How to Build Awareness, Engage and Convert with Facebook

With over 1.9 billion monthly active users on Facebook and 700 million on Instagram, the Facebook advertising platform provides an unparalleled opportunity to connect with an engaged audience across the globe.

Whatever kind of business you run — business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C), product or service-based — your customer is ultimately another person. There’s a highly likely chance, therefore, that they are active on one of these platforms. The right message at the right time will help connect with that potential customer you’re looking to find.

This blog will describe how you can use Facebook advertisements throughout your sales and marketing funnel — to help build awareness, foster engagement and win customers.

Awareness

At the start of your customer journey your aim should be to reach as much of your target audience as possible. The people you connect with may not currently be in the market for your product or service so the goal is not to directly sell to them, but to convey why they should care about you and educate them about your industry.

There’s a number of campaign types you can play with at this stage. Both Web Traffic and Video View campaign objectives will work well, as long as the content you are sharing with people is not focussed on a hard sell. Facebook also has campaign objectives such as ‘Brand Awareness’ and ‘Reach’ which will work as well. Brand Awareness targets people that Facebook considers most likely to engage with your brand and Reach shows your ad to the maximum number of people available for your budget, regardless of their likelihood to engage with it.

Remember that you need to expand your audience by reaching new prospects. Target a wide potential audience using Keyword Interests and Facebook Lookalike audiences. If these are a little too broad, narrow your audience segments by combining with Demographic and Behavioural targeting.

Engagement

At the middle of your customer journey, your aim should be to continue to educate people about your industry and also your brand and why it’s a potential solution to their problem. You’re reconnecting with people who have already shown interest at the beginning of your customer journey and are engaging them further.

As with the awareness stage, there’s a number of campaign types you can play with here. Both ‘web traffic’ and ‘video view’ campaign objectives will work well again, with the right level of educational content. You can also utilise some of Facebook’s other campaign objectives such as page like and post engagement, aimed at increasing the number of fans on your Facebook page and increasing engagement of the content you post to your page respectively. Lead generation ads will also work well, providing you are giving a good enough incentive for someone to give you their details and that they trust you enough to give you their details without visiting your website.

Remember that you want to reach people who already know your brand, with new and interesting content. Target audiences that have already engaged with you in some way such as Facebook page fans, video viewers, content engages, email lists and website visitors. You can do this using a variety of custom audiences to retarget users.

Conversion

At the end of your customer journey, your aim should be to close the sale. You’re reconnecting with customers who have engaged with your brand in a way that shows a level of intent and pushing your brand or product as the solution to their problem.

Both web traffic and conversion campaign objectives will work well. As with previous stages, a web traffic campaign will optimise to show your ad to people most likely to click it and visit your website. A web conversion campaign will show your ad to people most likely to complete an online conversion, which you get to define, providing you have the Facebook Pixel correctly installed and setup. In order to optimise for a web conversion campaign, each one of your ads needs to be getting 15-25 of these conversions per week, hence why you may want to use a web traffic campaign if this is not the case. (You’ll still be able to view all your conversions in your campaign statistics if you’re using a web traffic campaign).

Remember that you want to reach people who have shown intent and know your brand. Use custom audiences to retarget prospects that have submitted contact forms on your website, downloaded lead magnets, abandoned checkout procedures or looked at combinations of website pages such as products, pricing or solutions.

Winning customers begins with the very first interaction you ever have with them. Your customer is a person — so this interaction can take place on Facebook regardless of your business type or product. If you understand your customer journey, segment your audiences correctly at each stage and deliver engaging messages from beginning to end then Facebook can be a vital part of your multi-channel marketing mix.s