For businesses looking to advertise their goods and services and connect with their target market, Facebook has emerged as a key platform. Facebook offers enormous possibilities for businesses to interact with their customers and develop their brands, with over 2.7 billion monthly active users.
A Facebook waterfall strategy is one of the most efficient Facebook video ad methods to reach new customers on Facebook. This is because you qualify your leads as they go through the marketing process keeping your cost low and the quality of your marketing lead high.
A Facebook waterfall campaign is a collection of three to four Facebook video ads intended to lead the viewer through the purchasing process.
The initial video typically serves as an attention-grabbing hook, with a brief introduction to the product or service.
Each subsequent video ad can be longer and cover more ground once the user is fully engaged and interested in the product or service.
In addition, each video has a link to a landing page that features the video and asks viewers to either buy something or sign up for email or SMS updates.
What Are Facebook Waterfall Campaigns?
Facebook waterfall campaigns are so named because the video ads theoretically waterfall into each other.
Each video ad builds on the previous one and requires that the viewer has watched the previous video ad before seeing the current one.
The first video is brief and attention-grabbing to draw in viewers, and the subsequent videos capitalize on this interest by giving viewers more details about the good or service.
Depending on your USP you may find that it is valuable to have multiple intro videos. Having multiple intro videos will allow you to gather more important on what messaging is connecting with your target audience.
Future video ads can then be optimized using this data to make sure they are reaching the proper people.
The First Video Ad
Facebook waterfall campaigns enable businesses to connect with a larger audience pool. I recommend you use Facebook's traffic campaign objective to maximize your landing page traffic and clicks.
In the past, Facebook managers would not recommend that you run Facebook traffic campaigns.
The reason for this is that the traffic that comes to your site may not be as qualified as leads generated from the sales objective, resulting in wasted resources.
This has changed for two reasons.
First, we are looking to generate the volume that the traffic campaign provides us and then ruthlessly cut out those who do not meet our set criteria.
We do this by generating video ad content that is very targeted to who we believe our customer is.
To start out, we are going to require that users viewed our whole video, 100%, or at least 75%. This should cut out any viewers who are not interested and provide more top of funnel traffic for cheaper then running a straight sales objective for your Facebook waterfall ads.
Secondly, tracking has changed for Facebook ads. This has made it harder to track the progress of you customers.
The results is that the volume of traffic coming in from a sales objective may not generate the return we are looking for.
Follow Up Videos
Now that our new potential customer know who we are we can run longer follow up video to get them to like and trust us.
In the following videos we will want to create custom audiences of people who have watched through decreasing percentages of our video ads.
We do this for two reasons.
Because the videos are longer and we want to catch most if not all of these people.
Because the viewers should be more qualified the further they go along the process.
Emails + SMS
If anyone indicates interest by signing up as a lead be sure to email send an SMS follow up. If these potential customers visit your landing page move them along to the next video ad, more on this below.
Final Landing Page
Anyone who has watched the fourth video or gone to the final landing page and not bought should receive retargeting ads before being dropped into your regular retargeting campaigns.
Speaking of retargeting campaigns. It is a good idea to exclude your landing page visitors from your general retargeting campaigns until they either purchase or exit the funnel.
How to create a successful Facebook Waterfall Campaign
A well-planned and thorough understanding of the target audience are necessary to develop a successful Facebook waterfall campaign. Below are some helpful tips when creating your own Facebook waterfall campaign.
Set Up Your Target Audience: Reach New Customers And Existing Customers
When launching your Facebook waterfall campaign you can segment your audience into two buckets new customers and existing customers.
If the product or service you are promoting are not time-sensitive, I recommend that you run your existing customers to your video ad landing page via SMS or Email first.
By doing this you can gather a baseline of data from your most valuable customers to determine if allocating any budget to Facebook Video Ads makes sense.
Keep in mind that if your existing customers who love you are not purchasing or moving along the funnel, odds are potential customers who don't know your brand will not.
Messaging: Develop A Framework For Communicating With Your Audience
Develop the message you will use is important for creating brand awareness and achieving your campaign objective.
In this example, I'm using know, like, trust, and convert.
The first step is to get potential customers to know who we are. This is accomplished by explaining what your business stands for and how you are different than competitors.
The next video ad should get potential customers to like us and our message.
Throwing in some humor or personal stories will help to engage your audience.
The third video should build trust with potential customers.
Finally, the fourth video should prompt viewers to convert by utilizing CTAs like "Learn More," "Sign Up" or "Buy Now."
If you are looking for a Facebook video ad testing process. You can read my 4-step video ad testing process here.
Video Ads: What Watch Percentage Should I Set For My Waterfall Video Ads
Here are some general guidelines for your Facebook video waterfall campaign.
Play with the front-end percentage. A higher watch requirement will bring in a lower volume. Conversely, if not enough traffic is coming through consider easing off the percentage requirement.
The length of your video is important. You want it to be long enough that it takes some investment, but not to long or some qualified leads may fall outside of your retargeting for video 2.
If your first video is not converting consider your USP may not be connecting with your audience and consider testing different marketing angles.
Each video after the first should have an easier watch requirement as a lot of qualifications happened in the first video ad.
The final video should be a culmination of everything mentioned in the previous three and have a strong CTA.
Landing Pages: Important For Retargeting With Other Marketing Channels
Your final landing page after video 4 will sell your final product or service.
It is up to you to decide if it is wise to advertise your core offer on landing pages for videos 1, 2, and 3.
If you decide not to do this you can add in bonus material/lead magnets to drive lead generation and cut down further on your costs.
Your landing page is an important piece of this campaign as any traffic here can be retargeted by other campaigns in other marketing channels.
In addition, if you have lead gen goals for your company these pages can be a key factor in helping you reach those numbers.
Save Money: Use Email/SMS Follow Up When Possible
For your existing customer base and any potential customers who provide you with lead details, communicate by Email or SMS first. This will be cheaper than spending on any ad campaign.
If the potential customer goes to your landing page via your email or SMS we want to exclude them from seeing the next video ad...
You can exclude these people by creating a custom audience of everyone who has been to that landing page.
In the below example, I created an audience of people who have been to the second landing page.
I then exclude those people from seeing the ad for video ad 2.
Now starting with video ad 3 I will include all visitors who visited landing page 2.
I can repeat this process for video ad 4.
Measuring the Success of Facebook Waterfall Campaigns
Measuring the success of your Facebook campaign can be difficult. This has been accentuated by the recent loss in tracking by Facebook. For more on this lookup Facebook tracking and IOS 14.5
Luckily if this is important to you the Facebook waterfall campaign can help us better track our results.
The way we do this is by isolating our Facebook video ad funnel and using Google Analytics.
To isolate the funnel, we only run Facebook video ads to these landing pages, we don't continue to mingle existing customer traffic with the funnel or run Adwords ads to it.
Any traffic that comes to these landing pages can be assumed to be Facebook traffic.
Using Google Analytics we can then get a clear picture of the conversion rate along every step of the funnel.
Using Google Analytics to track your traffic and revenue numbers should help you align your Facebook marketing efforts with the rest of your business.
Ultimately, as with any campaign, we are going to measure our success using the following formula.
Visitors X Average Order Value X Conversion Rate = Revenue.
Facebook Waterfall Campaigns Are A Cost Efficient Way To Weed Out Bad Leads
Tracking Facebook ad performance is getting harder. Generating a large volume of traffic to your site and converting them through a proven funnel is an excellent way to cut costs. We then use other methods like Google Analytics to track campaign performance.
Need help creating a custom Facebook Ad Strategy for your business? Book a call with me.
Comments