Many of you will already be using Facebook as part of your marketing strategy. But Facebook also has other uses which can help your business. For example, are you using Facebook to create a sales funnel? This is an important and helpful tool for your business. Read on in our guide to find out how you can create a Facebook sales funnel.
Summary: 5 Minutes read, Level: Advanced
In basic terms, a sales funnel is the whole process from beginning to end of a customer purchasing a product. There are several steps or stages to a sales funnel and these can depend on the type of business you operate.
A typical sales funnel will contain some or all of the following seven phases:
The customer becomes aware of or is made aware of your business and/or products.
Your products appeal to the customer and make them interested.
A customer will decide whether or not it is a product they want and compare prices and availability with several different outlets and businesses.
A decision is made about purchasing a product.
A product is purchased.
In situations where there is a contract of any sort, a customer will decide if they wish to renew this as it expires.
Additional purchases are made. Not all of these phases will apply to your business, but many of them will. It is important to understand a sales funnel in order to use it effectively.
The majority of people on Facebook are there purely for a social experience. Very few users log on to their account with purchasing in mind. But the landscape of buying has changed and there are millions of potential customers on Facebook. Adverts and links to various online businesses are commonplace. Businesses wouldn’t use Facebook if it wasn’t effective and you can take advantage too by creating a sales funnel.
Here’s how you can do it:
You will need good, eye-catching content. This could be a well-written and interesting blog post or it could be a video. It could be a link to a podcast or it could simply be a fun post. Whatever it is it needs to stand out and make potential customers stop and take notice. Use multiple forms of content to appeal to a maximum possible audience.
Your warm audience are those who are already aware of your business and have perhaps purchased from you before. You know that these people are receptive to your business or brand and you can target them specifically with content you know will interest them.
A cold or lookalike audience is made up of people who haven’t had contact with your business. These people will have used similar businesses or have similar interests to members of your warm audience. These are potential new customers and they need to be wowed. Facebook ads can help you to identify a cold audience with their ‘create a lookalike audience’ feature.
Use the content which resonated best with your warm audience to target your cold audience. Habits rarely differ that much and you can achieve great success with this.
Some of your cold audience will have become members of your warm audience now. This should hopefully be generating more sales. But it doesn’t stop there. You need to continue creating and posting great content which your audience can engage with. The idea is to get as many members of your cold audience to transfer to the warm audience. Even when you have a colossal warm audience there is still no guarantee of sales and you need to press on.
Facebook ads is full of features which can drive people further down your sales funnel. One such feature is the pixel. It will provide you with code which you can paste into the body of your website in order to help you remarket and for customers to complete a purchase. It’s easy to use and comes with a tutorial for new beginners.
Remarketing can be tricky. You want to give your audience a little push in the right direction, but you don’t want them to feel coerced. More content, specifically video content, can give them that little extra push to make a purchase. Another way is to get them to sign up to your mailing list. A free offer at this point can really help. Who can resist that? Even when customers have signed up to your mailing service, there’s still no guarantee of a conversion.
This is it, the last part. The term ‘hard sell’ sounds aggressive, but it needn’t be that way, or at least needn’t seem that way. You will focus on the people who took advantage of your free offer but never followed up with an actual purchase. A personal video along the lines of ‘thanks for trying our offer, but you never made a purchase’ with information about why they absolutely should make a purchase is key. This can give already susceptible customers that last little push towards buying. Conversions are incredibly likely for a number of customers now.
And that’s how you use Facebook to create a sales funnel. Is with lots of other forms of digital marketing, a good deal of trial and error will be involved. It will take time to determine things such as which kind of content works best for conversions and what the best time of day is to post new content. It’s all a learning process and once you have it all figured out you will be able to direct customers through your sales funnel totally effortlessly. Facebook ads will do most of the hard work for you and is totally automated, allowing you to focus on other aspects of your business.