How to Build a High-converting Facebook Sales Funnel

Getting sales leads through social media is actually much more beneficial to your sales cycle than you might think. Studies show that referred leads take about 97 days to close, while cold website leads take 75 days on average—but leads from social networking sites take only 40.

Think of a Facebook sales funnel as a regular sales funnel—it just exists on Facebook, and in the form of ads. Just like your typical sales funnel, your Facebook funnel will have a few touches, with the ultimate goal of moving leads down a pipeline toward an end goal.

With Facebook, that end goal might not be a sale, especially if you’re a B2B company with a long sales cycle. Instead, you might use Facebook Ads to build a list of qualified prospects, and after you have their emails, add the prospects to your normal sales sequence.

Not all Facebook Ads are going to generate leads for your marketing or sales teams. There are eleven types of Facebook Ads. Some ad types are perfect for generating engagement or getting more followers on Facebook—those other ads are great, but we’re going to cover three ad types that will generate leads for your business.

1. Lead Generation Ads

This type of ad can use an image, carousel (multiple images that viewers can swipe), or video. These ads also require copy in a heading, subheading, and a call-to-action (see below).

When a user clicks on the ad’s call-to-action, they’re prompted to fill out a lead form. You can choose the information required in this lead form—it’s generally best to ask for a name and an email. (Some companies also ask for phone numbers.)

The benefit of lead generation ads is that your users don’t need to leave Facebook to enter their details. It’s a quick, two-step process. They click your ad, then type an email and name (or whatever info you ask for). This quick process increases the likelihood that your prospects will give you their information—especially on mobile.

2. Offer Ads

Offer Ads are discounts or promotions. When users click on the ad, they’re taken to a page in an online store. These ads are most commonly used for e-commerce and retail. But, B2B sales can use them too.

For example, instead of offering a discount on a pair of shoes, a B2B company could offer a discount on services. The link in the ad could then take users to a landing page featuring the discounted offer. The page would prompt visitors to give their email address in exchange for the discount. It looks something like this:

3. Carousel Ads

There are several ad types that will simply display information about your product or services to your prospects and encourage them to click a link to your website or product pages. Carousel Ads are a great way to showcase more than one product or service as with this ad type, a user can swipe across several images or videos.

These ads won’t grab contact information for you, but they can drive traffic to your website or blog, encouraging prospects to explore your site or download some of your gated content.

This is a useful part of your Facebook sales funnel since you’ll need to show prospects:

a) More than one product or service feature and

b) A mix of ads and not just your lead gen or offer ones—no one likes seeing the same ad over and over.

The Rule of 7 states that it takes users around seven times seeing your ad before they take action. So, understand that your audience will take steps—you might not sell your online course or land a new client the first time they see your ad.

Just like with sales, it takes time to move Facebook Ad viewers through a funnel to a purchase or to whatever your end goal may be.

First, choose your goal.

The first step in setting up a successful funnel is to choose your goal. There are many end goals to choose from, but yours might be:

• “Free trial signup” if you’re a SaaS company, like Copper
• “Book a meeting,” if you’re a business coach
• “Add to cart,” if you’re an online store

Align Facebook Ad types with your goal.

Now that you’ve selected your end goal, you need to align your Facebook Ad type with that goal. One of your goals is likely to get highly qualified leads. Since we know that leads need more than one touch to get through the funnel, we’ll need more than one ad to qualify and convert prospects.

SaaS ad funnel example:

Let’s say you’re a SaaS company looking to get trial signups through a lead generation ad. Your funnel might look like this:

Top of the funnel: Carousel ad featuring three images that match with the top three benefits users get from your product.

Middle of the funnel: A free ebook download via an offer ad that takes users to your ebook landing page.

Bottom of the funnel: A trial sign up via a lead generation ad.

Build the ads.

You can set up each of your Facebook Ads in the Facebook Ads Manager.

First, you create a new ad.

Next, you’ll be prompted to select your ad type. Here’s where you’ll choose lead generation or carousel, etc.

Once you’ve selected your ad type, you’ll need to name your campaign and decide if you want to do a split test and optimize your budget. If you A/B test, Facebook will automatically optimize your campaign for you—we recommend A/B testing.

Next, it’s time to define your audience. You’re going to want to be as specific as possible here. In fact, it’s best if you have a Facebook Pixel embedded in your site—which collects user data from your website visitors—so that you can retarget people that have visited your site.

Plus, when using the Pixel, Facebook can build an audience for you based on the audience your Pixel collects—this type of audience is called a Lookalike Audience. (Learn more about Lookalike Audiences here.)

Finally, you’ll save your audience and set your budget:

Get the creative right.

Half the battle in setting up a good Facebook Ad sales funnel is making sure your creative is compelling and fresh. You should monitor your ad performance over time and change out your creative when you notice a dip in performance.

No one likes to see the same ad over and over, and when users see your ad (with the same copy and image) over and over, they’re much less likely to click.

Put the leads into your CRM.

Facebook will keep the leads from lead generation ads so that you can download them. Once you have them, it’s important that you get them into your CRM so that your marketing and sales teams can follow up with the leads as Facebook will only store them for 90 days. Remember, the faster you follow up, the more likely you are to close a deal.

For help downloading your leads, visit this Facebook tutorial.

Facebook may not be an obvious or traditional choice for sales prospecting. But, these days, the reps and marketers who think out of the box are massively outperforming those that stick to traditional means of converting prospects to buyers.

Don’t miss out on the opportunity to turn the world’s largest social media platform into a lead generation machine for your sales team.