How-To: Facebook Marketing Funnel: 5 Steps and Turn Fan into Customers
Is Facebook a grocery store or hay in a field ready to harvest?
A shop to pick and collect *customers* or a place to nurture budding plants?
The reality? A bit of both and you need a Facebook Marketing Funnel for success.
Your fans are a lot more meh about you than you think.
If you want *now* cash-in-hand customers, then go to Google, target purchasing intent, and reap the *harvest*. Thank you very much. OR…
…play the longer payoff, discovery, strategic social media marketing ‘care and nurturing‘ game.
Sales today and sales tomorrow? A Facebook marketing funnel helps!
Don’t worry, this is Urban Renström, there is always science and research involved in everything I talk about, teach, and demonstrate.
The not-so-secret is Facebook (and all social) is not the place for harvesting customers. Facebookers look for distraction, Googlers look for answers.
Google-I’ll-target-intent-via-keywords sort of way. Nope. Facebook and Facebook funnel is a discovery platform. Because it is the discovery and you are interrupting people in the middle of being distracted you must first build relationships before asking for the sale.
Yep, relationships. Discovery versus, intent.
Because people gotta trust ya before they buy from ya.
Worse, the higher the price the more people gotta trust ya.
Build a Bridge of Trust – to the Inner Circle
People must ‘know you, like you and trust you, before they buy from you”
Business is all about trust. You’ll never get sales from Facebook unless people trust you.
As crazy as it sounds *people* have Zero trust in you. Social media followers are the furthest away, coldest, least trusting audience in your ‘sphere of influence’. A Facebook Marketing Funnel is you building trust with people – helping, allowing them to know, like and trust you.
Trust flows in this order:
- Social Follower = no trust in you
- Visitor from Search = slightly more trust than social
- Content Audience (repeat reader of your blog) = know and like you
- Email Audience = You have been invited into the inbox, audience is trusting
- Customer = You’re doing it right.
- Repeat Customer = the holy grail of trust
The distance between a Facebook Fan and a customer is one ginormous chasm of trust. And the Facebook Marketing Funnel will get you there.
The question, therefore, is how does one bridge this trust gap with fans and followers?
What should you do?
5 Steps to Build Your Bridge of Trust
…Facebook Ads Rarely work unless your targeting is spot on and you target a warm market (fans, recent visitors to your website, or e-mail subscribers) – Andrea Vahl
The easiest way to build Trust is through email. Yes, email. Yes, we are discussing Facebook trust and email.
Notice the green email audience in the circle of trust? Green is next to the orange. When a person gives over their email they trust you more than a Facebook fan.
The easiest way into a person’s inbox is to offer an irresistible bribe in exchange for their email address.
Is email not dead? Nope, email marketing is very alive and very profitable. But why use email?
Email is 40 times more effective for acquiring sales than Facebook and Twitter combined. 91% of all US consumers use email daily. Email users order 3x more often than social. And the order value via email is 17% higher than social.
Each on its own is reason enough to use email. Ignoring email marketing you are leaving money on the table for your competitor to collect.
This Irresistible bribe, a Gold Ticket to the inbox, is you giving high-value goodies to your fans and they invite you into their Inbox. Simple!
The simple 5-step Facebook Marketing Funnel:
Step 1) Offer fans a ‘bribe’, an Irresistible Lead Magnet, in exchange for an email address.
Step 2) Use Facebook Ads and Offers and Promote your bribe to your Fans (and non-fans)
Step 3) Email Marketing – Foster relationships, and build trust around helpful, useful, valuable content.
Step 4) Make your offer
Step 5) Wash. Rinse. Repeat
I’ve used this exact funnel to earn a 6 figure income in the first 2 days of my launch. Well, that never happened.
However, I am converting non-fans into fans; fans into leads; and leads into sales. This is trust-building, not magic. And trust-building takes time and effort.
Maybe you are asking why not just hammer fans and non-fans with ads.
Nothing wrong with that approach.
Asking cold audiences for a sale is like cold calling people or door-to-door sales.
Yes, those tactics do work, sometimes, but, my broken watch is accurate twice a day and right twice a day makes me late always.
One way to build trust on social is using a Facebook Marketing Funnel.
1) Your Bridge to Profits Starts with Your Irresistible Lead Magnet
“A newsletter is access to someone’s inbox. Treat the inbox like a Golden Ticket”– Chris Brogan
Your Irresistible Lead Magnet is a Gold Ticket and step 1 in your Facebook Marketing Funnel.
Yes, it’s a bribe, but, but not an *I tricked you*.
At face value when you exchange a high-value giveaway for a name and email address you create a market.
Take this one step further/deeper and this bribe positions you as an authority in your field; (and the best reason of all) it starts the reciprocity cycle — give great value, gain respect, and affinity, and build trust with your fans.
Win, Win, and bigger Win.
Irresistible Lead Magnet can be anything your ideal client values. A coupon code, a checklist, an eBook, a quick start guide, video series.
Align your Irresistible Lead Magnet with your product or service. This step sounds obvious, but, many business owners miss this entirety.
