How to Make a High Conversion Effective Facebook Video Ad Funnel

No matter what ads you put on Facebook they can be the most beautiful things in the world but if they don't have an actual strategy built towards the psychology of turning people into customers, you're screwed. So let me show you how to do it. 

Here's the thing, video ads are the best kind of ads. They just are. They build empathy, they get emotional identification going so they can lead people down to buy products and services. So, you have to know what videos to make and you have to know how to finalize them which is a word that I just made up to make sure that you are respecting the buyer's journey and putting these videos in the right places. And then super awesome bonus at the end, I'm going to take you right over my shoulder into ads manager and show you how to set this stuff up. 

What is Sales Funnel

Let's talk again about what a sales funnel is. We have the TOP, MIDDLE, and BOTTOM of the sales funnel. 

So, at the TOP, you have your cold audience. These are people that have no relationship with your brand whatsoever. You don't know these people at all. You're just meeting them, waving at them, saying hello, getting to know each other, doing all that first date stuff. 

MIDDLE of the funnel. That's the consideration phase where you're starting to get to know each other better and starting to see if you're ready to take the next step.

And at the BOTTOM of the funnel, they are just one little push away from becoming customers. 

So, we have to respect those when we're creating our content and when we're finalizing it. 

let's jump right into what videos to make

So, at the top of the funnel when nobody has any idea who we are, we want to introduce them to us through these text on the screen storytelling type videos, or testimonial demo-type videos. That creates a lot of awareness and emotional identification with the product and the people that use the product or the service. 

Because that is going to get people interested and allow them to move through the funnel. And it has a headline right off the top that says this thermos solves your worst problem with coffee in the mornings. It just takes people right into the problem that it solved. Because that's what businesses do, they solve problems? So that's what we'd like to do at the top of the funnel. Now an important note here is that you may just need a top and bottom of the funnel. What we're looking at here is what's called the attribution window or the conversion window. 

So basically, how long it takes someone to get through the funnel. If you're selling a pair of sunglasses, it may only take someone 30 minutes to get through the funnel. Not a whole lot of brain power goes into that. So, you introduce people to the brand with these types of videos at the top of the funnel, and then you simply re-target them at the bottom of the funnel. And in the re-targeting phase you want to lean heavily on social proof. You want to lean on testimonial video content. 

Get a Zoom video with as many customers as you can together ask them how it felt before they have the product and after. And then cut that into a little a video that tells a story. These types of videos work great at the bottom of the funnel, because what people are looking for there is really to get pushed over the edge. They've visited the product page. 

They've watched a bunch of your video content and the last little nudge that they need are other people telling them how great you are. There's also a ton of power in emotional storytelling down here directly from other customers. People want to read reviews just think about how many reviews you read every time you buy something online, a ton. So why don't we just go at people with these reviews in re-targeting, instead of making them search them out. Now not every funnel is built the same. 

If you're buying a $3,000 wedding ring it's going to take you longer to decide to buy that than someone buying a $20 pair of sunglasses. So that means that the sales cycle is longer. The funnel is longer. We need to do more nurturing in that middle of the funnel to warm people up. They need to see more testimonials. They need to see more information about what your product or service is and how it's different from the rest of the competition. So, you just need to test, optimize, and do some critical thinking about the psychology of your customers to realize if you're selling that $20 pair of sunglasses you may find that a simple A two-step funnel is all you need. 

If you have a $3,000 product, you may have eight or 10 pieces of video content that's going into this warming people up. So, you have to do some market research and market psychology that revolves around how your customers are most likely to buy. 

What I want to do is take you inside a very simple two-step e-commerce funnel over my shoulder directly in ads manager and show you how we set this stuff up. So, this is Facebook ads manager. This is the belly of the beast. And what we're going to do is very quickly set up the first is prospecting. So, you're going to go to create a new campaign. And I'm going to assume right now that we're in an e-commerce type situation or you're selling a physical product or even selling an info product. 

Mistakes people usually do 

One of the biggest mistakes that I often see is that people are not optimizing for conversions. You want to give your campaign name here. I love to use emojis to show which stage of the funnel that we're at. So, I'll use a blue emoji for the cold audience and then I'll say TOF which is the top of the funnel. So, it's my prospecting audience conversions or my product. So, we'll click on continue. And now I'm inside this ad set. And so, we'll turn campaign budget optimization on for now put it on a hundred dollars a day. And now we'll go into the ad set level. 

