How to Build a Result-Driven Social Media Marketing Funnel?
When it comes to using social media to sell your brand, there are hundreds of ways to choose from. To keep your audience interested, these techniques push you to create content, create a social media marketing calendar, and plan creative campaigns.
However, there seems to be a gap when it comes to creating a customer journey that leads potential customers from the first time they hear about your company to becoming brand supporters and repeat purchases.
The five steps of the marketing funnel will be broken out in this article. You’ll know where social media fits into each stage by the end.
Let’s first have a basic understanding of the social media marketing sales funnel.
What is the Social Media Marketing Sales Funnel?
A marketing funnel is a journey that your clients take to reach you. From the moment someone learns about your organization to the moment they make a purchase, marketing funnels trace the path to conversion and beyond.
After rigorous research, a marketing funnel can tell you what your company has to do to influence customers at various stages. It starts with the awareness of your brand to customers and lasts until they make a purchase. A person becomes a loyal customer at the end of the social media marketing funnel.
The stages of a social media marketing funnel may differ according to different businesses and specialists. Regardless of what you call the phases, a customer journey follows a basic pattern that leads to a sale and long-term brand loyalty. Here are the levels of social media marketing funnels.
Awareness: Increasing brand awareness by attracting new consumers who aren’t familiar with your company.
Consideration: Making yourself stand out from the competition so that new people consider you.
Conversion: Facilitating your audience to act and buy something.
Engagement: Using social media to stay top-of-mind with your audience and keep them engaged after they’ve made a purchase.
Advocacy: Earning the audience’s trust so that they refer your brand to others.
How to Build a Social Media Marketing Sales Funnel?
You’ll be able to incorporate social posts into each stage of the funnel if social media is an important element of your marketing plan. You may organically steer your audience through the consumer experience depending on the channels you employ.
The marketing funnel functions as a whole. Friction in the journey is decreased when each phase works toward a specific purpose, resulting in a customer journey that continues to establish trust with your audience and improve brand awareness.
Stage 1: Awareness
The first step in the social media marketing funnel is for potential clients to discover your business and become aware of its existence.
As a company, you should be able to identify a problem that your target audience needs assistance with. Even if your target audience is unfamiliar with your brand, you can connect with them by providing a solution to a common issue.
This is not the time to make a hard sell on your products or services. The purpose is to provide value and assistance. This content should be useful enough for potential buyers to remember your brand and want to learn more about you.
Things You’ll Need in This Phase
- Blogs
- Educational and Information Videos
- Humor Marketing
- Inspirational Content
- Paid Advertising
Stage 2: Consideration
As customers progress through the marketing funnel, they begin to seek out more particular information while deciding whether or not to purchase your product or service. This includes investigating why you are superior to your rivals.
You provide more specific information during the consideration phase to guide potential clients towards the action phase. Providing relevant content to potential consumers, such as case studies or webinars, can assist create trust during this stage.
Things You’ll Need in This Phase
- Guides
- Testimonials and Reviews
- Case Studies
- Demo Videos/How-to videos
- White Papers/ Ebooks
Stage 3: Conversion
Customers should be amenable to being sold at this step of the funnel if you’ve developed the relationship up to this point. Examine your analytics data to observe how the majority of your audience interacted with the previous phases.
Believe that your audience has progressed this far through the funnel and that sales will begin to flow at this point. Maintain potential consumer contacts until they are ready to buy.
It’s fine to gently encourage your clients to make a purchase by providing offers such as a new customer discount or free shipping. In fact, 67 percent of respondents stated they would be most likely to take advantage of discounts or special offers.
Use remarketing paid advertising at the action stage to target users who have shown interest by engaging with prior sections of your funnel.
Things You’ll Need in This Phase
- Discounts
- Price Comparisons
- Promotions
- Free Trials
- Remarketing
Stage 4: Engagement
It’s critical not to lose sight of your target market once you’ve closed the deal. It’s customary for brands to spend less effort on this section of the funnel.
It may appear that once a customer makes a purchase, they are lifelong loyal, but this is not always the case. To stay top of mind, you must continue to maintain the relationship.
Maintain contact with your customers and make them feel a members of your brand community. Create social media material that encourages people to buy depending on their purchase.
Things You’ll Need in This Phase
- Post-Conversion Communication
Stage 5: Advocacy
Advocacy is a customer’s favorable attitude, or behavioral disposition, toward a brand. You can step up your game by creating a program to encourage customers to refer your products, pitch for your services, and endorse your brand to friends, family, and the social community.
The last but not least significant stage of the social media marketing funnel is advocacy. You must ensure that your buyers are retained and will buy from you again by engaging with them on social media on a regular basis. You should also try to focus on the referral part as well, by encouraging customers to refer and get some additional discounts on their next purchase.
Things You’ll Need in This Phase
- Brand Community
- Personalized Offers
- Featured Reviews
- Survey
Pro Tip 1: Align Funnels with Customer Journey
The purchase decision-making process for customers is a different and distinct activity. It exists in the absence of the funnel. As a result, the purpose and value of funnels are determined by their ability to influence customers’ purchasing decisions. To summarise, you should match your social media funnels to the client decision-making process.
Based on the customer’s purchase phase, small businesses can prepare content, marketing campaigns, online strategies, social media posts, and so on.
Pro Tip 2: Align Funnels with Your Objectives
Setting budget, campaign, target audience, post, and other constraints and criteria become impossible without aligning objectives and funnels. Understanding the destination allows you to precisely chart the course; thus, you should structure your social media funnels around your company goals. To construct extremely efficient funnels, one needs to have a clear roadmap from choosing the best social media channels to analyzing data for each goal.
Conclusion
You may produce a high number of leads by understanding how social media marketing funnels function. The content and timing of your social media content delivery are crucial to the success of your funnels. Marketing automation solutions can be used to schedule articles, categorize audiences, track lead KPIs, and develop bespoke CTAs. With these data and modules, you can provide relevant information to your leads and gain greater traction on social media networks.
If all this is overwhelming for you, you may hire a social media marketing agency to make the sales funnel for you or manage your all-over social media marketing.
Do what suits you best!
Stay tuned for more social media marketing content!