Whether your business provides products or services to individuals or other businesses, your sales depend on your ability to connect with and persuade potential customers.
Social media platforms provide an opportunity to connect with people and brands. There is potential to use these platforms to reach people with your message.
According to a recent report, adults in the US spend an average of 95 minutes a day on different social media platforms. This time isn’t just spent on entertainment, but also on seeking inspiration and advice.
What is the connection between this and your business goals? Is there any practical value to social media marketing for your business, or is it a fruitless endeavor?
If done correctly, it can be a key component of your marketing strategy that brings quantifiable results and has a demonstrated effect on your sales.
This article talks about the paid social marketing funnel, which are ads that are targeted towards a specific audience. Many of the same principles can be applied to organic social media strategies.
- Building a Social Media Marketing Funnel
- Who are you trying to reach
- Where can you reach them
- Funnel Step 1: Awareness
- Funnel Step 2: Consideration
- Funnel Step 3: Conversion
- Funnel Step 4: Loyalty
- Funnel Step 5: Advocate
- Budgeting
What’s a Social Media Marketing Funnel?
The term marketing funnel was first coined by Elias St. Elmo Lewis in 1898. The marketing funnel model was created to describe the journey a customer takes before becoming your customer, including all the different touchpoints they encounter.
Typically the stages of the social media marketing funnel are described like this:
- Awareness: first becoming aware of your brand or product
- Consideration:Â 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 social media marketing funnel is an opportunity for different stakeholders at your company to reach the potential audience and lead them further along the funnel. Each stakeholder is ideally responsible for one stage of the funnel.
- 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
Typically, the customer journey is much more complicated than the simple funnel image indicates. Oftentimes, users will drop off or go back and forth multiple times before converting. They might also revisit your website and take actions multiple times before converting – often through a different channel than where the first touch point happened.
It is important to manage people’s expectations for each social media funnel step and to be aware of the different ways of measuring success. More on this later.
How to Build a Social Media Marketing Funnel
You need to identify who your audience is and where they can be found before you can start reaching out to them through social media. In order to do this, you should consider what interests them.
Who Are You Trying to Reach?
Think about what shared attributes your target audience has.
- Where and how do they spend their free time?Â
- What kind of content interests them?Â
- What kinds of challenges do they face?Â
- What brings them relief and joy?Â
You can gain some of this information through customer and market research, and by getting insights from your organization’s sales and customer service teams.
Begin with the data you have, and increase your understanding by experimentation as you go.
Where to Reach Them?
It is important to research which social media platforms are most popular with your target audience so that you can effectively reach them.
Each social media platform has a different purpose and therefore attracts a different audience with different behavior. The key is to find the platform(s) where your target audience spends their time and then test different platforms to determine which performs best at driving your KPIs at each stage of the sales funnel.
To increase brand awareness, your goal should be to generate more traffic to your site. Your audience should be defined as people who are interested in your product or service. Metrics could include website traffic, social media engagement, and email signups.
To generate leads, your goal should be to get people to fill out a form on your website. Your audience should be defined as people who are interested in your product or service. Metrics could include the number of form submissions and the quality of leads.
To generate sales, your goal should be to get people to buy your product or service. Your audience should be defined as people who are interested in your product or service. Metrics could include conversion rate and average order value.
Metrics to measure awareness stage performance
At least:
- Reach: how many unique users have seen your ads
- Frequency: how many times on average a unique user has seen your ad
- Estimated ad recall lift: when running an ad recall campaignÂ
Brand lift tests offered by Facebook and LinkedIn are worth testing if you have a chance but you should also usually track:
- Impressions: how many times have your ads been shown
- Engagements: how many times have users engaged with your ads
- Engagement rate: how many ad impressions led to an engagement
- CPM: cost per 1,000 impressions
- CPV: average cost per video view
- Video views 25%–100%: how many times your videos were watched to a certain timestamp
- View rate: how many impressions led to a video view and vanity metrics is an interesting extra, too, such as:
- Likes
- Reactions
- Follows
- Saves
How to Optimize Awareness Campaign Performance
Make sure your campaign is meeting the above metrics and 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?Â
It is important to see whether your LinkedIn ads are being seen by the right people. This can be done by analyzing the demographics report. Adjust your targeting if necessary.
