The success of your business and sales depend on connecting with people and convincing them to buy what you’re selling.
This is why social media is such a powerful tool—because it allows you to connect with people in a way that was previously impossible. You can reach out to people who share your interests and connect with them on a deeper level, and you can also connect with brands in a way that allows you to get your message across to the right people at the right time.
A social media marketing funnel helps you to understand what kind of content to post on your social media pages to encourage customers to take a specific action. A marketing funnel is a tool that outlines the journey that customers take from first becoming aware of a product or service, to eventually becoming a loyal customer. By understanding this journey, you can better tailor your social media content to encourage the desired action from customers.
In this article you will know about creating a successful social media marketing strategy:
A Social Media Marketing Funnel
The marketing funnel is a model that describes the path a customer takes from being aware of your product to becoming a customer. It details the different touchpoints that a user normally goes through before making a purchase.
Different cases label the funnel slightly differently, but the idea is the same.
Typically the stages of the social media marketing funnel are described like this:
- Awareness: first becoming aware of your brand or product
- Consideration: finding out more about it, comparing different options
- Conversion: making a purchase, starting a trial, or becoming a lead for sales
Depending on your strategy, sometimes also include the post-conversion stages of:
- Loyalty: existing customer satisfaction, upselling
- Advocacy: spreading the word and becoming an ambassador for your brand
the common goal of achieving desired business outcomes. The social media marketing funnel is a process that starts with potential leads and ends with conversions. At each stage of the funnel, businesses have the opportunity to reach out to their potential audience and lead them further down the funnel. The goal of the social media marketing funnel is to allow businesses to achieve their desired business outcomes. To achieve this goal, businesses need to collaborate with different stakeholders within their company.
- Sales: providing insights about target markets, audiences, and accounts
- Paid social: targeting your potential audience with the right message, driving the goals of each funnel step
- Organic social: managing content pillars to capture interest and delight your audience
- Community management: engaging with users and followers, leading a conversation, and providing customer service through social channels
Although the customer journey is not always a linear path, the funnel model can be a helpful way to visualize the steps a customer takes before converting. Sometimes customers will revisit your site multiple times or take actions through different channels before finally converting.
It is important to have the correct expectations and KPIs for each social media funnel step and be aware of the attribution you use to measure them.
Building a Social Media Marketing Funnel
Who is your target audience and where do they spend their time? This is important to know before you begin to reach out to them on social media.
Who are you Trying to Reach?
Think about what shared attributes your target audience has.
- Where and how to they spend their free time?
- What kind of content interests them?
- What kinds of challenges do they face?
- What brings them relief and joy?
You can learn some of this information from customer and market research, and from your organization’s sales and customer service teams.
Work with the information you have and gain more knowledge through testing.
Where to Reach Them?
It is important to research the demographic and usage of different social media platforms to determine which ones will be most effective in reaching your target audiences.
You should target the platforms where your audience spends their time and test different platforms to see which is most effective for each step of the funnel.
1. Know your audience
If you have been to a sales conference, you will know that sales is all about the process of narrowing down potential customers.
Social media marketing is no different than any other kind of marketing. However, before you can start building your social media sales funnel, you need to understand what a social media sales funnel is and what needs to go into it.
To create an effective social media marketing funnel, you must first understand your target audience and how to speak directly to them.
People generally don’t purchase items from brands that they don’t trust. Therefore, if you can create a connection with potential customers and get them interested in your content, there’s a higher likelihood that they will make a purchase when they need what you’re offering.
However, if you don’t know your audience before starting this process, all this work will be for nothing because your message won’t resonate with anyone.
What are your company’s values? What do you want customers to associate your brand with? Who do you want as customers? Which customer will benefit most from what you offer?
2. Identify the right channels for your audience
What is the best way to determine which social media platform will work best for your business?
The best way to find potential customers is to look at where they are.
There are a lot of people on social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter that you can reach out to. However, not all of them will be interested in your business.
If you want to generate more leads, focus on the channels where people have already demonstrated an interest in the type of content you share.
Instead of wasting your time trying to connect with people who don’t care about your interests, focus on those who have already shown an interest in what you’re doing.
If you want to get people talking about your brand, one of the best ways to do it is to use social proof. This is when people see that others are using and talking about your brand, and it makes them want to do the same.
You can create social proof by getting influencers to talk about your brand, by using social media, and by using word-of-mouth marketing. If you want people to start talking about your brand, a great way to do that is by using social proof. This is when people see that others are using and talking about your brand, and it makes them want to do the same.
You can create social proof by getting influencers to talk about your brand, by using social media, and by using word-of-mouth marketing.
A large portion of creating a productive social media marketing strategy involves building a supportive and engaged community around your brand.