A lead magnet is the consideration step of your Facebook Marketing Funnel
Here are a few examples of Irresistible Lead Magnet:
A General Building Contractor uses ebooks:
- “10 Questions to ask your General Contractor before they Quote for work and 3 questions you should never ask”
- “My Top 10 House Maintenance Tasks Costing you €1000’s a Year – And a Cheatsheet for HIM to follow”
A Website designer could use these:
- “Here are the 5 Goals you Question you Must answer before Signing the Check – and Bonus cheat sheet”
- “A Cheat Sheet Guide On Building A Lead Generation Website”
An Interior designer — could create these as ‘bribes’
- “The 5 Rules Of Colour You Must Know Before Hiring A Interior Designer”
- “Why 1.618 Is The Golden Rule And How Your Interior Designer Will Smash It On Your New Room”
2) Promote Your Irresistible Lead Magnet with Ads and Offers
Promote your Irresistible Lead Magnet to fans and non-fans. Use these four main types of Facebook advertising objectives to promote your bribe to your audience.
Target people matching your ideal customers. Offer/advertise your bribe to both fans and not fans.
The General Building Contractor would target 35 – 60-year-old homeowners, married, with 2-3 kids, who like home building or home renovating TV shows. (not a complete interest graph for targeting just the back of the napkin stuff).
Still, wrestling with your Facebook Ads? I can help.
3) Nurture (build Trust) with Useful, Valuable Content.
And so it begins. You got your Gold Ticket invite. Now what?
Now you chat, talk, and build a relationship with your subscribers using email.
How often you email your subscribers depends upon many factors. But, match your email marketing frequency with your sales cycle.
4) Make Your Offer
The best digital marketing tools is also the most maligned and the least understood. Email Marketing isn’t dead. BAD email marketing is dead —CHRIS BROGAN
Do you hit your new email subscriber with your ‘special offer’ on the first email? I would offer a tripwire/gateway product.
But, maybe and maybe not. All marketing is part art and part science. The squishy answer is you need to test. The goal of email marketing is to build a relationship with your subscribers so you can make the offer.
The Facebook Marketing Funnel is you providing more value and answering more questions the deeper a person travels.
5) Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
Nothing about digital marketing (or marketing) is fixed in stone.
Pros are never satisfied. Every stage of your process can be improved. Never be satisfied with your results.
Wash, rinse, repeat is the metaphor for test, test and test some more.
Test everything you do. Your bribe. Your bribe copy. Your ad targeting, your ad copy, your imagery, your Facebook Posts, your email subject lines, your email delivery day, delivery frequency, and the content of your email.
Everything can improve.
You get the idea. Test and improve.
Testing, however, is not a 52-card pickup game. Oh no. Use control and a test. Change one element. Run the test and compare your results to your control. If your test gets better results than your control, your test is now your new control. Again, change one part. Run the test and compare your results to your control.
Profit Path 5 Steps to Turn Fans into Customers
Facebook is not your private advertising channel where you collect customers like its goods in-store. Oh no. You really must use a Facebook Marketing Funnel.
Advertising on Facebook is not targeting keywords on Google. Selling, anywhere, requires warming up leads in steps. With each step building trust.
Accept you have a Grand Canyon ‘trust gap’ (Purple to Yellow circles), then build your bridge (with email) and nurture your (Purple) fans with content.
Your Facebook Marketing Funnel 5 Profit Path Steps using
- Use an Irresistible Lead Magnet. Focus on getting opt-in to your bribe and moving fans onto your list
- Set up Facebook Ads and install the Facebook Pixel on your website to measure accurately the cost for each opt-in
- Use e-mail as a nurturing tool to build trust and sell your product
- Make offers via email
- Wash, Rinse, Repeat – view all your reports and monitor for which is part is your weakest link, and analyze which ads perform best and improve the others.
Putting it all into Practice
All this is effort work and more. Not every one of you is ready to up-level your marketing or your business.
Many of you are satisfied with the broken watch being accurate twice a day. But, not me.
Use a Facebook Marketing Funnel and social differences and you will get different (profitable) results.
Care to discuss this? I would love to chat.
Thanks for this great post. I totally agree with you that social media, facebook in particular, is for building relationships.
Many companies stay away from it because the conversion rate is low on sales but what they don’t realise is that they are building trust, transparency and are interacting with people rather than interrupting them with ads on google or you tube etc.
Others see facebook as a magent for negativity due to the level of transparency on there. But if we keep the positive stories and PR out there, it will come back to us!
It’s a long term relationship too… not something that can be quantified by conversions. Thanks again, I look forward to your next post!
Carol
Yea agree the sales conversion is low and the customer service backlash is potentially dangerous.
Using Facebook as direct sales channel won’t work effectively and will alienate fans. Just cause I liked your page means not I am ready to buy from you.
The backlash from a bad product or poor customer service is still present in the ether of business. Maybe not visible on social. But, doing the damage never-the-less.
I always believed if you deal with the negative customer experience, as you should, and solve the base problem causing the bad experience in the first place, you can easily turn one customer around. And improve your entire business as a result.
Just needs a mindset shift really. And the early movers get the advantage.
Thanks for stopping by with your thoughts.
Facebook marketing is a really good strategy to meet your loyal customers.
Thanks for sharing the great post.
Regards,
Malisa
Hey Malisa,
Yea, Facebook is the place to find everyone of your customer groups. Only need a budget and then the all can be achieved.
Urban