Understanding the entire customer journey of the consumer helps to keep them engaged and ensures high conversion rate. At every stage of their journey with your product, consumers have different questions about your product..
For example, at the beginning clients may want to know if your product is trustable while later on they may want to know other features and pricing of your products versus your competitor’s product. Thus, when creating your Facebook ad campaign you have to make sure you use the right message at the right stage of the customer journey.
This post consists of ways to integrate the Facebook marketing objectives to create an effective Facebook campaign that follows the customer at every step on their customer journey.
But before then, it’s important to note that not all products or services are made equal. The customer journey for selling a T-shirt will be much more simple and shorter than the one for selling an educational package. This is because selling an educational package requires much more information by the buyer, customer will want to know more about your product before buying.
Not all products have the same customer journey
In this pillar we take all the thing we learnt in the past 3 pillars and combine it to create one big strategy. Finally we will look into how we can automate this strategy.
eCommerce customer journey
The first stage in the customer’s journey is the awareness stage and this is the point where your audience is probably getting to know you for the 1st time or perhaps not may know of your brand but is still new to it.
Message: here is the point you introduce the benefits of your products to the consumer.
Objectives: the objectives you can use here include traffic, engagement, video views or conversion (Conversion can only be used if you have enough data on the action you want to convert for).
Targeting: Show your ads to the initial interest audience you created your audience insight research while excluding users who have already purchased from this list. If you have an existing list of email of customers, you can upload them to Facebook and target the email as well.
The consideration stage is where your audience is warming up to your brand or product. In this stage you need to entice or attract your potential customer. Here is also where you can start to build trust and rapport.
Message: Send messages such as other benefits statements, customer’s reviews, product demo or case studies.
Objectives: The objectives you can use here is traffic, since you have already created engagement and you will want to send the customer to your site. Other options you can use is video views, catalog sales or conversion.
Targeting: Your targeting here should me mostly users who viewed your site and have engaged with your initial post. Ensure you exclude users who have Add to Cart or Purchased. This exclusion is important because you don’t want to annoy people with showing them the same ads. Instead we will create another ad specially for those who added to cart later on. Plus it helps you reduce your cost.
That this point you have the audience’s attention and they want to know more about your product and how it compares to other competitors or options on your website. Some of them would have already bought your product at this stage however, the more prudent shoppers might want to shop around and evaluate all options before buying.
In this stage you help the customer by helping them evaluate your product against your competitors. This is crucial because you have a higher chance of convincing the customer if you are in control of how they evaluate their options. Fact is if you don’t do it your competitors might. Better you than them.
Message: This is the good time to show them different packages that you have or different variant of your brands. You can also talk about promo codes here and compare your brand with your competitors and show how you are better, faster, cheaper, etc.
Objectives: The objectives here include traffic, video views, conversions and catalog sales, messages
Targeting: Users who visited website. Exclude users who already made a purchase.
This is the stage where users make a decision about making a purchase. Your message here can include promo codes, bundle offers or discounts. There are buyers who go from the awareness stage to making a purchase without caring about offers or promo codes. There are also buyers that make purchase from the consideration and evaluation stage. However, some are bargain hunters and they will always want to buy at a discount, the acquisition stage is where you target them and offers them promo codes and discounts that your business offers. Don’t leave money on the table by dishing out discounts to early in the funnel because there are customers who will convert without a discount anyway.
Also, at this stage the objectives you to use include: traffic, video views, conversions, catalog sales, message. And your targeting should include users who added to cart.
One other stage to take note of is the Loyalty stage. At this stage they are already your customers and your purpose here could be to upsell or cross sell, repurchase, acquiring reviews or providing customer support. The facebook objectives here can include catalog sales, traffic views, and message. At this stage, your targeting audience includes users who already made a purchase.
This sample shows what it looks like for most businesses and it is broken down into two phases, the starting phase 1 and phase 2 the advance phase (where the automation begins).
Facebook customer journey phase 1
Let’s assume you start off with your objective as engagement and your message is showing the benefits of your products to target the initial interest audience. Some people may click on your ad and go to your website, and of course, some don’t click on it at all. What you can do is to send another engagement ad and this time use a different benefit statement because those people may not have bought into your first benefits.
The next step after people have started visiting your website is to start building a reputation with them. We do this by showing this segment audience ads that feature your customer reviews. At this stage, people have started flowing into your website from Facebook and checking your product. As a result, the Facebook pixel has started profiling the data of people that are visiting your website. You can then go to Facebook and create a new target audience similar to people that has visited your website. And then remarket your product to this new audience which will then go through the initial stages.
In the following stage is where you talk about evaluation of your product. Here’s where you talk about features of your product compared with your competitors or the different product tier or bundles that you have. The purpose is to help the audience evaluate the options they have. Your Facebook objective here can be traffic (Link clicks) or catalog sales (DPA) and target people that have seen your product page but have not made a purchase. If you are using the traffic objective, send the audience to a website that compares your product to your competitors. If you use the DPA you can show the audience an ad of your top sellers or product recommendations based on products they viewed on your website (This is done with the help of the Facebook pixel and the catalog feed).
Along this point, you should be getting more people to add products to their carts at this stage. Now Facebook is able to build an audience of people who look similar to those who have added to cart. You can now create a new adset of Add to Cart Lookalike audience to the top of your funnel and channel in more potential customers.
In the next stage, you target the prices sensitive people who have not made a purchase yet. You can do this by creating an ad that offers a discount and promo code.
Once again, after you have enough purchases you can start to make an audience of people who look similar to those who have purchased from your website.
Finally, once they become buyers and consumers you can start to cross sell them and send them ads to buy more from you and also offer them other benefits such as discount on shipping.
Facebook customer journey phase 2
The phase 2 is a replica of the phase 1, but what you’re doing now is using the conversion objective to retarget the audience you have built from the first phase. This phase is pretty much automated.
Here, we can start to use the conversion Facebook objectives. In this objective, Facebook goes through all the audience you have created and show your ads to people on Facebook who are most likely to convert for the action you selected. You can start with the objective of view content first as you may not have the data of people who have added to cart.
The only thing you have to change from time to time is your messaging because you don’t want to bore you audience with the same visuals and ad copy all the time.
So that comes to the end of the phases of the customer journey but before I go, let me share one concept with you which might also be help.
The new generation of customers are more engaged online platforms and old traditional methods of marketing are becoming less effective. If we look at traditional marketing, we will notice that the majority of eyeballs that engage with newspapers and radio ads are of people who are older. So think about this, in the next 10 to 20 years the new older generation will consist of people who are used to shopping only. So you can imagine how selling online will grow tremendously.
Traffic has started moving from malls to shopping online and thus much traffic is coming to e-commerce.
Your Facebook campaign also is an essential factor to contribute to your ecommerce success. So you need to think of Facebook as a mega mall and your Facebook campaign as a retail outlet. So it’s essential that you open your mind to having a concept of digital marketing and build your online presence to maintain the relevance of your brand.