{"componentChunkName":"component---src-templates-blog-post-js","path":"/blog/nurturing-customers-to-convert-through-social-marketing-ads","result":{"data":{"post":{"metaTags":null,"title":"Nurturing Customers to Convert through Social Marketing Ads","date":"2026-07-13","content":"

Awareness to Action: The Essential Guide to Social Ad Nurturing

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Have you ever asked somebody to marry you on a first date? How about answering the door to a stranger and lending them £100? The answer is probably not! 

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That’s because connections and trust take time to build; this theory can also be applied to Paid Social Media Advertising. Asking potential customers to purchase a product or service from your business, or even share their data with you for a callback or a quote, is likely to prove unsuccessful if they are unaware of you in the first place.

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You may get lucky and advertise your services to somebody who needs what your business is offering at the perfect time, but on the whole, this is unlikely. Relying on luck isn’t a strategy, and by doing so, you could cost your business a lot of money.

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The Role of the Sales Funnel in Social Media Advertising

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The key to a successful social media advertising campaign is nurturing prospective customers through each stage of the sales funnel, from brand awareness and consideration through to the final conversion stage.

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Awareness

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Whether you are a start-up, a well-established business or somewhere in between, brand awareness campaigns will always have their place within social media advertising. 

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These campaigns are all about introducing (or reintroducing) your company, product or service to a cold audience in a cost-effective way. When it comes to traditional advertising, these types of campaigns would typically be run using billboards, flyers or taking out a page in a local newspaper or magazine, but do you really know who is looking at these? 

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With social media advertising, you get to decide the age of your audience, the location in which you want your ads to show (locally, regionally, nationally or even globally!), and the interests that these people should have - for example, if you’re selling children's clothes, you can ensure you are placing your ads in front of parents, rather than just everybody within a certain age group. 

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Once your brand awareness ads are up and running, it’s what you do next that is important. Your ads are now being displayed to people you want to see them, but moving the engaged users from awareness to consideration is key.

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Capturing Engaged Audiences

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To do this, you can set up a series of audiences that are segmented from the cold audience above, including: 

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These people haven’t simply seen your ad and moved on, they engaged with the content you’ve shared, and they are now qualified to move on to the consideration stage.

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It’s important to remember that you won’t necessarily receive direct conversions from your brand awareness campaigns; they exist to warm up audiences, hence typically costing pence per thousand recipients.

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Consideration

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At the consideration level, instead of spreading the net wide and trying to capture everybody, you want to specifically target the people who have engaged with your ads at brand awareness level. This is where your ‘warm’ audiences come into play.

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These users have shown some form of initial interest, whether it be liking an ad, clicking through to your Facebook/Instagram profile, or even watching your video for a certain amount of time.

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With website traffic ads, you will want to send your prospective customer to either a specific landing page, a blog article or even a product catalogue so they can find out even more about what it is you offer. At this point, you no longer need to ‘introduce’ yourself or your brand to your audience, but instead educate them and show why they should trust and consider your product or service - five-star reviews and video testimonials are a great way to do this.

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In theory, by running these ads alongside brand awareness ads, you should see a noticeable difference in the cost per landing page view (CPLPV) compared to targeting a cold audience. While a cold audience might occasionally give you a cheaper CPLPV on paper, the lack of nurturing usually means those users spend little to no time on your website, highlighting that your ad budget is being wasted on unqualified traffic.

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Meta Pixel and CAPI

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You want to ensure that you have the Meta Pixel and CAPI (Conversions API) installed on your website to maximise the benefit of the traffic coming through to your website.

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By having the Pixel installed, you can create remarketing audiences based on actions that people have taken off the back of your ads, which you can then use in the conversion stage of the funnel. These audiences could be:

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Once a potential customer has taken these actions on your website, it’s time to move over to the conversion stage to generate new leads for your business.

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Conversion

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So far, you’ve nurtured your target audience through brand awareness and consideration campaigns. Now you’re ready to put action-oriented ads in front of them.

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Whether you are going to be using lead generation forms on Facebook and Instagram, e-commerce product ads or website conversion campaigns, these are the final pieces of the sales funnel.

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Website Conversion Ads

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Website conversion ads have a similar goal; however, these users are sent back to the website instead of completing a form on social media. By using the Meta Pixel and CAPI, you can target specific events on the website (such as contact form ‘submit’ buttons or phone number clicks). Meta can then optimise your campaigns, specifically targeting users within your hot audience who are more likely to take that desired action.

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E-commerce/Shopping Ads

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For e-commerce, if a customer has been to your website, viewed a series of products and even added to the basket and not checked out, you can show these exact products back to them! These potential customers have spent their own time, with the assistance of your strategic ads, looking through the products you have to offer. Remarketing these products back to them is a no-brainer - a nice little discount could also convince them to convert here.

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Lead Generation Ads

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Lead gen form ads are a great solution that allows your now ‘hot’ audience to contact you quickly and efficiently while on the social platform itself. These forms enable you to determine what bio data you collect, for example, name, email address, postcode, and much more. We also recommend introducing questions with single/multi-choice options that are specific to your business offering, so these prospective customers can qualify which service they are interested in.

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Lookalike Audiences

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It doesn’t end there with conversion ads, though. Now that you’re receiving conversion data from your campaigns, you can create lookalike audiences, where Meta takes the demographics, behaviours, and online habits of a current audience to create a brand-new one that may have been missed. 

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For example, you can create a lookalike audience based on everyone who has completed a contact form on your website in the last 90 days. Similarly, for lead generation campaigns, you can build lookalikes of people who have successfully opened and submitted a lead form. 

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These new audiences can then be fed back into the original brand awareness campaigns, keeping your sales funnel flowing.

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In summary, providing a cold customer base with conversion ads without nurturing them through the sales funnel is a risky tactic that lacks strategy and costs you more. Having a strategy which feeds a potential audience through a journey that explains who you are, why they should use your services or products and finally encourages them to sign up, buy or get in contact thanks to positive reviews, attractive USPs or special deals will be a lot more productive to your business.

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