In order to create a cross-funnel Facebook advertising strategy, you need to identify the right signals and track significant data to efficiently optimise according to your marketing goals.
Remember, Facebook has 3 campaign objective options for advertisers: awareness, consideration, and conversion. You have to learn how to leverage Facebook objectives to create a full-funnel campaign strategy. When creating a campaign, you must not overlook your objective, the optimization settings, bid strategy, or budget selections. This is because Facebook ad auction makes decisions around these settings using algorithmic learning.
So, what are the 6 steps to building a full-funnel advertising strategy on Facebook?
Step 1 – Understand how your marketing funnel works
Your marketing funnel is the path that users take during their journey with your marketing activities. There are various ways to define and break down your marketing funnel.
Top of funnel – Get people to your website
Middle of funnel – Nurture existing leads
Bottom of funnel – Get them to choose you (aka conversions!)
You need to understand what your marketing funnel looks like in order to optimise your full-funnel Facebook ad strategy. This means asking questions like, “how many touchpoints do I have with prospects?” or “how long does it take for a customer to travel from the top to the bottom of the funnel?”. After you’ve thought these through, you’re ready to get moving with your ad strategy.
Step 2 – Give your Facebook ads account some structure
Once you know your own marketing funnel’s structure, you can think about the structure of your Facebook ad account. How this is structured will determine your ability to manage and optimise campaigns and meet your business goals.
Aside from your objective, most decisions are made at the ad set level in Facebook ads, such as targeting, optimisation settings, bid strategy, and budget. And within each ad set, there’s your ads, which you can change in terms of its offer, its creative, and its messaging.
So, to target prospects across your funnel through Facebook your account structure must match your marketing funnel. This means you must create campaigns in accordance to each stage in your marketing funnel.
Campaign 1: Top of funnel (TOF)
Campaign 2: Middle of funnel (MOF)
Campaign 3: Bottom of funnel (BOF)
So, your first view in ads manager will be of how much you are investing and how your KPIs are tracking across each stage of the funnel. Next, you should use your ad sets to test your offers and audiences:
Ad set 1: Offer 1 & Audience 1
Ad set 2: Offer 1 & Audience 2
Ad set 3: Offer 2 & Audience 3
Ad set 4: Offer 3 & Audience 4
Now, you can compare performance to understand how you should adjust your budget allocation or test new offers and audiences within that funnel stage.
Lastly, you have your ads. This is where you should test different creative, ad formats, and messaging within your ad set:
Ad #1: Offer > Creative Variation 1 > Copy Variation 1
Ad #2: Offer > Creative Variation 1 > Copy Variation 2
Ad #3: Offer > Creative Variation 2 > Copy Variation 1
Ad #4: Offer > Creative Variation 2 > Copy Variation 2
And top tip! Remember to clearly name your campaigns, ad sets, and ads, so you can identify them and make decisions and changes much more easily.
Step 3 – Set objectives based on the funnel
Now that your campaigns are mapped out by funnel stage, you should be able match up the proper objective as offered by Facebook. Here is a guide to reference when making your objective decisions based on your marketing funnel:
TOF: Awareness, Consideration -> Brand awareness, reach, traffic, engagement, video views.
MOF: Consideration, Conversion -> Messages, lead generation, app installs, conversions.
BOF: Conversion -> Conversions, catalogue sales, store visits.
Step 4 – Select your targeting types
To reach your campaign’s objective, you need to understand what targeting types and audiences are most appropriate for each ad set. Facebook’s targeting options allow you to create audiences ranging from broad to specific.
Audiences can be sourced directly from Facebook’s core audience options (demographics, interests, behaviours) or from your own data (website visitors, custom audiences, lookalike audiences etc). As your prospect moves down the funnel, your targeting should become more segmented as you are targeting more qualified users.
Step 5 – Leverage engagement audiences
Engagement audiences allow you to reach those who have previously interacted with your page. This way you can boost your funnel strategy from start to finish:
Step 1: Awareness campaign objective -> broad audience targeting -> engaging video.
Step 2: Consideration campaign with lead generation objective -> target those who engaged with the video -> promote piece of content through lead-gen ad.
Step 3: Conversion campaign -> target users who completed lead ad -> convert them using product-centric offer.
Step 6 – Optimise settings & conversion events
To ensure you achieve your marketing goals, you must implement the correct settings, for example your conversion event and optimisation for ad delivery settings.
Conversion event applies to ad sets under a conversion campaign. The conversion objective relies on outside signals to fuel optimization. For MOF and BOF conversion campaigns, the conversion event allows you to select the appropriate event based on your objective and offer. On the other hand, the optimization for ad delivery setting is where you define what you see as success for your ad set.
Once your cross-funnel strategy is up and running, you should delve deeper, test new audiences, offers, and creative to try and optimise and scale your account further. With Facebook ads, you have an opportunity to advertise and gain new customers, and convert existing ones, through your marketing funnel. These 6 easy steps will ensure a solid, effective campaign strategy that will boost advertising results.
If your company requires a professional online presence please Contact Us to discuss how we can help you, on Dungannon 028 3754 9025 or Belfast 028 9002 5050.
