In this blog post we cover how to utilize Facebook Live as a Sales Funnel.
By the end of this blog post you will learn how to integrate Facebook live with your sales funnel and have it to scale further.
A sales funnel is defined as the buying process that you lead your audience through when they purchase your products. This is divided into several steps and generally has a Front End offer and then an Up Sell or a Down Sell. The model and the steps involved vary from business to business and all funnels have one thing in common which is to induce a high degree of selling and purchasing with the customer.
There are 3 ways to integrate Facebook live into your sales funnel.
The first is to have a “call to action” in your livestream. A call to action or CTA for short is a directive issued by you as the brand or the business owner to have the audience to take a form of action.
That action can be expressed as “sharing a link”, “click and go to a website”, “click and download now and of course”, my favorite, “buy this now”.
You would be surprised as to how many business owners and brands fail at this part. They hesitate to ask for the sale because of limiting beliefs and self sabotage resulting in an awkward sales pitch.
CTAs are done at the end of your livestream because trust and credibility would have been built between you and your audience. If you ask someone to buy at the beginning of the livestream, it doesn’t make sense because they have yet to get to know, like or trust you and people buy from people that they trust.
You can also combine CTAs with scarcity tactic where you limit the product or promotional offering by limiting quantity or limiting time.
For example, for the first 5 to register you will get a bonus valued at $5,000 or second example is buy this now at a promotional price of $197 and save $400 only for the next 72 hours.
The second way is to add a link that leads to the sales page for your product or service. It is recommended to add the link once you are done streaming because you want to have the focus on the livestream.
If you add or reveal the link too early before your call to action, your audience would potentially have the perception that all you care about is sales and money. You will then lose their trust and potentially them as your audience.
To track and analyze clicks on your link, use link management services such as bitly.com. It’s free to use and you can customize your link to look more professional and branded instead of a jumbled up computer generated link. For example, bit.ly/72hourfiresale.
The free Bitly account also offers you analytics on total clicks on the link and the location and origin of the clicks. This is important because the data received will help you plan better for your next marketing campaign. The premium account offers more robust data such as a detailed report on the time the link is clicked.
The third way to integrate Facebook Live into your sales funnel is through content. Content is the hook in getting your audience interested in your product offering. It is the bridge between you and your visitors.
The content shared needs to be of value and of relevance to your audience. It is best that the content provides a solution to a painful problem that they are experiencing. Serve them at the highest degree and you will find that your audience will follow you because you are an expert authority.
Now that we have covered 3 ways to integrate Facebook Live into your sales funnel, next you would want to develop a scalable sales funnel. There are 3 stages to that.
The first stage is to attract visitors. When you are livestreaming on Facebook, the first step is to get as many of your audiences from other social media sites to watch your stream. You can do that by announcing the details to your livestream across all your social media sites. Then the challenge is how do you get new visitors and turn them into prospects and customers?
There are 2 surefire ways.
The first is paid advertising on Facebook. Highlight their interest, solution to their problem or a benefit and have them sign up to be reminded on the livestream. This is a good way to attract new visitors and also build up your mailing list which you can maximize revenue from the list later through email marketing.
The second way is to strategically set up 2-3 short livestream sessions detailing that you will be having a Facebook live session on a particular date and time and covering a certain topic.
Then you deploy the scarcity tactic and let the viewers who are tuning in know that you are not sure if you will do another Facebook live session again after that, so if they know or want someone to benefit from the upcoming Facebook live session, tag them in the comment section below and remind them to make time for it. This way, you get free word of mouth advertising.
The second stage is converting your visitors into prospects. Here, you offer something of value in exchange for their name and email address. This is again, to build your mailing list which in turn, builds your online business because the rule of thumb for any online business is that if you do not have a list, you do not have a business.
In the offer to your visitors, you can do a giveaway in the form of an eBook, video training or templates. There are many types of giveaways and the three mentioned are generally the easiest to produce with high perceived value from the public. Do note that your content needs to be specific, adds value and targets a specific niche or problem area for your customers.
The third stage is converting your prospects into customers. In this stage is where you sell or make an offer. There are multiple ways to make an offer to your audience and it is generally divided into two paths; direct and indirect.
In direct, we’re talking about hard selling to your audience where you make an offer at high energy and deploy scarcity tactics, price slashes, discounts and disqualifying your audiences.
In indirect, you make the intention to sell upfront and at the end of the livestream, you reveal the details of the offer.
There are no hard and fast rules on which method works better than the other because each path has its own pros and cons.
To determine which path to take, first you must determine your brand values. Is your brand vocal, passive or active? If you deploy hard selling tactics, does it match your brand values?
Next is to understand the context or circumstances in which your audiences were brought in. Was the context set at the beginning indicate to your audience that there will be hard selling?
When you have decided on the two mentioned criteria, next is to test it out. Execute the tactics and evaluate the results. If it is not getting you the results that you want, review, do an evaluation and change things up. Remember that your goal doesn’t change but how you get there can be flexible.
Once you’ve found a pattern that works for you, next is to scale it up by pumping in money for advertising to funnel in as many visitors as you can into the Facebook livestream.
Most sales funnels end here but hey, here is a bonus stage for you. The bonus stage is turning your customers into your dedicated promoters. This will help you maximize on free advertising through word of mouth and opinion leadership.
This is where you introduce a referral or affiliate program. There are two ways you can deploy this which are either public or exclusive.
Public would be openly informing every visitor on your website that you have an affiliate/referral program and they are to sign up at a separate page for more details.
In exclusive, what you can do is to pull up sales data and filter out customers who have already bought your products or engaged with your services. They are then sent a private invitation to be an affiliate where they can earn extra income by promoting the product or service.
They will receive commissions for every customer that they bring in that purchases the product or service and you can decide for the commissions to be either in percentage or fixed rate.
Through 3+1 stages of Facebook Live Sales Funnel, you are maximizing your opportunities to turn visitors into your potential loyal customers.
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In the next blog post we will discuss How To Generate More Leads After Your Livestream.
Til next time.
Moni Arora
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