Reaching Your Audience: Making Your Meta Ads More Effective
In this article
Picture this scenario: Two weeks before an event, you’re asked to run a Facebook ad to boost ticket sales. You’ve got a small budget, so you set up your ad campaign with the objective of sending users who meet your target audience to the event page on your website and… it doesn’t perform the way you’d hoped.
So, what went wrong? Was the campaign time too short? The budget too small? The content not engaging enough? Maybe. But the real question is – was the audience you targeted ready to buy? Probably not.
This article will explain how to make your Meta (Facebook and Instagram) ads more effective by using a marketing funnel and key tools like Meta Pixels and Audiences. You’ll learn how to move users from the awareness stage all the way to taking action on your website.
Demystifying marketing funnels
Many of us will have seen a marketing funnel before, but with endless acronyms and shapes out there – pyramids, cones, and spirals to name just a few – they can feel overwhelming.
A marketing funnel maps out the journey that your audience takes from first hearing about your organisation to deciding to support it. Imagine it as a path that guides people from knowing you exist to becoming supporters or customers. In our model, the journey is broken down into three stages:
- Awareness: This is the starting point where people first learn about your organisation.
- Consideration: Once people know you exist, some of them will want to hear more about what you offer.
- Conversion: Here, the person takes action, such as buying a ticket, signing up for your newsletter, or making a donation.
The right place at the right time
But why should you move your Facebook and Instagram ad audiences through a funnel?
With over 37 million Facebook users in the UK, targeting everyone isn’t an option – especially if you have limited resources – so you need to understand how much they know about you before you begin. On average, in any given market only 3% of people are ready to buy, while 60% don’t even know that they have a need to be fulfilled.
A marketing funnel allows you to gradually warm up your audience, ensuring you’re delivering the right message to the right people at the right time. Instead of focusing on broad demographics, you can segment your audience based on their level of engagement and move them through each funnel stage.
You should map each of your audience segments onto a funnel, as they may be at different stages at different times. Audience segments are groups of people categorised by their behaviours, interests, and levels of engagement with your organisation. By understanding these, you can tailor your ads to speak directly to the needs and interests of each group, increasing your chances of conversion. Find out more about segmenting your audiences and creating personas.
Meta Tools
Once you’ve mapped out your audience journey, the Meta Pixel and Audiences can help you move them through the funnel more effectively.
The Meta Pixel
The Meta Pixel is a small piece of code that you place on your website to track visitor actions and understand how people interact with you after seeing your ads. It helps you to create custom audiences – users who have already interacted with your organisation – and retarget them based on their behaviour. Retargeting involves serving ads to these audiences based on their previous actions, encouraging them to take the next step in their journey.
Meta Pixels allow you to be more precise in your targeting, using your ad budget more efficiently by reaching those most likely to convert.
You can find out more about Meta Pixels, what they do and how to add them to your website, here.
Meta Audiences
Meta offers three key audience types to help target the right people:
- New Audiences: This audience is exactly what it sounds like – people who haven’t interacted with your organisation before. When you create a new audience, you’re typically targeting people based on their location, age, gender, interests, or behaviours. These “cold” audiences would be used in the awareness stage of your campaign.
- Custom Audiences: Users who have already engaged with your organisation and have had that action tracked by your Meta Pixel. These “warm” audiences are perfect for the consideration and conversion stages.
- Lookalike Audiences: A lookalike audience helps you find people who are similar to (or look like) your existing custom audience, based on characteristics like interests, behaviours, and demographics. This is a great way to find new potential customers for the awareness stage of your campaign.
Find out how to set up custom audiences and lookalike audiences.
Not every audience starts at the top of the funnel
You can also retarget some of your existing audiences by uploading data from your mailing list or CRM, to create a custom audience of those individuals, allowing you to target them in your social media advertising. Find out how to create a customer list custom audience.
