
Create engagement, compel your audience, and convert them to customers with these three strategies.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last ten years, you know that social media has created one of the best direct to consumer platforms for businesses to reach their target market.
As social networks like Facebook and Snapchat continue to expand their features, more and more opportunities are being made for businesses to advertise their product/service online and connect with the people that are likely to care about them the most.
However, with increased opportunity comes increased competition. In a March 2016 report, Facebook announced that over 3 million businesses worldwide advertise on their platform, and since then those numbers have more than doubled. To add insult to injury, social media users are more tired of ads than they’ve ever been, often they find them disruptive to their user experience and only 31% reported that they’d actually sit through an entire ad even if it was targeted to their interest; some even went as far to say that they’d rather sit through a television ad before they saw one in their newsfeed.
So, if an increase in competition is saturating the market and Facebook users are tired of seeing ads then why are so many businesses still using Facebook to acquire new customers?
Simply put, because it works!
If you’re currently running Facebook ads and aren’t seeing any results or you’re considering running ad campaigns and want to avoid the pitfalls that lead to high costs-low conversions then read and implement the three strategies below to learn how to create Facebook ads that engage your target market, compel them to act, and ultimately convert them from follower to customer time and time again.
Strategy 1: Create an ad funnel
If you go to Google and type in “How to create Facebook ads” you’ll quickly pull up thousands of links, all claiming to have the secret sauce to create ads that convert. What you’d be hard-pressed to find is any of those articles telling you what an ad funnel is and how to create one- that’s because ad funnels are the secret sauce for any and every Facebook ads agency and freelance marketer. Every ad campaign that converts on Facebook has a funnel as it’s foundation and once you know what an ad funnel is you’ll quickly understand why.
So, what is an ad funnel, you ask?
Great question!
The easiest answer to give without leaving you feeling like you just took a crash course on the theory of relativity is this- an ad funnel is a series of ads or ad campaigns directed at a specific target market intended to move the viewer of the first ad from a follower to a customer.

Click the link below to see a larger version of the funnel and download it to incorporate into your next ad campaign
Click here to download the Facebook Funnel PDF
As you can see in the photo above, Facebook ad funnels can get intricate. This funnel was designed for a client of ours that wanted to not only acquire new customers but also extend the life cycle of their customers through retargeting. The reason you see so many steps in the funnel is that its designed to overcome three core objections your brand will face before a potential customer is willing to make an online purchase:
- Social proof- Does anyone else think this brand is cool?
- Perceived value- What am I going to gain from watching this ad or clicking the link aside from an item that’s on sale?
- Trust- I haven’t seen this brand often, how do I know that I can trust them?
So, in step one, you see that there are two ads running simultaneously, a direct response copy ad and a short 30-45 second video, both leading to a blog post that delivers tremendous value. These serve dual purposes and have several campaign objectives- engagement and link click.
In both campaigns, you want to start with the objective of engagement, meaning, at first you are more concerned with getting a great amount of engagement on each ad than you are with getting link click conversions.
Why?
Because getting a good amount of engagement will overcome the first objection- social proof. If you focus first on getting enough people to engage in the ad then you’ll be more likely to get your link clicks at a lower CPC the second time around since psychologically the viewer will feel that if other people like the ad/offer then they will too. From there, depending on the length of time someone spent on a video or the length of time between the day someone read the blog post, you move them to the second stage of the funnel which is another ad that leads to a lead magnet aka an irresistible free offer that you give in exchange for an email address.
Only once you’ve given a visitor enough social proof through engagement AND delivered a ton of value through a blog post and a lead magnet do you run an ad that leads to a paid offer/product page. This strategy overcomes the second objection of perceived value.
The rest of the funnel is created to overcome the final objection which is trust. Data shows that on average a potential customer needs to see a new brand at least seven times before they make their first purchase, so while someone may watch your ad, opt-in for your lead magnet, and even shop around on your product page chances are they won’t make a purchase yet because they haven’t “seen” you enough times. To overcome that objection and gain their trust you can run a set of ads based on specific retargeting either from your product page, cart page, and even the thank you page of your website to extend the life cycle of the new customer.
- Designing a funnel can be exhausting, but it’s well worth it if you want real results.
This can seem like a lot to take in, let alone implement, but this by far is the number one reason why most businesses fail to make sales conversions through Facebook advertising. If you’re willing to put in the extra work to develop a funnel you’ll greatly increase your chances of success through Facebook advertising.
