The Step-by-Step Guide to Creating a Facebook Sales Funnel
Recent data from Statista shows Facebook has 1.86 billion monthly users and continues to grow. This means marketing opportunities are plentiful. Facebook is one of the best places to spend your money.
To show you why, let’s just compare the cost-per-click (CPC) of Facebook and the ultimate PPC juggernaut, Google Adwords.
The average CPC on the Adwords search network is $2.32.
And what about Facebook?
The average CPC is only $0.64! With a bit of work, you can reduce this even further.
The other thing with Facebook advertising is the wide variety of placements and Ad types available.
For example, you can build brand awareness, increase engagement, send traffic to your Facebook page or go right for the jugular and try to make an immediate conversion.
It really just depends on your specific goals and what you’re trying to accomplish. Facebook is a different animal to traditional PPC platforms like Adwords. Facebook is more than just buying clicks or impressions. used correctly, Facebook comprises its own powerful sales funnel of sorts.
Taking a different approach
What’s your objective when you log into your Facebook account?
Is it to check your friend’s updates, comment on photos and generally see what’s happening in your network
Here’s a graph from AaronZakowski.com that shows us what most people spend their time doing on Facebook.
As you can see, Facebook is more about socializing not making a purchase when they’re scrolling through their Facebook feed.
This means that there is an overall low buying intent on Facebook. It sounds like a pretty silly place to try to sell, right? As a result, many brands end up being disappointed with their ROI.
Maybe they’re getting new followers, more engagement and so on, but it’s not really translating into solid conversions.
The problem isn’t with Facebook. The problem lies in the approach that many marketers take and “jumping the gun” by selling to someone who isn’t fully on board to buy.
After all, you can’t expect a cold lead to instantly whip out their credit card and buy. They’re just not in the buying mindset.
You’ve seen the buying cycle before, right?
If someone is in the “opportunity recognition” phase, they won’t be pulling out their credit card to make a purchase. Because there are customers who are ready to buy. But for the vast majority of Facebook users who have no intention to buy, there is still a way to coax them to purchase.
How?
The key to succeeding with Facebook advertising is to first develop a sales funnel.
It must be sensible, logical, and take into account the fact that most Facebook users aren’t in a “buy now” mindset.
Things bring us to our step-by-step guide to creating a Facebook sales funnel.
Step 1 – Create Segmented Content for your “Cold Audience”
The first thing we need to do is an inventory check, begin by categorising your content, you’re going to need to have a few different forms of content to appeal to a wider audience until you can narrow down your best formats.
Blog posts
videos
Infographics
Slideshows, webinars or eBooks
It doesn’t really matter which specific format of content you take as long as it’s high quality, engaging, and relevant to the specific audience you're trying to connect with, over time you will develop a better idea of the types of content that work best.
As with all your content make sure it has a permanent home on your website. The importance of this will be clear later when you begin retargeting audiences to move them through your funnel.
As you get more advanced and your audience diversifies and your segments grow you’ll need to develop additional content to reach these people.
You'll also want to map out the sequence and steps users go through when researching or deciding on a real estate agent or brand, once your funnel begins filling with leads and prospects you’ll have different people at different levels of the process and each with needs specific to their readiness to engage and decision-making process.
Having a variety of engaging content will ensure that you’ve got something for all of the little sub-niches in your audiences.
Step 2 – Promote Content to Your “Warm Audience”
Once you have worked out the content you have on hand, you’ll want to start promoting it to people who you already know of, a “Warm” audience. A warn audience is one that consists of people who have already engaged with your brand, people in your email list, those who follow your Facebook page, people who have expressed some interest in what you do.
Promoting content to this audience can be as simple as sending them a weekly email with new listings, recent sales and a link to your latest blog or posting regularly on your Facebook page and other social channels.
Social Estate connects your CRM and website, it monitors your listings and blog to automatically build your weekly newsletter for you, it will even send this email to your database at a scheduled time each week.
Step 3 – Create Ad Audiences “Lookalike Audiences”
Facebook's lookalike audiences, look like your current customers, visitors to your website and those in your existing database.
In other words, these are individuals with interests, habits, and behaviours that are similar to your existing core audience.
You can think of this Audience as “cold” but can be easily turned into leads.
Therefore, these are the people you want to target.
You'll want to create two separate audiences, one Lookalike and one website custom audience.
The first audience requires an existing list of contacts like those in your CRM.
Social Estate connects your CRM and website Pixel to build and maintain these audiences for you.
If you're setting up your own funnel you can follow the below steps to create a lookalike audience.
Read our Guide on lookalike audiences
The second audience targets people who have visited your website recently and specifically pages that intricate a higher level of intent such as someone who has visited your listing appraisal page more than once in the past week.
Social Estate connects with your website Pixel to build and maintain your retargeting audiences for you.
Read our Guide on creating custom website audiences here
Step 4 – Promote your best content
Now that you know who you're trying to reach you’re ready to create some Ads to promote your best content to these people.
Review the results of step 1, which content was the most popular? Which blogs received the most clicks and views?
It doesn't matter what the format of this content is, be it a video, blog post, webinar if it’s popular then that’s the content you want to promote.
Through the paid promotion of your best content to a cold audience, you’ll be able to add many new additions to your “Warm” audience.
People qualify for your warm audience once they become aware of your brand and show some level of interest, this can be either liking a post or clicking a link to read a blog article. Now they are no longer strangers and have found some value in your content.
Step 5 – Effective remarketing
You just can’t expect people to go from “Cold” to “Warm” to qualified leads.
This is where remarketing comes in, now that you know who's interested and who's not you can continue to show ads to those who have visited your site or engaged with your content, they are not strangers and you want to keep your brand and content at the forefront of their minds. So how do you effectively move your “Cold” and “Warm” audiences further down the sales funnel? Remarketing and Facebook is the perfect network for doing this.
