3.1 Understanding Funnels

Welcome to chapter 3 of this course on Facebook and Instagram advertising.

In the last chapter, we focused on how you can understand the business and its people better, before you start setting up your campaigns. Now, in this chapter, we're going to dig deeper into marketing.

Why marketing?

Because you are a marketer first and a paid-ads specialist second. Essentially, marketing is the ability to understand how humans think and behave - how they make decisions, and how you can help guide them towards the journey you want them to take. Like we mentioned early on, our goal isn't just to teach you how to run a bunch of ads - it's to help you get actual results for your clients. And to get results you need to understand how marketing works.

To do that, we’re going to introduce you to a very important concept in marketing - funnels.

Now, this is a term used across the world, but most people don't truly get what it is, and that’s usually because we’ve over-complicated it. To be honest, though, it's quite simple. To help explain what funnels are, let's take an interesting example - marriage.

Yup. That’s right, marriage.

There are several different journeys two people take to reach the point where they get married. 

Some couples may have met at a party where they hit it off, exchanged numbers, maybe texted for a bit, and started meeting more frequently before they finally started dating. Another couple might have been friends for years before it became a romantic thing. Or sometimes, they may have just met for a couple of days before they decided to get married–not super ideal but hey, who makes the rules? Oh and there's cases where the decision is made by the parents and the couple just kinda turn up for the wedding but this, by and large, is not the case.

In most cases, couples go on a journey from the point of being strangers to being married and the same is true for the way people engage with businesses. It’s always a journey. 

One user might come to a business, take time to understand the product or offering, test out the product, and then over-time become convinced enough to buy from the business. Another person might take a much lesser time to reach that point and buy almost instantly.

This has a lot to do with the customer themselves, the type of business and the need it meets. The point is - people buying or engaging with brands is always a journey. And we call them ‘buyer journeys’. Pretty straightforward.

Now, why is this so important?

Well, going back to the marriage example, if a guy walked up to a girl at a bus stop and got down on one knee, would she say yes?

Of course not - they are total strangers. That would be a terrible decision.

But somehow, most ad campaigns out there are trying to do just that. It’s ridiculous. They run these ads asking customers to take a big leap with them and buy their products when they haven't yet taken the time to introduce themselves or build trust. Which is why it's essential to understand that people engage with brands through journeys.

Now there are different journeys a user might take in buying from a business.

Let's take our favorite online flower store example - one person might see an ad on instagram, go to the website and buy flowers on there. Another user might search for flower stores online and find the store in the listing. And yet another person might talk to a friend who recommends our flower store and then comes to the website to buy.

Each of these different journeys is what we call a funnel.

A funnel is basically a unique buyer journey that a user would take to engage with a business.

For example - Instagram Ad to Website to Purchase is a funnel. Now this is the most basic format of a funnel. It gets deeper and more nuanced but this is a great place for you to start thinking about funnels.

We want you to be able to understand each concept at a simple level before we get deeper into it and our hope is, this episode has accomplished exactly that. We'll talk more about funnels in the next episode, so I’ll see you there.

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