Strategy 2: Create Copy That Speaks Directly to Your Target Audience
Now you’ve got your ads funnel mapped out, it’s time to tackle the first ad by creating compelling copy that gets your audience to take the desired action. There’s an art to copy and the best copywriters aren’t cheap, usually charging $5000+, luckily there’s one tried and true tactic that you can implement into your copy that, if done right, will compel your audience to move to the next step.
Storytelling
To this day, storytelling is one of the best ways to move people to the desired action if the story you tell speaks directly to your target market. Telling your audience how great your product is or how much time/money it will save them is not enough; remember, you’re in competition with 3,000,000+ other businesses that are probably telling your target audience the same thing. At the end of the day, no one cares to read about what your product does, but they do care to read a great story related your product that resonates with them.

To date, Tai Lopez has the highest viewed and converting ad ever ran on Youtube and it all started with this ad here.
If you’ve never seen the man above in your news feed before his name is Tai Lopez and he’s currently one of the most successful online marketers of this generation. Many can’t stand Tai for the luxury cars and scantily clad women he sprinkles in his ads, but before the videos of him in his big Beverly Hills mansion surrounded by swimsuit models Tai started off with one simple video of him in his garage telling a story that resonated with millions of people worldwide. The story he told in his video was one of a man who grew up on welfare, lived with the Amish, and slept on a couch for years with $42 in his bank account while he struggled to figure out the key to success.
And one day, as he claims, he found it-knowledge.
From there, the rest of the copy in the ad leads to an offer to join his 67 steps to success program.
While the rags to riches story may be overplayed, Tai knew that his target audience was on the hunt for the one thing that would take them from the basement floor to the penthouse suite and he was the man that could give it to them. If Tai had chosen to tell his audience how great the product he was selling is without connecting with them through his story no one would have bought his program, but instead he chose to let his audience know that he was once in their position, he got out of it, and now he wants to help them do the same.
Whether you chose to be the character in the story or not, you want to make sure your ad copy touches on the pain points of your target market and moves them either from the avoidance of pain or towards the satisfaction of pleasure; that’s the kind of copy that compels.
Strategy 3: Utilize the pattern interrupt factor
Since the days of radio, we’ve been conditioned to accept ads as the price we pay for good entertainment, the difference now is that instead of having to sit through the ad to get back to whatever we were doing we can simply scroll past it. This presents a broader problem to business owners who wish to capitalize on Facebook advertising-how do you get your target market to stop what they were doing and pay attention to you?
You must create an ad that’s so visually captivating that it commands the user’s attention and stops them in their tracks. This can be done through a creative video that causes a pattern interrupt.
When you go to create your ad, you need to think about all the things that your target audience is drawn to, and I mean all.
Everything from their favorite color, the type of music they listen to, and the activities that they are interested in playing a role in creating an ad that will make your audience stop what they’re doing and pay attention to what you have to say. The best way to figure out all the things your audience is interested in is to either pay someone to do research on your target market or do it yourself with an activity that I call, The Brain Dump.
The brain dump is one of the quickest and most effective ways to come up with ideas to use in your ads that will create a pattern interrupt in your target audience and get them to view your ad.
Start by taking a sheet of paper and creating four separate columns as follows:
- Activities
- Utilities
- People of Influence
- Desires
Then, go through each category and write down at least twenty different things that relate to your audience and correspond with each category.
For instance, if you sell a high-performance coaching program for people in B2B sales you might fill out the categories like this:
- Activities- Reading personal development books, networking events, healthy living.
- Utilities- Hubspot, Linkedin.
- People of Influence- Brendon Burchard, Grant Cardone
- Desires- Higher closing rations, wealth, job security.
These will serve as ideas that you can use for not only your ads but your targeting as well. Whatever ideas you come up with, make sure they really resonate with your audience to interrupt their pattern and cause them to pay attention.
I know, Facebook advertising isn’t easy but if it didn’t work there wouldn’t be so many businesses pouring their advertising budgets into it. The key to creating successful ad campaigns is to design your ads and strategies in a way that engages, compels, and converts your audience into customers. The three strategies above serve as great starting points, and if you couple them with high-quality professional video then you’re sure to be successful with your advertising campaigns.
Try these three strategies and see how they work for you, if you need help creating high-quality video for you campaigns we’d be more than happy to help. At Business Video Washington D.C. we’ve served hundreds of business owners in the DMV area and we have all the technology and tools you need to make high-quality videos for your marketing needs.
Contact us by clicking here.