Advertising on Facebook is a powerful tool that can reach thousands of potential customers for a pretty modest budget. It seems so simple – and that blue ‘Boost Post’ button is waiting there tempting you to drop a few dollars and see what happens to your sales.

But finding success selling on Facebook takes a more methodical approach than just throwing money at a few random posts. Today, we’ll talk about how to build Facebook ad campaigns around your sales funnel.

While the method we present here is fairly simplistic, it is easily scalable as your business grows (hopefully, in part, thanks to this post).

Top of Funnel Advertising

Your first goal in Facebook advertising should be to get more potential customers into the top of your funnel. Fortunately, creating top of funnel ads isn’t as hard as you might think. For each stage of the funnel, we’ll talk about how to structure your audience and what to say in your ad.

TOF Audience

The best way to find a cold, top of funnel audience is through Facebook’s look-a-like tools. You can upload your existing customer list (you have one of those, right?) and the folks at Facebook HQ will create a list of people who share traits with your customers.

This cold list will be a powerful tool for reaching new customers that resonate with your brand.

TOF Messaging

It’s tempting to get your look-a-like audience built and start selling to them right away. But that’s a mistake. Skipping over the getting-to-know-you phase is never a good idea – and more likely to turn people away than to win new customers.

Start by focusing on driving engagement with your ads – think of TOF ads as introductions, not a sales pitch. Introduce yourself, present your brand image, include some lifestyle shots. We’ll get to the sales stuff soon enough.

Middle of Funnel Advertising

Reaching audiences in the middle of your funnel allows the most flexibility. You can continue to engage or push for the sale. At this point, it’s all about what is right for your brand and what resonates with your audience.

MOF Audience

At this point, you should have generated some engagement through your top of funnel advertising. You’ll use this warm audience to begin your middle of funnel advertising. In Facebook, you can create a custom audience of people who have engaged with your page over a set period of time.

By targeting an audience that has already shown interest in your brand, you can start to reduce costs and narrow your focus.

MOF Messaging

Middle of funnel content can be very broad – you’ll want to continue pushing for engagement, but you can also start to push specific products or services. Your warm audience should be getting a broad mix of content – blog posts, e-books, product features, and video demonstrations.

When you’re targeting the middle of your funnel, keep each ad separate so that you can track the effectiveness of each message. This will allow you to focus on what is working best with your audience and drive up your ROI.

Bottom of Funnel Advertising

Getting a social media audience to the bottom of your sales funnel will take some time, but this is the audience most likely to convert. And so, you should have a clear strategy for advertising to people who reach the bottom of your social media funnel.

BOF Audience

Getting your bottom of funnel audience defined will take a bit more work – but there’s no substitute for the hot audience that is ready to support your business. The first step is to get the Facebook pixel installed on your website so that you can track your audience more closely.

Once you have the pixel installed, you can create a custom audience made up of people who have taken a specific action on your site. Find what works for you, but consider product page viewers, abandoned carts, or landing page views.

BOF Messaging

It is essential to get your bottom of funnel messaging right – otherwise, all the top and middle work you did will be wasted. If you’re an e-commerce business, your BOF messaging should be focused around remarketing products that the customer has already viewed.

If you’re more of a service business, you can convert your audience with special offers, free trials, or off-line consultations. Basically, take all the sales stuff you put off doing at the top and middle stages and pour it into converting your bottom of funnel audience.

Social Media Advertising

Advertising with Facebook is simple to get started with. But the more you dig into it, the more you realize that this can be a powerful tool for business growth. Once you segment your audience in a way that gives laser focus to your audience and messaging, you see more success and a higher ROI.

At Fusion Group USA, we can help you craft a social media advertising strategy that gets your brand in front of the right people. Contact us today to learn how we can transform your social media presence.