Facebook can be an incredibly powerful advertising tool. Unlike other advertising platforms, Facebook allows you to reach your exact audience and target by geography, job title, age, behavior, interests, and much more. But targeting is the easy part. Building an effective Facebook ecosystem where audiences and campaigns work with and build off of each other is more complex. 

Thinking about Facebook as its own nurturing funnel can effectively add structure and strategy to the limitless variations of audiences.  

People at the top of the funnel are not familiar with the brand and need to be treated differently than people at the bottom of the funnel who have already engaged with the brand or are already customers. Thinking about Facebook as a funnel allows advertisers to serve the right message to the right user at the right time. 

There are multiple stages to consider in building a Facebook funnel. Each stage has a defined purpose that gets rolled out with the correct campaign objective, ad creative, and audience targeting.

Top of Funnel: Prospecting

A major mistake on Facebook can be asking brand new prospects to convert immediately. On this stage, the objective is to get new people into the funnel so they get familiar with your brand. It’s too early to ‘sell’ to them so often prospecting audiences engage most with interesting, introductory, and brand-building content. Audiences built off this stage are ‘warmed up’ and can fuel the rest of the funnel.

• Optimize prospecting campaigns for clicks, video views, or page likes
• Sample target audiences: 
  • Saved audiences with targeting by demographics, interests & behaviors
  • Lookalike audiences built off of custom uploaded lists i.e. your list of current customers

Lead Capture

Once prospects are engaged with the brand from the prospecting stage, they are ready for a stronger ask in the ads served to them. Lead capture ads allow new people to sign up directly through Facebook (often with a few short clicks!) to be nurtured with email. Lead capture ads should always feature some incentive, like a white paper download, giveaway entry, or product discount. 

• Optimize campaigns for lead capture
• Sample audiences:
  • People who clicked prospecting stage ad
  • People who viewed >50% of video from the prospecting stage campaign
  • People who are fans of your page on social media but have never signed-up

Conversion

Once leads are nurtured through prospecting campaigns and/or lead capture campaigns, they are ready for a harder ‘sell’ on Facebook and can be targeted with conversion-optimized campaigns. At this point, audiences are familiar with the brand and more likely to convert, so you can more efficiently spend money trying to convert leads that are already primed for conversion. 

• Optimize campaigns for conversions
• Sample audiences: 
  • Lists collected from lead capture campaign stage
  • Retargeting to people who have been on the website
  • Retargeting to people who abandoned cart on your site

Loyalty

A final stage to consider is building loyalty among existing customers. It’s far cheaper to retain a customer than acquire a new one so sample content to serve to current customers may include information telling them how to make the most of their purchase or cross-selling other relevant products. 

• Optimize campaigns for conversions
• Sample audiences:
  • Current customers
  • Lost customers that you want to win back

A more thoughtful funnel structure to your Facebook campaigns will allow you to send more targeted messages, organize audiences more strategically, and spend advertising dollars more effectively.