Starting a new business can be overwhelming, and sometimes we want to hit the ground running and bring in sales as fast as possible. That being said, taking the time to build out your ad funnel is a critical step for businesses that want to market on Facebook. Building out your ad funnel with your Facebook pixel will provide you with important insights on your ad campaigns that relate to audience targeting, content performance, ad ranking and more to help you make the most out of your Facebook marketing strategy.

How Funnels Work

A funnel is used to trace the steps that a new user must take before they convert. Funnel stages start wide and get narrower as users move toward the bottom of the funnel. At the top, you have your most broad and generalized audience. This can be anyone who’s stumbled across your site, looked at an ad or has at some point been introduced to your brand but has not fully engaged with your content or brand to show genuine interest. As users make their way through the funnel stages, strangers turn into prospects, prospects become leads, and leads become customers.

What Is a Facebook Ad Funnel?

A Facebook ad funnel is essential in helping your business’ build brand awareness, attract leads and drive sales. The stages of the ad funnel guide users through the buyer’s journey and nurture them through each step until they are ready to purchase.

Stages of Ad Funnel:

1. Awareness: The moment a user first discovers your brand, product and/or service.
2. Interest: Interest is piqued. At this stage, the user starts to search for more information about your brand, products, and services. These luke-warm leads will start to visit your website, social media channels, and blog.
3. Consideration: The potential buyer has done their own research and is interested in your business or brand, but isn’t yet ready to buy. At this stage, the user is comparing you against your competition or waiting for a special offer that will entice them to convert.
4. Intent: User is getting ready to buy. They are adding items to cart, reaching out to your business on social media with questions about products and services, or getting in contact with customer service reps.
5. Evaluation: Before committing to purchase, a potential buyer may seek out reviews of your product or service, exclusive promotion or coupon to close the deal.
6. Sale: The user has made their decision and purchased your product. Nurturing this new relationship with newsletters, next-order coupons, order tracking, and opportunities to give feedback will turn this new customer a loyal customer moving forward. Remember, it costs less to convert an existing customer than to acquire a new one.

Knowing the stages of the buyer’s journey will help you create an ad funnel that generates demand for your business’ products while understanding and addressing your target audience’s pain points to drive sales and conversions. Creating an ad funnel is similar to building and improving your sales funnel. By aligning your ad funnel with the buyer’s journey stages, you can better optimize your marketing funnel and maximize your marketing efforts.

Stages of The Buyer’s Journey:

1. Awareness: The beginning stage of the buyer’s journey. The prospective buyer has realized they have a problem and is most likely unaware that your company offers a solution.
2. Consideration: Buyer understands their problem or pain points and is researching businesses that can offer them a solution. At this stage of the buyer’s journey, your business should be delivering information that best targets pain points to appeal to buyers and helps them make the best decision possible.
3. Decision: In the final stage, the buyer has decided on a solution and is ready to purchase.

The stages of the buyer’s journey are nurtured by the stages of your ad funnel. Your ad funnel will help you send relevant messages that connect with users at different stages of their buyer’s journey. By showing the right information to the right users at the right time, you can provide them with the information they need to move deeper into the funnel and help them get closer to the desired end goal: converting, lead forms, newsletter sign-ups and more.

Creating a Facebook Sales Funnel

It’s important to be strategic with the information your ad funnel provides so that you can uniquely market to users at each stage of funnel. As a brand new business or business new to marketing on Facebook, it’s important to remember that users can’t move through the sales funnel until they’re in it. You can use several strategies to generate brand awareness and start building your ad funnel. 

Strangers won’t buy from you if they don’t know your brand, are uninterested or they don’t trust your business. At the awareness stage, the key to attracting new prospects is to highlight and align audience interests with your brand, pinpoint their needs and problems, and communicate how your business, as an industry leader, can solve their problem. Focus on informative and educational marketing content to reel in and engage your target audience.

Here are a few things to keep in mind when you’re educating your audience at the awareness stage:

• Avoid the hard sell: Potential customers don’t want to be sold to aggressively, especially when they are unfamiliar with a brand. Nothing turns a customer away faster than a hard sell that feels unnatural and forced.
• Use content that encourages engagement: Educational advertising doesn’t mean boring. Connect with your potential customers using high-quality content that supports open conversation and interaction with your brand. This builds transparency and trust in your brand.
• Don’t be repetitive: Being repetitive with your copy and content will seem spammy and devalue your brand. Let users know that your brand or business exists and lightly touch on one of their pain points to spark their interest in a voice that speaks to them.

Once you’ve reeled new users into your ad funnel, you can start to market to their interest with ads that focus on brand consideration to start segmenting your audience pool. Now that users are familiar with your brand voice and personality, they can start to get a feel for “who” your brand is. Ideally, users should connect with the “who” because it relates to who they are and what they need from your business. 

Facebook consideration ads can help you tackle both the “interest” and “consideration” stages of ad funnel to let prospects know how your brand can help them. Facebook consideration ads can help you drive traffic, encourage engagement, increase brand reach, and acquire new customers with lead generation while still increasing brand awareness.

When marketing to prospects that you want to turn into leads, you can run site traffic ads to drive your audience directly to your site and encourage conversions. You can also use retargeting ads to market to users who have expressed an interest in your brand, visited specific product pages, engaged with your content, asked questions and left comments to keep your brand top of mind. As prospects turn into leads, they move deeper into the funnel into the “intent” and “evaluation” stages. 

In these final stages, leads start to add products to their cart, read through product reviews and brand reviews, and reach out directly about specific products before they commit to purchasing. At this point of the funnel, conversion-focused ads will turn warm leads into customers. Facebook conversion ads can help you give hesitant users the nudge they need to buy from you. Run ads that offer special first-time purchase discounts or retargeting ads to show users products they’ve added to their cart and abandoned, and always include a direct call to action.

As you take the time to build out your ad funnel, look over your ad insights and performance data each month. Determine what type of ad content is connecting with your target audience and use the invaluable information Facebook provides to make adjustments and optimize your marketing efforts each month. Having a strong understanding of how your ads are performing will help you create strategic custom audiences and successful ad campaigns that move users from one stage of the funnel to the next.