Facebook boasts one of the most comprehensive advertising targeting platforms available to businesses. With Facebook Ads, you could target your ads to iPhone-owning women aged 30-40, living in Sydney, who are close friends of men whose birthdays are within a month (if for some reason you wanted to). However, most people love to use Facebook to interact with friends, so are rarely in the mood to buy, buy, buy! Consequently, businesses advertising on Facebook can’t just spruik their products to a cold audience and hope for the best, but rather, they need to add value to users’ online experiences and develop solid relationships.

A good way of developing a relationship with your customers on Facebook is by guiding their journey through a funnel from awareness of your brand, all the way to a conversion. Luckily for us, Facebook ads are set up in a way that makes it easy to target potential customers at different stages of the buying process.

So, the first step of any Facebook ad campaign is deciding whether your marketing objective is Awareness, Consideration, or Conversions.

Awareness objectives are designed to generate interest in your product or service. Basically, they’re for when you want to let people in your target audience know you exist! Combined with some strategic audience targeting, the ‘Brand Awareness’ and ‘Reach’ objectives are great for finding people most likely to pay attention to your ads and increasing awareness for your brand.

It’s at this stage you’ll want to think of creative ways to add value to your audience’s social media sessions and get them paying attention amongst all the other noise in their news feeds. By sharing an informative and engaging blog article, or a funny video relevant to your industry, you’ll pique the interest of potential customers while making them aware of your brand.

While Awareness campaigns are great for getting your brand out into the world, most of the time, you’ll want your audience to engage in some way with your ad. Whether you’re after comments on a post, or clicks through to your website, ad campaigns with Consideration as their objective are the perfect fit! Consideration objectives are designed to get people thinking about your business and looking for more information about it. We’re spoiled for choice when it comes to Consideration, being given the choice between driving Website Traffic, App Installs, Content Engagement, Video Views, or Lead Generation – it all depends on your business goals.

If your ad is specifically related to your product, it’s best to target an audience that is fairly ‘warm’, that is, a group of users that have at least heard of you before. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes; you wouldn’t click the ‘like’ button if you see a brand that you’ve never heard of just talking about itself. There are a number of great strategies to trial for finding these ‘warm’ audiences. Why not use the Facebook pixel to track and then remarket to people who have already visited your website (or a specific page of your website), or create a custom audience consisting solely of everyone who watched that video you posted last month that went viral!

Alternatively, you can create an audience of people that share key characteristics with everyone who has already liked your page, or has liked your posts in the past. This is a great strategy when paired with an eye-catching visual and a post about how your business solves a problem commonly experienced by your target audience. Remember; make it about them, not about you!

Finally, down the pointy-end of your Facebook funnel is the Conversions objective. Here you’ll find those objectives that encourage people (that are already interested in your business) to purchase or use your product or service. You can design your campaigns to optimise them for Website Conversions, Product Catalogue Sales, or Store Visits.

With Website Conversion ads, you can track certain actions people take on your website, like registrations, checkouts, and more. Website conversion adverts work with the Facebook pixel on your website, so you can reach the website visitors who are most likely to take your desired action.

Product Catalogue Sales ads automatically show products from a pre-uploaded product catalogue to your target audience. This could get very technical very fast, so, simply put, these ads display your range of products to users that have expressed an interest in that product category, or to users who checked out a specific product section on your website. The great thing about these ads is that they’re dynamic; meaning that if someone takes a look at a particular product on your site, that’s the product they’ll see again in the ad.

Don’t have an online store? Don’t fret, Facebook has thought of you! With a Store Visits campaign, you can promote multiple business locations to people who are nearby. The Store Visits objective lets you create dynamic local ads for multiple store locations to drive visits and in-store sales. You can also target people within a given distance of your store locations with ads that are designed to help people navigate to, or contact, the location nearest them.

If we’ve got multiple business locations, there’s a good chance you won’t want to use an identical message for each location. That’s why the store visits objective lets you automatically localise ad content for each store location, complete with a store locator, unique call-to-action button (such as Call Now or Get Directions), and flexible location targeting.

There you have it, the wide array of options you can to Create and capture demand through the funnel by driving brand awareness to find new clients, increase consideration from qualified consumers, and then capture the demand and gain customers.

 Of course there wouldn’t be many businesses around that would need to use ALL of these objectives, so there is certainly a large element of strategy and planning that goes into selecting the approach that is best suited to your business. With that said, we hope that as you read through these options, your ears pricked up at least a couple of times as ideas for what would work great for your business ran through your head!

As a digital marketing agency, we manage and create ads for our clients’ social media accounts every day. We understand that it can be overwhelming if you’re a busy business owner, marketing manager, or communications officer. So if you have any questions regarding Facebook advertising and strategy, please give us a call on 1800 356 164 or email info@atmmarketing.com.au.