Convert More Traffic Into Customers
The social media marketing funnel is designed to help you determine what content to post on your social media pages to encourage customer engagement. The marketing funnel conceptually outlines the journey that customers take from initial awareness of your product or service, through to eventual purchase and beyond. It can be helpful in understanding how your various marketing activities work together to achieve your business goals. Social media marketing funnels are commonly used in conjunction with paid advertising campaigns.
The different stages that will be covered in this article are creating a successful social media marketing strategy.
Social Media Funnel Maps
The social media funnel shows the journey that potential customers take after they become aware of your brand. They will consider your brand, make a purchase, and then become loyal customers or advocates for your business.
People are recognizing that your business exists through multiple channels. This can be through followers of your pages or profiles seeing stories about you posted by friends or other businesses. It could also be through people noticing hashtags connected to your business that they’re interested in.
In the consideration stage, visitors to your site are more active, signing up for your newsletter or downloading e-books and webinars in exchange for their email address. They are also engaging with other fans of your page, commenting on posts and messaging with questions. This gives you additional information about them and their motivations so that you can customize content more effectively down the line.
Understand Your Audience
Understanding how people are introduced to your brand is critical to its success. By analyzing data on the number of people who visit your website, shop on your app, or sign up for an email newsletter, you can figure out which channels are most effective in driving awareness and conversion.
Who is your target market, and what content do they want? Make sure you’re giving them what they want. For example:
- Are they sports fans?
- Do they frequent Instagram?
- What type of music are they into?
- What food do they eat?
Track Your Audience
Your social media accounts’ discoverability is a significant part of your funnel. People may discover your brand through advertisements or word-of-mouth from friends. The latter is a powerful method of attracting brand loyalty and an excellent way to get customers into the awareness stage of your funnel. If you have friends or family who love your products, ensure they spread the word.
Promoting your business on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter can help you attract new followers. Keep in mind what potential customers might be searching for when creating your ad campaigns and use relevant keywords.
Examples of Interest in Social Media Marketing Funnels
Videos that are in the form of a question and answer session are a great way to provide your intended audience with the answers to questions they may have. Additionally, these types of videos are also useful in developing trust and can be effective in directing people to your social media marketing page.
Questions help you understand what the other person is interested in. By understanding your customers, you can provide more value for them.
You might want to post a social media update asking your followers about their favorite running routes.
You can ask them about their favorite places to run outside of the city or state they live in. If they mention a place that’s far away, you can suggest shoes that are perfect for long-distance running or that will work well on different types of terrain, to help them prepare for their upcoming trip.
Facebook Live
One of the most effective ways to connect with your audience is to create short Facebook Live videos. This allows you and your followers to have a conversation in real time, resulting in an authentic experience that brings them closer to your brand.
You can use Facebook Live to inspire, entertain, or educate your potential customers throughout the Interest stage. The key is being able to produce videos that your potential customers will want to see more of, so that they will build anticipation before they move on to later stages in the funnel. For example, if you own a bakery, use Facebook Live as an opportunity to share recipes with viewers. If you’re promoting a new album, use it as an opportunity for fans who tune into the video early in their day and stick around until work is over–adding their excitement about hearing new music by engaging with them and answering questions along the way.
Surveys and Polls
If you want to better understand your audience, create surveys that are short and sweet. Too many questions will overwhelm people and they won’t complete the survey. Make sure it is easy to share with friends so you reach a wider audience. Encourage virality, but don’t overwhelm people with too many prompts.
At the end of each survey, give participants the option to sign up for more information in exchange for their email address or other contact details. This allows you to collect emails while simultaneously providing value by giving users access to exclusive content like ebooks or white papers related to their interests based on the results of their answers in the poll itself.