Facebook advertising can become boring for your followers if you only offer sales and discounts. Eventually, they’ll end up scrolling past your ads because they will have seen the same offers a hundred times. A great way to change your Facebook advertising strategy is to include customer feedback and testimonials.
If you only offer discounts, you may convert a few followers to paying customers, but the rest might not trust your product yet. Showing them good feedback from existing customers may persuade them to purchase your product, therefore increasing your conversions.
You’ll build trust with your audience and raise more awareness about the real-life benefits of your product by using testimonials in your ads. Client feedback offers personal stories and unique perspectives on your product – something that your followers will appreciate.
They act as social proof that your customers are satisfied with your product or service. Posting good testimonials over time will show your followers that you can provide trustworthy and repeatable results.
Three stages of the testimonial sales funnel
The best way to build a Facebook sales funnel with client testimonials is to do it in three stages. Firstly, create a case study video campaign to raise awareness of your offering. Secondly, share numerous videos of client testimonials to build trust in your offerings. Lastly, create an ad with an offer to persuade your followers to buy your product.
This sales funnel technique will maximise your conversions and make the most of your Facebook ad spend. It will also filter out prospective customers from regular Facebook followers. It can also attract those potential customers who are interested in your offering but haven’t been convinced to make a purchase yet.
Creating a case study video
Your case study video will be used to raise awareness about your offering, even if most of your followers already know what you have to offer. The video should be between one and five minutes long and will provide a context in which someone will use your product or service.
The video will also show how your product or service solves a problem or meets its intended goals, using verifiable data that the audience can trust. Once you have your case study video, you can create the campaign in Facebook Ads Manager.
Open Facebook Ads Manager and click the green ‘+ Create’ button to set up a new campaign. Choose ‘video views’ as the campaign objective and name the campaign something suitable, such as Case Study Video.
Next, set a daily budget that will get you enough views to sustain the other two stages of the sales funnel. Then, create your custom audience in the ‘Audience’ section. Click on the ‘Create new’ drop-down arrow in the ‘New Audience’ section, and choose ‘Custom Audience’.
From there, choose the best option for your business, whether it’s creating an audience from your customer list, a Facebook Pixel on your website, or from users who have engaged with you on social media. Facebook engagement is a great option here, so we’ll go with that.
Once you’ve chosen ‘Engagement’, select your Facebook page from the list – this is where you want to post the video. The second drop-down list provides more engagement options. Choose ‘Everyone who engaged with your page’ to target this specific audience and set the date range to 30 or 60 days.
Next, name this audience and click ‘Create Audience’. Click ‘Done’ and you’ll end up at an ad interface with your custom audience selected. Now, you can choose your location, age, gender and other targeting options – it’s best to select the location but leave the rest of the options at their default because your custom audience will auto target for you.
Choose where you want your video to appear within Facebook and Instagram – longer videos are better placed on Facebook, videos shorter than a minute are good for Instagram. Then, choose how you’d like to be charged.
You can select pay per view (whenever someone watches 10 seconds of your video, Facebook will charge you) or you can choose impressions (you pay for every set of impressions the video receives, such as every 1000 views).
The final step is to create a video advert for your case study video by including text that will appear above the video. This text will entice the audience to watch the video.
Share videos of client testimonials
The second stage of your Facebook sales funnel is to share a few different customer testimonials – five or six should do the trick. You can retarget people who watched at least 50% of your case study video because they are likely to be interested in your product, but just need a little more convincing.
As with the first campaign, create a new one from the Facebook Ads Manager homepage. Name it “Client Testimonials” and select your objective as ‘Reach’. Then, create an ad set in your campaign and name it something relevant. Choose a budget that’s enough to sustain the campaign for the duration that it’ll run for.
Select the ‘Run ads on a schedule’ option at the bottom of the ‘Budget & schedule’ box, then choose a good day and time slot when your followers are most active on Facebook. This will maximise the engagement with your testimonials.
Create a custom audience again, targeting people who watched more than half of your case study video. To do so, select the ‘Engagement’ option once the custom audience window opens. Facebook will ask you “What do you want to use to create this audience?” Select the ‘Video’ option.
You’ll be presented with three options – ‘Engagement’, ‘In the past’ and ‘Audience name’. Click on ‘Browse’ on the right-hand side of the ‘Engagement’ box. This will open a drop-down box where you can select ‘People who have watched at least 50% of your video’.
Next, choose the video on which your custom audience is based (your case study video). Choose your Facebook page from the ‘Page’ drop-down list and select your case study video from the list of options. Click ‘Confirm’ when you’re done.
For the ‘In the past’ option, make it 14 or 21 days – two or three weeks is a good time to retarget previous viewers. Then, give your custom audience a good name (such as 50% case study audience) and click on ‘Create Audience’. You will be shown a screen confirming that your audience is set up and will be ready to use within 30 minutes.
Back in the Ads Manager screen, leave the location, age, gender and detailed targeting at their default settings. Your custom audience will auto-complete these for you. For the placement options, select Facebook Feeds, Instant Articles and Instagram Feed.
If you have more than one client testimonial to share (which you should), you can choose the right frequency to rotate them so that your audience doesn’t see the same ad over and over again. If you select three impressions every day in the ‘Frequency cap’ option boxes, this should be enough to reach your target audience.
The final step is to set up the actual ad, as with the first campaign. Create the ad text to entice the audience to watch the testimonials. You can also include a link to your website to make it easier for customers to find.
Create an ad with an offer
The final campaign involves retargeting people who watched more than half of your case study video once again. You can set up a custom audience to target this group, just as you did with the second campaign. You’ll show this audience an offer for your product or service, such as a discount or free trial.
This campaign will be very similar to your client testimonial campaign, but instead of showing the ad during the week, show it on the weekend. This works well because your advert can be a weekend-only offer, or a Sunday special, for example.
Follow the same setup steps as the second campaign, creating a new one, naming it, giving it a reach objective, scheduling it to run on the weekends and choosing the ‘50% case study audience’ as the custom audience.
Keep the default location, age, gender and targeting options. Make your ‘Frequency cap’ three impressions every day and publish the ad set. Create the conversion offer ad, type the text (include the benefits of your offering and what problems it can solve) and then create the ad.
This completes your Facebook sales funnel using customer testimonials to improve your conversion rate. The entire funnel is an evergreen system that will move followers in and out, based on the audience setting you apply.
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