Full Funnel Advertising: What It Is and How To Use It

If you are looking to gain new customers or convert your existing leads into actual clients, you must already know that nourishing your relationship with a potential buyer is the way to go. But what is the best digital advertising approach to maximise ROI especially if your product or service is of high value and/ or high price? Well, full-funnel advertising is one of the paths to consider. In this article, we are going to talk about Facebook advertising for high-ticket products with a monthly ad spend of £5,000 and above.

A funnel is a nurture sequence of 3 campaigns that take customers on a journey from awareness – the top of the funnel, through to consideration – middle of the funnel, and eventually to acquisition – the bottom of the funnel. Advertising funnels are necessary because people do not normally buy items priced over £50 after seeing only one advert on social media. Their decision to buy is more considered and takes longer, so the approach to digital advertising should reflect this. The more expensive the product is, the longer the funnel sequence needs to be, therefore it takes seeing more than 3 adverts to convince somebody to make a purchase. Funnels exist from between 2 to 20 stages and you should always begin by testing the minimum viable option for funnel length for a product to maximise your Return On Advertising Spend (ROAS).

Full-funnel advertising is highly complex so take a look at this post from WordStream which will give you a better understanding of the concept, stages of setting up and data monitoring process required.

The below highlights the structure of a typical high-ticket, eCommerce funnel. Your job is to build the funnel out in Ads Manager via individual campaigns and run them simultaneously while keeping a close eye on all the moving parts.

• Stage 1: Top of Funnel Campaign: 2 – 4 ad sets per campaign – 2 ads per ad set
• Stage 2: Middle of Funnel Campaign: 1 – 2 ad sets per campaign – 2 ads per ad set
• Stage 3: Bottom of Funnel Campaign: 1 – 2 ad sets per campaign – 2 ads per ad set

Within every stage, each audience and advert are continuously being tested with new creatives and copy to optimise results.

Once the highest converting audience and advert are found, these campaigns can be scaled to increase ROAS. Scaling can occur horizontally by adding new adverts to a converting audience or by simply increasing the budget behind the front-running campaigns.

An established and well-managed eCommerce digital advertising funnel can be very profitable for a business. The number of funnels you need depends on the number of regions you are advertising in, and the number of product categories and price ranges you wish to advertise.

Advice for multi-market advertising

For advertising high-ticket items throughout Europe, it may work to run one funnel in each of the primary markets or one funnel to a region of Europe or a number of markets collected together that share the same economic conditions – for example, Eastern Europe grouped together, Northern Europe together, etc. This stops the Facebook algorithm from targeting only cheaper markets over others with additional ad spending.

The way digital advertising is structured depends heavily on the ad spend available. Note that over time, some regions and some product ranges will show greater ROAS over others and will have more scalability. These will then become a focus to maximise resources and minimise less productive investments.

With a larger monthly ad spend, you would be able to introduce various levels of funnel advertising which in return, will produce higher ROI by converting a larger number of people in your target audience into actual clients. If working with multi markets, it may be the case of 2 or more of these frameworks running simultaneously.

Once you have successfully gained your new eCommerce clients, there is some work to be done beyond the funnel to make sure the results you have achieved with your full-funnel digital advertising are long-run. The objective here is to retain the eCommerce clients and provide a professional level of help, support and onboarding. This can include anything from customer support and help with documentation as well as special offers, insider how-to’s, email follow up and effective product UX.

As you might have understood, full-funnel digital advertising is a complex process and requires an understanding of anything from business objectives to target audiences and ad set-up. It is also important to have an understanding of what type of content and tone of voice works for your social media marketing channels and create relevant content for your target eCommerce clients.

As an eCommerce business or any business for that matter, you will have to make a number of strategic decisions including some crucial digital marketing strategy choices. Whether you are new to the digital world or have been out there for quite some time our team at Yay!Starter Marketing is always available to have a chat and discuss what is the most suitable eCommerce marketing strategy for your business!

P.S. If you are not an eCommerce business, we cover a variety of industries in our blogs. Check out our latest article on the best Digital Marketing channels for the eLearning sector.