Unfortunately, this digital age of shortcuts and fast-track tools has spoilt us a little bit. As digital marketers, it’s super easy to be tempted to skip the slower phases such as awareness and head straight to the final (and most desirable) step: action.

Thing is, if you skip steps, you’ll have to pay for it in the end – and we mean that quite literally. Bypass the marketing funnel, and you’ll suddenly find yourself trying to convert a totally cold audience into paying customers – something we all know how to be unpleasantly tough and expensive.

So what makes the four-step funnel the most viable and cost-effective way to create new audiences? The general theory is this: if the ‘awareness’ section of your funnel is full of customers who are aware of your business in some way, you can start building tangible interest in your business, thus gently shifting customers from the first phase to the next. From there, customers can be moved into the ‘consideration’ phase, where they’ll start shopping around with your product or services in mind before finally moving into the ‘action’ phase by purchasing, subscribing, or doing whatever will deem your particular campaign a success.

Fortunately for us, Facebook – one of the most popular platforms for online advertisements – makes it easy to utilise the traditional marketing funnel without accidentally skipping one of the phases. Within Ads Manager, Facebook can help you move through the funnel with their built-in campaign objective choices: Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion. Selecting ‘Traffic’ or ‘Engagement’ raises awareness of your business by driving traffic to your website or allowing consumers to share the details of your service with their friends via comments, tagging and likes. ‘Lead generation’ and ‘Messenger’ objectives will raise interest in your business by finding people who are ready to share their details with you, make an online booking with you or at the very least strike up a Messenger conversation with your Page.

Video views are also fantastic for demonstrating consideration in what you offer. The length of the video can vary significantly; we’ve seen plenty of hour-long videos, and if someone is willing to watch 50%, 75% or 100% of a long video, then they are undoubtedly keen to engage with your business further.

Facebook’s Conversion objective places your ad in front of the people who are most likely to carry out the action you’re after. from purchases to registrations. All of these campaign objectives can be further optimised using the Facebook Pixel to track activity. An effective retargeting strategy using the various objectives and Pixel can bring your customers through your marketing funnel quickly and efficiently, all the while avoiding taking action on a cold audience, which keeps your cost-per-result lovely and low.

If you’d like Shed Social to review your campaigns, or if you’d like us to create them for you, then get in touch with us today.