Advertising is like dating, it takes time to get close :)
In most cases, your “Cold” audience will need to be exposed to your brand several times before they’re actually paying attention.
Social Estate connects with your website Pixel to build and maintain your retargeting audiences to keep your Ads on track.
Step 6 – Using the Facebook pixel
The Facebook Pixel is your best friend when it comes to running Ads. The pixel tracks your website visitors, pages visit, how often they visit and much more. You can then create very specific audiences for your Ads from this data.
Using a Facebook pixel generally goes like this.
Create a Facebook Pixel in Facebook Business Manager
Install the Pixel code on your website or use a pixel add-on for WordPress sites
Remarket to site visitors bringing then back again and again until they become a lead
If you don’t have a Facebook Pixel installed read our Guide on setting up your Facebook pixel.
As part of your account setup, Social Estate will check your Pixel installation and create your initial Ad audiences for you.
Step 7 – Remarketing
There are a lot of different remarketing techniques, with Facebook video works well to move people further down the sales funnel.
A typical remarketing scenario is as follows:
Someone checks out one of your blog posts, videos or guides on your website.
This introduces them to your brand and indicates they have some degree of interest.
A good tactic is to then show this person a video Ad introducing your business and services building a deeper connection and encouraging them to get in touch if they have an immediate question or need.
This lets them put my face behind my brand and generally helps to “connect the dots.”
You might say something like, “Thank you for checking out one of our recent blogs, if you're thinking of selling in the next 6 months feel free to get in contact for a quick chat.
Notice that we’re not beating them over the head to make a purchase right away. Simply encouraging them to delve a little deeper and learn more.
Step 8 – More on Remarketing
At this point, you’re going to make some conversions. But of course, not everyone is going to convert.
Now you will require a separate remarketing campaign for those who didn’t convert initially, these people just aren't ready yet but they may be in another month or two, so encouraging them to opt-in to your email list to keep in contact over a longer period.
For instance, your Ad might say something like, “Thanks for checking out [X page], if you found this information useful please download our free eBook or book a spot in our upcoming webinar.
As long as you’ve got a solid offer, a good portion of those leads will go ahead and opt-in.
From there, you’ve got them on your email list, so you can keep warming them up until they’re eventually ready to buy.
Step 9 – Warming Up Your Leads Even More
Now your sales funnel is starting to work, you’ve captured, grown your Cold audience and started to warm them up and you're even growing your email list but it still not enough.
Only around 25 percent of the people who opted into your email list will actually open your emails, so you’re still missing out on about 75 percent of would-be sales.
Let’s say someone visited your free appraisal or how to sell for a higher price eBook but they didn’t convert. This is where you need to keep the information coming and will need another campaign to explain the full benefits of your service, work on eliminating concerns or scepticism wary customers may have by being upfront about common issues and answer common questions with the content in this campaign.
The content for this type of campaign would consist of
Testimonials,
Further information on your products and services,
Mentioning recent sales and talking about the results
Be personable, no to polished, talk to your audience as if it were a regular sales call, you're trying to establish credibility and trust here and establish that you are the best candidate for the job.
Step 10 – The hard sell
Now we get to the pointy end, sometimes all the content and information in the world isn't enough to move someone to take action. That's when you need to go for the jugular with the hard sell.
This is where you want to place your attention on the individuals who have viewed numerous content items, downloaded your eBook and even taken you up on a listing appraisal but still haven't become a customer.
I’ve found that the best approach for this segment of your audience is to create a personalized video ad that says something like, “Thanks for checking out [X content], but for some reason you didn’t buy [X product].”
Then go for the hard sell with an overt sales message of why they should be using your services.
This campaign is only suitable for leads who are familiar with your brand and “Warm” and you have already shown them all the information you can but they are still undecided. They’re primed and ready, they just need a push.
Your Funnels Stages - Facebook sales funnel
I know that I just covered a lot of information and your head may be spinning. The below illustrates the stages a contact goes through before they become a customer, the whole process is about moving contacts from one step in the funnel to another.
This all leads to the final and most important stage of all.
In Summary, there are the core steps of the process.
Start by creating segmented content for your existing “Warm audience” to find out what's good
Create a lookalike audience to target new users this is your “Cold” audience
Promote your best content to your “Cold” audience to fill your funnel
Use your Facebook pixel to remarket to those who didn't become a customer immediately
Complete the four stages of remarketing where you target those who don’t initially convert
Iterate and improve each stage over and over to maximize conversions
When done correctly, you’ll gradually move prospects through your Facebook sales funnel. With each stage, they gain knowledge of your brand and interest in your services. This is important because most people just aren’t ready to buy the first time they come into contact with you.
In fact, it may take significant exposure to your brand and product over a period of time before they’re comfortable enough to make a purchase.
Efficiency Through Automation
The brilliant thing about setting up this type of sales funnel is that it’s automated. Once you’ve created your remarketing ads each stage of the sales funnel, it’s pretty much hands-off.
This frees you up to fine-tuning existing content, developing new content based on knowing what works to bring even more people into your Facebook sales funnel.
From then on, you’re simply optimizing your campaign and maximizing conversions.
Conclusion
Facebook is one of the top platforms for bringing exposure to your brand and can be incredibly effective for increasing sales.
But in order to do this, you must understand the psychology behind reaching Facebook users.
You need to understand that getting someone to the point of buying is a process, a series of steps.
With a sales funnel your goal is to move prospects step-by-step through the buying or selling process, supplying them with all of the information they need to make well-informed decisions.
It’s a matter of putting the systems in place, being patient and letting Facebook do its job.
Be wary of Ad products or services that drive traffic away from your website as this can kill your funnel and lead generation.