I want to welcome back growth advisor, Blue Ribbon Mastermind member, and close friend of the Smart Marketer family: Jeremiah Allen.
Jeremiah is so scary smart that sometimes after talking to him I’m afraid to walk into a dark room. No joke.
He’s shared his strategies on the blog many times before, and now Jeremiah is back with a quick breakdown of a 4-step Facebook Ads Funnel that his users love.
About Jeremiah’s Facebook Ads Funnel
Jeremiah ran this funnel for his client Ivy City Co, a women-led company that makes size-inclusive dresses for women of all ages.
Here’s a funnel sneak peek:
As with all good marketing, the success of this Facebook ads funnel comes down to communication.
Jeremiah says, “One of the ways that we change people’s lives is by talking to them in the right way.”
Are you tailoring your communications based on where your prospects are in the customer journey?
For this funnel, Jeremiah tailors his messaging by segmenting his ad sets into four groups:
- Awareness: Making people aware of your brand who might not have heard of you before
- Engagement: Getting people who are familiar with you to consume more of your content
- Promotion: Reaching out to engaged users to making them timely, relevant sales offers
- Retargeting: Following up your initial promotions with more content and offers
“I run very simple formulas… I take people from an awareness stage to what I call engagement, to promotion, to retargeting…
My two metrics that I actually care about are whether or not people are clicking on the darn ads and what the ROAS is. And this account is doing well.”
Here’s how Jeremiah is executing this funnel.
Facebook Ad Funnel | Step 1: Awareness Stage
Jeremiah opens his funnel with awareness ads that are simple and fun.
His copy and creative aren’t focused on the products, they’re focused on the customer: who they are, and who they want to become.
“There’s very little pitch, and it’s kind of a little bit transformational. It’s talking about an aspirational identity.”
In marketing, it’s not the best product that wins but the best promise: what’s the “after state” that you’re helping your customer achieve?
Here’s Jeremiah’s ad copy:
“The first one on the left says, ‘A good dress changes everything. Designed by women for women…’
You need to have good creative, but tell people how this is going to change their life. ‘A good dress changes everything,’ right? I don’t wear dresses so I don’t know. For me, it’s a good pair of shoes or a good pair of jeans changes everything, but we’re just telling them there’s going to be some change in their life.”
(Jeremiah calls this strategy “selling transformation”, which he explains in detail in this post: Value-First Marketing & Why It’s Important to Make an Emotional Connection With Your Customers.)
Copy and creative like this are a great way to connect with new customers. Jeremiah says he typically runs this ad to cold traffic, like a broad lookalike audience.
Facebook Ad Funnel | Step 2: Engagement
In the next step of the funnel, Jeremiah targets people who are aware of his brand to get them to engage with his content and become more familiar with his messaging.
Here’s the ad copy:
“BTS SNEAK PEEK! Over the past few months we’ve been working on a special project with @lindsarnold and it’s… (See more)”
As you can see, it’s a straight forward ad that talks about Ivy City Co’s “Behind the Scenes (BTS)” content series. It still doesn’t mention any products, or do anything except try to get the prospect to engage with the brand.
“This ad is at the engagement level, we’re showing it to warm audiences. People who have been at the site recently, engaged on social media, on the email list, those sorts of things.
And we’re just conversational. We talk to them about things that are coming up. Sometimes it’s newsworthy things. Sometimes it’s just something for fun, like what’s going on this weekend.”
You might be thinking it’s a waste of time to use ad dollars to promote content that doesn’t have a sales offer or a direct ROI, but this couldn’t be further from the truth.
This is a marketing strategy called Content Amplification, and it’s essential to growing a sustainable brand.
Facebook Ad Funnel | Step 3: Promotion
Now that you’ve made your prospect aware of your brand and engaged them with content, the next step in the funnel is to actually promote your products.
“Here is the first time we’ll actually look at somebody, look them in the eye and tell them to buy our stuff.”
But even though Jeremiah mentions his products here, it’s only a soft-sell.
Here’s the ad copy:
“SET YOUR ALARMS! Our dream collaboration with Lindsay Arnold goes live Thursday, 4/29 at 8:00 am MT. You’re going to love these.”
“Even though it’s a pitch, it’s still not like a heavy-hitting direct response pitch. It’s just like, ‘Hey, you probably wanna look at this.’ “
While direct response is super important for digital brands, it doesn’t need to be the strategy you use in every single piece of marketing.
With the power of retargeting, you can promote your products over time in a story-based way, which encourages engagement while still driving conversions.
And speaking of retargeting…
Facebook Ad Funnel | Step 4: Retargeting
The last step in this funnel is to take the people who have seen the previous promotion ads and retarget them with more content and offers.
These ads will go to your warmest, most engaged audiences:
“We’ll show things like this to view or add to cart in the last three days, that sort of thing.”
For these ads, Jeremiah says he likes to mix up direct response tactics with more of the soft-sell messaging from the previous step in the funnel.
“We do run catalog sales ads, but we’re also having a lot of success with retargeting ads where we just kind of go back to that casual, easygoing messaging.“
This type of funnel is a fundamental part of modern digital marketing.
These days, it’s often hard to be profitable promoting direct-to-offer ads to cold traffic, which is why it’s crucial to understand how to reach new audiences with content, get them engaged, and then make them sales offers.
We call this the Engage & Filter Method. I talk about it and how it fits into my larger content marketing strategy in this blog post: How to Scale Your Business Through Loyalty Marketing & Content Amplification.
A big, BIG thank you to Jeremiah for sharing this funnel with us today. You can read more about him below.
For more tips on how to grow a business with Facebook advertising, check out this
free course I did in partnership with Shopify: Advanced Facebook Ads: Customer Acquisition.
That’s it — thanks for reading!
Jeremiah Allen has been driving growth for small-to-medium sized ecommerce companies since 1997, and through his agency Fat Bullfrog, he’s made hundreds of company founders incredibly, stupidly wealthy. While he still enjoys client work, in 2017 he began acquiring and building his own ecommerce brands.