The more likes, comments, and shares your content gets, the more likely people are to see it. When your content is shared, it helps create social proof, which is basically when people see that others are interested in what you’re posting, and they’re more likely to engage with it themselves.
Social proof is when people do what others do because they think others know what they’re doing.
A book is more likely to be bought if it is recommended by many people rather than just one.
You can increase the credibility of your social media marketing by publishing testimonials and reviews from customers on your business page, or by using user-generated content.
4. Build your email list with an opt-in freebie
As stated in the text, the first step to creating a social media marketing funnel that is effective is to grow your email list.
When you do this, you create a way to more easily connect with and build a relationship with every lead who opts in to your list.
What is an opt-in freebie?
An opt-in freebie is an incentive you offer in exchange for the lead’s email address. The freebie can be anything from:
- A downloadable PDF or checklist—like “How To Write Headlines That Get Clicks (And Drive More Traffic)” or “25 Lead Magnet Ideas To Grow Your Email List”.
- An access link to video training—like “How To Write Blog Posts That Convert Readers Into Email Subscribers”. Or, it can be something else entirely like:
- A coupon code—like 10% off their next order from your online store.
- Early access to an upcoming product launch—like early registration for a new product launch.
- Access to exclusive content that isn’t available anywhere else on the web—like how-to guides, tips & tricks, and other content that is only available through signing up for your newsletter.
5. Use a branded hashtag to encourage user-generated content
When it comes to increasing their presence in search rankings, social media marketers have learned that a social media presence on Twitter and Facebook is essential.
More than half of all B2B marketers have at least one social media account, but less than a quarter are using them for marketing purposes.
Although there has been some progress in social media strategy for B2B brands, there is still room for improvement, according to LinkedIn’s first-ever State of the Industry Report.
The majority of respondents think that improving social media initiatives is one of the most important goals for their business or sector in 2016, second only to increasing revenues.
The report found that social media is not as big of a priority for companies as it was in 2015, but companies are still spending a lot of money on marketing efforts.
6. Optimize awareness campaign performance
Review your campaign’s success by looking at the campaign’s analytics against your original objectives.
Some things to consider:
- Which audience segments or targeting methods bring the best results? Does your targeting need adjusting?
- Is your budget distributed so your focus segments and markets get their rightful share?
- Think, what’s more important to you—maximizing your reach among a certain key audience or market, even if that means higher costs or maximizing your reach while optimizing the cost?
- Is one of your creatives underperforming, and can you make changes to it? What can you learn from the highest performing creatives?
The LinkedIn demographics report can help you determine if your ads are being seen by the right people in terms of job titles, seniority levels, industries, and companies. If they are not, you may need to adjust your targeting.
7. Optimize consideration campaign performance
You can see how well your campaign is doing by comparing it against benchmarks. These benchmarks can be from your industry or from general performance standards.
Here are some other tips on what to look for in the consideration stage:
- Analyze the volume and quality of the website traffic coming from your social media campaigns. In your analytics tool, pay attention to the bounce rate and time spent on site after arriving through your ads.
- Is your engagement rate up to the expected level, and what’s the quality of engagements? Remember to monitor the comments and replies you receive and perform community management.
- Have your conversion campaigns completed the learning phase and started delivering fully? If not, maybe adjust your targeting to gain more data for the platform to optimize for your goal.
- If you’re using micro-conversions as your campaign goal, are conversions coming in, or have you set the bar too high? Aiming for conversion events that are too far along the purchase flow in the consideration stage can easily lead to an unreasonably high cost per action.
8. Optimize conversion campaign performance
The time has come to put your money where your mouth is.
Ideally, you’d know your target ROAS or cost per customer acquisition and be able to optimize the ad spend towards that value. At the very least, you want to:
- Make sure that the cost you’re paying per action is reasonable to pay for the given action, knowing the value of your products.
- Know which social media platforms perform better at driving home conversions depending on your industry and product type. Test what works best for you in each stage of the funnel. Spend a small share of your total budget on testing new channels.
Managing full-funnel performance marketing in a global ecommerce
The page you redirect users to should be easy to use and navigate. For social media audiences, the landing page must be mobile optimized so it is easy to scan and process.
Test various call-to-action and landing pages to see which converts most efficiently. Note any differences between different markets.
Instead of only looking at metrics from social media platforms, look at the bigger picture by also comparing your ad spend to the revenue attributed to your ads in your analytics platform.
Conclusion
Social media is now a necessary for brands instead of just being an option.
There are ways to use the social media funnel for any type of business.
When social media is not the best option for selling your product, turning to other channels may be necessary. This is especially true for businesses to businesses sales or products that have a long purchasing cycle.
Although it may be difficult to create a social media strategy, it can be helpful in supporting sales and business goals.
If you want your audience to commit to your brand, start by building awareness. Each stage of content should be focused on the audience, not on you.
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