So, what we're going to do here is set up a lookalike audience. In case you don't know what to lookalike audience is Facebook knows all the people that have interacted with your brand in certain ways. For example, people that have purchased your product. If you have had that Facebook Pixel running on your site. What you can do is say hey Facebook, take a look at everybody who bought in the last six months and find a group of 2 million people that look like them. So, to create a lookalike audience go in here and say, create new lookalike audience. And you have to create that seed source which is called a custom audience. And that custom audience is one of these. 

So, what you'll want to do if you want a custom audience of purchasers are you'll go to website and select your Pixel there which has been running in your store. And then you want to select the purchase event. And I said, six months. 

So, we'll say 180 days, and then I'll name it. It's really important how you name your custom audiences to make sure that everything is super organized in there. So, what I like to do is three little sections here the brand, the audience, and the time-frame. And then I will just go to create an audience. 

Now I've got my custom audience in here as my seed audience. And I selected the United States because I only want to sell to people in the United States. If you're wondering by the way you can take custom audiences from other countries, let's say it's purchasers in the U.K. and you want to find people in the U.S. that looks like that. 

You can do that. In this case, we're just going for the United States. And we’re going to say a 1% look alike. It's going to be the 2.4 million closest people to that seed audience of purchasers in the last six months. So now we’re going to go to create the audience. And now we have our 1% lookalike audience sitting here waiting to be advertised to. It does depend on your product sometimes but very often you want to exclude people that is in that seed audience because you won't necessarily want to advertise to people that have purchased and that will just make your costs go down. 

So, I’m going to go ahead and exclude people that have purchased in the last six months. I like to turn detailed targeting expansion off just so that I know exactly how just this seed audience is performing. I choose automatic placements because I let the algorithm decide how to deliver it to people. And then I click next to go to the ad level. And this is where you'll put in your video. Single image or video. You'll upload your video here. Where you'll put the copy for your Facebook adhere. But what I love to do here for these types of videos is only put the headline in because it makes it feel more native in the feed. You may even want to try testing that is the headline as well. 

So, you have that in the headline and that in the text and then you'll have your website URL there. Now you want to make sure that you are optimizing for purchase here, which is a mistake that I often see. It's a conversion objective, optimized for purchase. So, you want to go in to that pixel and you want to select the purchase event and then you'll send it on its merry way. If you want to a split test different types of copy or different types of headlines then you can just do that here at the ad level. The little trick that I do is I love to just quick duplicate. And then I'll just say prospecting headline B and then I'll do I'll change the headline here. 

So that's what we do for the prospecting phase. Now for the re-targeting phase, I'm only going to re-target people down the funnel that have visited my website in the past two weeks. There are certainly other ways you can re-target people that watched a certain percentage of the video. You can re-target people that engaged with your Facebook page, your Instagram, whatever it may be. There are all sorts of ways that you can re-target people based on your product or service. 

But for here I'm just going to simply create a very simple bottom of the funnel. Again, optimized for purchase. That is re-targeting website visitors. So, we'll name the campaign we did blue before. So now we’re going to do red. Again, we’re going to be optimizing for purchase. 

How to create custom Facebook Audience

So, what we want to do is create a custom audience, website, and again, all website visitors. And we said two weeks. So that's the last 14 days create the audience. We’re going to exclude purchasers again. Now what I highly recommend if you're using testimonial videos down here is in this ad copy you start it with five stars because people resonate with that because of Amazon. 

And then a quote, and then maybe you could put a tagline here and then you have a website URL. It's not a bad idea to put the website URL in the copy. We've seen the click-through rate rates are higher when you do that. But the website URL here and then you'll upload your testimonial video here. And then you can let that run. 

And you see, we have our simple top of funnel and our bottom of the funnel. Now if you have a more expensive product, you may also find that you want to create middle of funnel here. And that allows you to help people through the consideration phase with other content that will educate them more and help build more trust and authority. 

Ultimately, we want them to either just buy it or move to the bottom of the funnel, or get out. Because that allows us to focus our advertising dollars on the most likely folks to become customers. Now you probably would want to know how to make these Facebook video ads that I'm showing you how to set up.