

Awareness

It is important to remember that, unlike with Google AdWords where you are meeting a demand that already exists, (users are already searching for something on Google), Facebook users are often not actively looking to fulfil a need.

With Facebook therefore your initial goal is to generate demand through producing enticing content and brand awareness. The Facebook platform makes it possible for information to ‘go viral’ (spread rapidly and to vast numbers of people) through the sharing of posts. However, this will only be achieved if your content is appealing, accessible and relevant to your target market.

Facebook can also be used for targeted advertising campaigns. You are able to target certain groups of people based upon criteria such as interests, location, age, marital status etc. In addition to this, you can use your current client data and also form lookalike audiences on Facebook, that you can then advertise to. This will ensure that your adverts are being viewed by the sort of people who will be most likely to respond.

Lead Generation

Once you’ve produced engaging content and put it in front of the right audience it is time to work on encouraging those prospects to become new leads for your business.

If your initial goal was to increase website visits, the next step in the marketing funnel is for those visitors to become leads. You can do this by offering the user something in return for providing their contact details. It is best if your ‘ask’ is proportional to the perceived value of what people will receive from you. For example, asking for someone’s name and email address is appropriate if they are getting a newsletter but not if you are asking for sensitive information such as their National Insurance number!

Having a clear call-to-action (CTA) in your Facebook adverts that addresses a specific problem a customer might have can also be a great way to enhance your lead generation.

Through using data analytics to measure interactions with your previous awareness campaign adverts, you can then target your lead generation posts to an audience of people who have previously engaged with your material. This will increase the likelihood of new leads being generated and pushes your potential customers one step further along the marketing funnel-towards achieving your desired goal.

Customer Conversion

After you’ve successfully attracted the right leads and built up trust with those people via your CTA adverts, the next stage should be pretty straightforward. Your content should focus on a specific buyer persona and clearly state how your business can meet their unique requirements. It can be helpful at this stage to highlight the benefits of your product or service and provide some statistics to support any claims you make, as this will encourage commitment from potential customers. You can then target this advert to a customised audience that is largely made up of existing leads but excluding any current customers.

By creating a set of adverts with different value propositions and then monitoring their performance via analytics, you can then further finesse your adverts to ensure you maintain the best click-through rate (CTR) possible, ensuring you are directing traffic where you want it to go.

Promoters

Once you have successfully converted your leads into customers, you can now get these customers to further promote your business by providing them with rewards as an incentive for doing so. You can create a custom audience based on existing customers and target your adverts towards those people. Turning customers into promoters by rewarding them can help to increase loyalty whilst also providing your business with new referrals, a win-win situation!

At Air Social, we know how to get your adverts in front of the right audiences and are able to construct Facebook advertising campaigns that are optimised for lead generation. If you would like us to maximise the way your business uses Facebook marketing, get in touch!