However – a word of warning: It is the page owner’s responsibility to ensure that the correct policies for marketing are in place, not Meta’s. Before you start creating custom or lookalike audiences or add a Meta Pixel to your site, it is vital that you check your website’s privacy policy, cookie policy and terms and condition and update them if necessary. You can also only upload lists to Meta if you requested opt-in from individuals when you collected their data. Finally, it is recommended that your legal team or a lawyer sign off your privacy policy before you start advertising.
For more information around data privacy and online tracking, see this recorded webinar from our Data Analytics and Insights Tech Champion.
Aligning Meta’s ad objectives and content to your marketing funnel
Now you have segmented your audiences, you’re ready to create your campaigns. When you set up your ads, Meta offers objectives that align with each funnel stage. Below are the key objectives and how they work.
Awareness
At this stage, your goal is to let people know you exist. The Awareness objective is ideal for reach, video views, or introducing audiences to what you do or where you are.
- Pros: Whether you’re launching a new show, promoting an event, or trying to build brand awareness, this will help you reach a large audience and lay the groundwork for future engagement. You could use content like a season launch video or share a new fundraising initiative.
- Cons: While awareness is critical, it may not lead to immediate action or measurable outcomes, as you’re not asking the audience to do anything at this point.
Consideration
Once audiences know about you, they can be retargeted using the Traffic and Engagement objectives. These are great for sending users to your website, Instagram profile or Facebook event, and for actions including link clicks, and landing page views.
- Pros: This stage nurtures potential customers, allowing you to share richer, more specific content to prepare them for conversion. For these ads, you may use warmer messaging or event-specific content.
- Cons: Consideration campaigns can be more complex and require compelling content to avoid users losing interest, and they might not yield immediate conversions.
Conversion
At the final stage, the goal is to get people to take action, whether that is buying a ticket, signing up, donating, or calling you. Use Meta’s Sales or Leads objectives to retarget users from the consideration stage.
- Pros: Retargeting engaged audiences makes conversions more likely, maximising the efficiency of your ad spend. This stage can result in immediate and measurable actions. You would use warmer messaging and direct calls to action in these ads, like “Book Now”.
- Cons: These campaigns often have the highest cost per result, and if your audience hasn’t been nurtured enough, conversions may be lower than expected.
As your audience moves through your funnel, they could see at least 3 of your ads. In the later stages of the funnel, warm messaging is key to engaging audiences. By varying your content, copy, and call to action, you can keep your campaign fresh and avoid ad fatigue. Tailor your messaging to match the audience’s stage in the funnel to ensure your ads remain engaging and effective.
Find out more about Meta ad objectives.
Create a campaign plan
Now that you know who you’re targeting and how you’ll move them through the funnel, it is worth having a campaign plan for your ads so that you know what you will run and when.
You should include the following for each audience:
- Audience objective e.g. ticket sales
- Conversion action on your website e.g. successful purchase
- Measure of success e.g. number of tickets sold
- Timeline
- Audience
- The marketing funnel steps to get them there for Awareness, Consideration and Conversion ads, including:
-
- Dates for each advert
- Targeting e.g. new, custom or lookalike audiences
- Ad objective and target
- Budget
- Content, copy and call to action:
Once you have this mapped out it will form your campaign strategy. You can use our campaign plan template or create your own.
In summary
Planning your Meta ads around a marketing funnel allows you to shift from reactive, underperforming campaigns to a more strategic, long-term approach that builds awareness, nurtures engagement, and drives conversions. With tools like the Meta Pixel and Audiences, you can target the right people at the right time and tailor your content to match their stage in the journey. This strategic approach helps you maximise your budget, achieve better results, and ultimately grow your audience.
Further support
The Digital Culture Network is here to support you and your organisation. Our Tech Champions can provide free one-to-one support to all creative and cultural organisations who are in receipt of, or eligible for, Arts Council England funding. If you need help or would like to chat with us about any of the advice we have covered above, please get in touch. Sign up for our newsletter below and follow us on X (Twitter) @ace_dcn for the latest updates.