Strategy

How to Build the perfect Funnel for your Advertising Strategy

Sanne Kruis

The Marketing Manager of The Next Ad.

May 17, 2017

Are you wondering how to best build your advertising strategy? You don’t know where to start with your advertising campaign? The Next Ad can help you finding answers to your questions by introducing you to its Funnel Theory.

How to Build the perfect Funnel for your Advertising Strategy

Are you wondering how to best build your advertising strategy? You don’t know where to start with your advertising campaign? The Next Ad can help you finding answers to your questions by introducing you to its Funnel Theory.

As you might have guessed, The Next Ad’s platform is based on one major principle: the Funnel Management Theory. The Funnel is made up of three different layers, each focusing on a different goal and different audiences. This Funnel principle should be your starting point for whenever you create a new advertising campaign, no matter if you are a mid-sized or large business, operating in different industries.

Our Funnel has three main layers:

• Awareness
• Consideration
• Transaction

Let’s go through each layer together taking the example of GoPro, an American company selling the world’s most versatile camera.

1 Awareness

The first phase of your advertising Funnel is all about awareness: You are trying to attract people who don’t know you yet and advertise to a large group of people who could be interested in your product. By attracting a broad target audience, you can get real-time CRM data automatically on board. Our platform also allows you to create Lookalike Audiences based on the CRM data you collected.
In this phase, we advise you to use dynamic ads, video ads or carousel ads and run A/B tests to see what ad creative works best. Always make sure to exclude existing customers from your prospecting campaigns using custom audiences or dynamic audiences because you don’t want to waste time and money on people who already bought your product, right?

Taking the example of GoPro, the company could start attracting its potential customers with a video ad featuring its newest camera. To make sure its ad works, GoPro will A/B test the video ad using different texts and call to action in video A and video B. Thanks to our hyper optimisation engine, GoPro will soon find out which ad creative works best. GoPro will most likely target an audience that speaks English, is interested in extreme sports and is aged between 16-35 and exclude an audience that is aged below the age of 16 or above 35.

2 Consideration

Once you’ve attracted the people who don’t know you yet, you can move on to the second phase: consideration. Now it’s all about engaging the people who know you as well as existing customers. You can build various custom audiences again but make sure to pick the ones your campaign is most relevant for such as most loyal clients, recent buyers, slipping away users etc. In this phase especially, relevancy is key. Your campaigns must be based on the audiences you’ve handpicked. Just like in the first phase, make sure to exclude audiences who have recently converted and A/B test your ad creatives. Thanks to our optimisation engine, your ads will be rotated and tested automatically.

In the case of GoPro, the company can use a link ad to target website custom audiences & engagement audiences to drive people to its website, product audiences to drive to the new product and create custom audiences based on the CRM data using remote audiences. GoPro will exclude audiences who have recently bought a GoPro camera.

3 Transaction

Having engaged the people who know you, it is time to convert them and bring them to the last step of your advertising strategy, namely buying your product. This is usually a smaller group of people that are super close to becoming your leads. In this phase, you want to advertise to website custom audiences and product audiences. By using dynamic ads, you can automatically show the most relevant content to the most relevant audience.
Finally, make sure to exclude people who you don’t want to bother with your ads again such as customers who have recently bought your product. You can do that by using remote audiences.

In the final phase, GoPro will mainly target engagement audiences, website custom audiences and product audiences with a carousel ad as they are most likely to convert and buy the new camera. GoPro will not advertise to people that recently converted. Finally, GoPro will only use the most relevant content as it has reached the end of the funnel, trying to give its audience the last push to buy its newest camera.

Conclusion

By using the principle of the Funnel Management Theory, you can expect high quality leads thanks to our automatic optimisation options. Moreover, you get a completely optimised campaign on ad set and ad level without having to waste time and money. Finally, you are in full control of your customer journey, which can be easily optimised during the campaign to improve relevancy even more.

Even though the Funnel Management Theory seems easy and applicable to all of your campaigns, there is no one-size-fits-all solution to your advertising challenges. Instead of applying the theory to your advertising campaigns and following every step one by one, I would advise to continue to learn and adjust your funnel layers depending on your individual case and performance. In the end, it is best to set up different campaigns for each funnel layer to get more insights more easily.

Keywords

CRM data: CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. At its simplest, a CRM system allows businesses to manage business relationships and the data and information associated with them. CRM is a strategy for managing all your company’s relationships and interactions with your customers and potential customers. It helps you improve your profitability.

Lookalike Audience: A Lookalike Audience is a way to reach new people who are likely to be interested in your business because they’re similar to people who already are. Based on your Custom Audiences, we can start looking for people with similar behaviours or interests. This is a very interesting group depending on the quality of your Custom Audience to reach out to new customers you haven’t been in touch with before.

Remote Audience: We offer a special audience that is directly and indirectly connected to your own CRM database. We can automatically fetch the right people from your CRM and create a remote audience from it. This means that your Custom Audiences will always be up to date increasing your relevancy and results in your campaigns.

Dynamic Ads: Dynamic Ads automatically show the most relevant content to the most relevant audience, based on app or website behaviour. They are created on the fly by using a unique ad template and different elements pulled from your product feed.

A/B test: A/B testing is a process used to measure the impact of a slight change in your ad creative. It allows you to test two variable versions of an ad.

Custom Audience: This audience will let you find your offline audience among people who use Facebook. This audience can be used with other targeting options. You can use email addresses, Facebook IDs, mobile phone numbers, Device IDs as identifiers to create a custom audience.

Website Custom Audience: This audience is based on the people who visit your website. You can include and exclude specific behaviour or visits on your site to create the most optimal group for retargeting.

Dynamic Audience: If you’ve installed the Facebook Pixel, you will know when your products are being viewed, added to your cart or purchases. You can then dynamically serve ads based on the products someone viewed and based on the specific spot they reached in the purchase process.

Product Audience: This audience is based on the people who have bought products in the past and are likely to buy products in the future.

Engagement Audience: This is an audience made up of people who have engaged with your Facebook content. ‘Engagement’ refers to actions like spending time viewing your videos or opening your lead form or Canvas.