You spend some time putting together the perfect Facebook ad, selecting your target demographic, and publishing it. Pretty soon you’re gathering “likes”, but the phone isn’t exactly ringing off the hook. If/when it does ring, callers just want to know a price. Definitely not what you were hoping to accomplish!

The above scenario is unfortunately, all too common. Why? What happened?

As with many disappointments in life, the problem lies in the original expectation and overall strategy.

Think for a minute about your sales funnel. You inject it with new leads and contacts (top of the funnel), nurture them through a process of information (middle of the funnel), and some will come out as new business (bottom of the funnel). If you’ve been in business or sales for any length of time, you’re likely familiar with this.

Facebook (or any social media) ads are a “top of the sales funnel” strategy. A well-designed advertisement will indeed attract plenty of clicks.

But that’s all the ad is supposed to do – generate a click!

What happens after that click will depend upon the process you put in place to move prospects farther down through the funnel. They will rarely be ready for the buying phase just yet, but if you carefully and gradually nurture the lead, they could be.

Carefully Consider These Factors BEFORE You Run Facebook Ads

1. Pay attention to the full funnel.

From top to bottom, strategize your prospect interactions and touches. Realize that you need a plan for initial traffic, nurturing, conversion, and ongoing communication. There are rarely any shortcuts, you’ve got to put in the work.

2. Where will the prospect “land” when they click on your ad?

What will this prospect need to see, hear, watch, read… in order to want to continue down the funnel with you? Website? Landing page? You’ll want to make sure you design and create the content that your prospect will see very skillfully.

3. Are you asking leads to provide their contact info on your landing page?

This is common, but if you go this route, you’d better have a very unique offering. Called a “unique value proposition”, this offer must be something that they can’t simply find elsewhere (such as by performing a simple Google search). They must desire your offer badly enough to trade their contact information with you in order to get it.

4. What is your next step?

After prospects land on your page, opt-in, and consume your initial material, what is your plan to re-engage with that prospect? Options can include…

  • Direct emails (if you had them opt-in)
  • Asking them to subscribe to your blog
  • A retargeting campaign
  • An invitation to attend a live event (seminar or webinar)

If you don’t have a plan to re-engage, how do you know you will ever make contact with this person again?

5. What is your budget?

Generating leads from a cold market on social media requires significant traffic, and social media platforms will charge you for that traffic. In order to generate a significant number of clicks, you must have the budget to maintain the ads for an extended period of time. And unless you can create the pieces of the funnel yourself, you will probably need to hire someone to do that for you.

6.  Get Help!

Putting these pieces together takes a significant chunk of time – time that you may not have because you are busy running your business and dealing with your current clients.  Setting up your sources of traffic, landing page content, funnel content, etc…  requires marketing experience.  If you are new to this type of marketing, you don’t want to travel the road alone.  You’ll spend more time and waste more money with the do-it-yourself route than if you had simply outsourced the job from the beginning.

As you may be realizing, there is rarely a way to “shortcut” the entire process by running an ad and attracting bottom-of-the-funnel clients. Social Media ads work great for their intended purpose – generating clicks.

So if your Facebook ad gets plenty of those clicks, that’s great! You can consider it a success, because creating curiosity is all it was supposed to do. But if you don’t have the rest of the funnel assembled before you run those ads, most of your leads will likely drift away.

Instead of thinking “Facebook ads”, think “sales funnel”. Take the time to assemble it first, then begin to invest in your ads.

Contact us for more information on building a strategic funnel, and we can help you create a plan that works seamlessly from the top all the way down to the bottom.