How to Build a Productive Facebook Sales Funnel: A Complete Guide

Facebook ads are no longer set-it-and-forget-it way to attract leads. Facebook is now a crowded space where you need to pay thousands of dollars to get your brand noticed. If you want to thrive and beat your competitors, you need to develop an excellent Facebook sales funnel.

The first thing you need to keep in mind is that Facebook users generally aren’t actively looking to buy things when they’re on the platform. After all, it’s not an ecommerce site. So, the first time they see your ad, you can’t expect them to take out their credit card. That’s why, you need to have a Facebook sales funnel that takes them from brand awareness to buying from you.

You need to gradually put them from the awareness stage into a buying mindset. Before we get into the details, it’s essential to know how a Facebook sales funnel functions. Let’s take a closer look.

What is a Facebook Sales Funnel?

A Facebook sales funnel describes a customer’s journey before they buy a product through Facebook. The top part of the sales funnel, called, “Top of the Funnel (ToFu),” is all about making people aware of your product and brand. You want to make people interested in what you have to offer. This is also called the awareness stage.

The middle part of the sales funnel, called, “Middle of the funnel (MoFu),” focuses on showing consumers how you are unique. You could provide free trials or samples so that consumers can get a feel for the product. It’s also called the consideration or evaluation stage.

The last part of the process is to convert your leads into customers. It’s the bottom of the funnel (BoFu), and is also called the purchase stage. It’s all on you to lead people to the end of the sales funnel from the first stage.

Image via Moz

A good sales funnel can nurture good prospects and prevent them from leaking out of the funnel. If you want to grow your business, designing a good sales funnel is crucial.

5 Steps to Build an Effective Facebook Sales Funnel

Now that you know how important a sales funnel is, let’s move on and take a closer look at how a Facebook sales funnel works.

Facebook offers brands an opportunity to reach out to a broad base of customers. It’s got over 2.41 billion active users and this is a massive audience that brands can reach.  Plus, the options to target your ads are numerous. But the sheer number of options also gives rise to a dilemma. How can you reach out to the right people and convert them into customers?

Let’s go through, step-by-step, how to set up a Facebook sales funnel that will help you get more customers without draining your budget.

However, before we get into how you can build a Facebook sales funnel, you need to first identify your target audience.

This is essential as all of your content needs to be tailored to their requirements and interests. You can define your target audience based on their demographics, locations, and psychographics. Once that’s done, you can move on to creating your funnel.

1. Create Different Types of Content

Content is at the gist of any digital marketing strategy. The first step to building a productive Facebook sales funnel is to produce different kinds of content.

Blog posts, slideshows, infographics, ebooks, podcasts, and videos are some examples of different kinds of content you can produce.

Of course, it takes a lot of time and resources to create new content. If you have a limited budget or are short on time, you can repurpose your old content.

Multiple types of content will help you reach out to different segments of your target audience.

It doesn’t matter which type of content you choose to produce as long as it is engaging and relevant to your product.

Also, make sure that you upload content to your website. It’s a crucial step that will help you, later on, narrow down your Facebook sales funnel through retargeting.

The other important thing that you need to keep in mind is that the content that you create shouldn’t just have variety or quantity. The quality of the content that you create is of paramount importance too. It’s what dictates how well it will be received by your target audience on Facebook.

2. Promote Your Best Content

Before you get too far into your Facebook sales funnel strategy, you need to test the waters. An excellent way to see what your audience likes is to promote your best content to people who are aware of your brand.

This means you need to promote your content primarily to your Facebook fans. Additionally, you can also include those people who have previously visited your website but haven’t taken any action.

These are people who know about your brand, products, or services already. So, you don’t have to work too hard to create awareness. Instead, you need to gauge how engaging they find your best content.

Look at how they react to your content and determine the content that gives you the most conversions. To do so, analyze your engagement and conversion rates.

Take note of the content that performs well. You can promote this content to reach out to cold audience as well. Odds are if your fans like it, cold leads are likely to react favorably to it as well.

3. Create a Lookalike Audience

To broaden your Facebook sales funnel, you need to reach out to new people. The best way to make sure you’re reaching out to the right audience is to create a lookalike audience.

For the uninitiated, a lookalike audience refers to people who have similar interests to your existing customers. Alternatively, they could also be a group of people who have habits and behaviors similar to your core audience.

It’s easier to convert this segment of consumers into leads that are viable. So, you should aim to target them first.

Image via Moz

To create a lookalike audience, you should go to the “Custom Audience” option in Facebook ads and choose “Lookalike Audience.”

The next step is to choose the source for the lookalike audience. You also need to select the country for which you wish to create the lookalike audience. Lastly, move the audience size slider to decide how big you want your lookalike audience to be.

While choosing your audience, remember that it’s always better to keep the audience size smaller by filtering out locations and other variables. With a smaller group, you have a better chance of creating a lookalike audience that matches your core audience. This can improve the effectiveness of your Facebook sales funnel.

4. Remarketing

You can’t expect users to engage with your ad the first time they see it. It may take a few attempts to hook your target audience.

You may need to expose them to your products several times before they become leads. That’s the best way to ensure you build a productive Facebook sales funnel.

Here are a few different ways in which you can set up your Facebook remarketing campaigns. It can be based on:

• Engagement
• Website visits
• Page visits
• Event interactions
• People who have interacted with your Instagram business profile
• Web page visits

Facebook’s tracking pixel tool is an excellent way to find visitors who have bounced out of your Facebook sales funnel. You can run targeted ads exclusively for them based on their behavior.

For instance, you can offer a coupon code or freebies to move them to the next stage of the funnel.

Image via Hootsuite

In simple terms, a Facebook Pixel is like a tracking code. You can copy your Pixel code from Facebook and add it to your website. This will enable you to track the behavior of your traffic from your website to Facebook. It’s similar to Google Analytics.

It may seem overwhelming at first. But Facebook provides detailed instructions on how to install and test pixels. Once you create a pixel, it can take around 20 minutes for it to be active. There are many variables you can tweak to see which pixels give you the most leads through the Facebook sales funnel.

5. Analytics

The last step of creating an effective Facebook sales funnel is that of analyzing your results. Facebook provides detailed analytics for all of your ads and that can help you figure out how well your ads are performing. You can experiment with different formats of your remarketing ads by incorporating images and videos as well.

Based on the results that you get from your ads, you can accordingly modify them to improve your results from your Facebook sales funnel. You can also do A/B split testing of your ads to figure out what works and what doesn’t.

With A/B testing, you can test each variable of your ad copy and find out which one works better. You’ll need to do this for every variable to ensure that your ad copy is well-optimized.

Also, you need to remember that A/B testing isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it method. You’ll need to do it regularly to make sure that your ad stays optimized.

Conclusion

Building an effective Facebook sales funnel requires some technical know-how and familiarity with Facebook. It’s not tough, but it may take a while to understand how custom audiences and remarketing work.

Even if you don’t get the expected results right away when you set up an ad, don’t get disheartened. Keep tweaking the variables until you build a truly productive Facebook sales funnel.

Is there anything we missed about building a solid Facebook sales funnel? Please share your insights in the comments below.