It’s no secret that Facebook marketing has commanded 90% of marketer’s attention.

And not just digital marketers. The “traditional” marketers that were/are so accustomed to the primary channels of television, radio, and the print is looking to allocate significantly more budget to the social media giant.

Quarter after quarter, year after year, Facebook’s advertising revenue continues to outperform projections, and for a good reason. Facebook’s ad platform is one of the most dynamic demographic targeting interfaces ever to hit the advertising and marketing profession.

Its ad pricing model is dramatically cheaper than that of TV, radio, and print, and it has advanced trackable metrics.

As Facebook continues to improve and expand on their ad offerings, marketers need to do a better job at well…marketing. It’s no longer a time to ask “Should we be utilizing Facebook ads,” but “What type of Facebook ad is going to have the greatest ROI.”

As businesses and entrepreneurs invest more of their marketing budget into Facebook Ads, there also comes a responsibility to learn all the different options of a Facebook ad and the sales/lead generation funnels that will behave differently.

Let’s break down Facebook’s ad technology and the various types of funnels that we may want to test to achieve a higher conversion rate effectively.

It’s All About the Pixel

Before we even begin to break down some of ad/funnel combinations,
I can’t stress enough how important it is to implement the designated Facebook Pixel that is assigned to your ad account.

This pixel is crucial to remarketing, lead conversion, and audience building, so be sure it’s implemented across your entire website.

While the primary pixel will be applied across your website, Facebook also has several additional modifiers that you can also add to specific pages for better tracking and ROI.

To save time and resources, Google Tag Manager is an excellent way to implement these ad modifiers. If you haven’t utilized GTM, make it one of your first priorities.

Once your pixel is installed, you will now have access to multiple variations of ad products offered by Facebook.

Here’s where marketers go wrong: They do minimal research to find out who their potential customers or leads are. They cast an extremely wide net to target as many people as possible, and their ad performs poorly.

Top of the Funnel: Quantity Isn’t Always a Good Thing

When you’re looking to grow top of the funnel awareness and leads, it’s a no-brainer to utilize Facebook’s massive demographic database to put your ad in front of potential customers or subscribers.

Interest targeting is one if not the most popular features used within the ad platform, which allows for continuous variables to target a potential customer.

Here’s where marketers go wrong: They do minimal research to find out who their potential customers or leads are. They cast an extremely wide net to target as many people as possible, and their ad performs poorly.

They continue to target individuals who like similar brands or products to their product or service, without completing the necessary competitive research to differentiate themselves.

It’s a common mistake that most marketers make at this stage in the funnel. When you have a highly targeted audience, not only do you increase your amount of conversions, but your CPC or CPM decreases as well.

Some valuable tools that you can use to find out more of who your audience is Facebook Audience Insights and Buzzsumo. Audience Insights (https://www.facebook.com/ads/audience-insights) allows you to drill deeper on specific fan bases of popular pages and highlight unique demographics that can be beneficial from ad copy to a webinar or lead magnet ideas.

To complement audience insights, Buzzsumo (www.buzzsumo.com) is a valuable tool that will highlight the most shared content across social media networks based on your keywords.

Seeing what type of content resonates with your potential audience also gives ideas for content upgrades and overall free offerings that you might want to offer as an incentive for lead information.

Recommended FaceBook Ad type for Top of Funnel: If you’ve built a custom landing page to assist in conversion rate, a traditional FB ad that sends traffic to your website will suffice.

If you’re looking to increase CRO or decrease bounce rate, you may want to a try a Facebook Lead Ad, which captures information without the person leaving Facebook.

Recommended Funnel for Top of Funnel: Since this will be your first attempt to collect an MQL (marketing qualified lead), your funnel should reflect that of a typical free offering.

Your ad would project some Webinar or free piece of content that addresses a pain point of your potential customer, which would then require submitting their information to obtain this.

Once the lead has been acquired, they would be put in some automation sequence that eventually moves them to the middle of the funnel.

Website Custom Audiences: Hyper-Relevance At It’s Finest

With a Facebook Pixel implemented on your site, it allows for custom website audiences. Allowing you to target individuals that have visited your site previously, and you would like to advertise purely to that audience.

Advertising to website visitors is hyper-relevant because they already have visited your website, so they understand what your brand is already about.

With Facebook Website Custom Audiences, the technology allows you to drill down on specific pages of your website they have visited, creating different offers and funnels for specific pages.

Example 1: Visitor has landed on your homepage or a general navigation page. Because this is a free visit, you create an ad the potentially offers a free lead magnet that puts them in an email funnel sequence.

Visitor lands on website> guest heads over to FaceBook> visitor sees an ad for free ebook or webinar.

Example 2: You’ve created a general awareness ad that promotes a piece of valuable content on your website. Because that person lands on that content, you will now enable a webinar ad that offers an upsell after the webinar.

FB ad that promotes valuable blog post> visitor reads blog post> visitor returns to FB> visitor sees the ad for a free webinar that offers solutions to pain points> visitor signs up for a free webinar, and now in nurture funnel.

Example 3: A visitor has viewed a sales page on your website and has not converted. Allowing for you to offer a bonus upsell once they login into Facebook, ultimately enticing them to become a customer.

The visitor comes to a sales page but doesn’t convert (doesn’t reach a Thank You page)> visitor returns to FaceBook> visitor sees the ad for product sales page they left.

Whenever you have an opportunity to remarket to a previous website visitor, your opportunity for moving that visitor down your funnel increases significantly from real exposure to your brand or product.

Customer Retention: The Growth We Continue To Forget About

As much as I actively participate in growth hacking (where growth is your only metric), I continue to see brands completely bypass their current customers for new ones.

While growth is necessary, customer retention is just as critical for sustainable success; and yes you can utilize Facebook ads and funnels for this as well.

Facebook Custom Audiences also allows you to upload email lists to their platform as well, which allows for multiple segmentation for customers vs. non-customers.

If current customers have had a positive experience with your product/services, they more than likely buy again or upgrade. You can remarket this with a custom Facebook Ad that targets them by email address, and leads them into your highest-price product funnel.

It’s Only Just Begun

Just remember, when you selected which Facebook Ads match up with your funnels, it’s only just begun! You may find that you’re having success with a click-through rate of your ads, but conversion rates may be lower than expected.

You’ll need to test different funnels with ads by mixing and matching to find the best available combination. When you can fully utilize Facebook’s dynamic ad technology, not only does your remarketing provide a better customer experience, your ROI increases significantly.