Posts can be enjoyed by their audience. A definition of a social media marketing funnel is the job that can be assigned to each post.
“Hope marketing” is where you hope your followers buy… after seeing a random promotion. It’s all about guiding your customers each step of the way… to building trust and later, repeat sales and referrals. Each message has to be a match for the marketing phase it is deployed in, i.e. each marketing message has to be customized for the phase of the buying process that the customer is in.
Understanding the Importance of a Social Media Marketing Funnel
A social media marketing funnel tells the indicated pathway that leads from a person noticing your brand for the first time to the person becoming a brand customer and recommending your brand for use. This structured pathway for a funnel is segmented into five key stages. The five stages are awareness, consideration, conversion, loyalty, and advocacy.
Awareness, (top-of-the-funnel, TOFU), is the place where new potential customers begin to learn about your products, services, or offerings. Consideration, (middle-of-the-funnel, MOFU), is the place where new potential customers begin to compare your offerings with those of competing offerings. Conversion, (bottom-of-the-funnel, BOFU), is the place where new potential customers are ready, willing, and able to purchase (buy, book, register, request a demo,etc) your product, service, or offering.
After this, the potential customers become your actual customers. This process begins when you actively and consistently provide helpful information to your customers. This process of being a helpful person (providing helpful information) creates the possibility of your customers, and perhaps even your potentially new customers (i.e. people who have heard about your business, possibly via reviews or recommendations by existing customers), beginning to create and post helpful information to your existing and potential customers, online.
An example of this would be for a fitness company to launch a quick workout video for their audience that lasts about 30 seconds. Their audience engages and shows interest by clicking the video to download a free training plan and sign up for an email automation sequence. Eventually, they purchase a paid membership.
A sales funnel helps to visualize everything someone in the sales process can see and where the process can cause a potential loss by showing where customers lose interest.
Set a Clear Primary Business Goal and Identify Your Best Audience
Your primary business goal is the starting place. Think about what you want to do this month in your business. This could be collecting email lead information, selling a product, filling consultation requests, motivating interested individuals to sign up for a trial, or increasing repeat orders. A common mistake is to try to optimize every marketing campaign to achieve every goal available. This all dilutes marketing messages.
Now create a simplified customer profile. For this identify your most valuable customer who also is the most likely to benefit from your offer, and most likely to act on it quickly. Include their pain, informed end state, budget, preferences, concerns, and buying intent.
Practical questions to use when creating this profile would be:
- What problem is bringing this person to search for help today?
- Which social media do they use when researching for something to purchase?
- What proof or evidence would lower their concern about price, quality, or results?
- What can they do before they are ready to purchase?
Always map the pathway between first contact and purchase. For example, In a B2B purchase, they may watch LinkedIn videos, download a guide, attend a webinar, and book a call. For a B2C purchase, they may find the product on Instagram, read reviews, and use a discount code.
Usually different audiences mean different pathways. For a new customer versus a returning customer, they should not receive the same offer or message.
Don’t just post any content, make sure it hits your target audience
When marketing to a new audience there are key stages you should keep in mind. TikTok is a great place to start with video ads, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts.
There are plenty of content types you can use to naturally introduce your brand. Demonstration-style content is a good example. Product demonstrations, educational carousels, behind-the-scenes footage, practical tips, creator partnerships, contests, and other content types can all introduce your brand.
When choosing platforms it’s important to keep behavior in mind, not just habits. A consultant aiming at operations leaders is more likely to find success on LinkedIn over TikTok. Instagram, Pinterest and TikTok, on the other hand, may be great for a consumer focused brand.
Video ads are a great example of a content type that can be easily and effectively implemented into video ads.
Timing, placement, and reach based metrics are what can determine your success when marketing and advertising. Numbers showing video views, the number of video ads engaged with, visitor data showing profiles visits, video shares, and video comments, analytics show audiences engagements, and other metrics showing reach focused data can help marketers determine the success of their marketing and advertising strategies.
To help grow the number of qualified leads
The first stage in the buying process is recognition. Therefore, consideration begins when someone identifies a problem and starts assessing potential solutions. At this point, broad forms of entertainment, such as watching movies, give way to more useful forms of entertainment.
Some effective forms of entertainment during the buying process include posts or articles with customer testimonials, case studies, comparisons, before and after, expert interviews, tutorials, webinars, product demos, and objection handling.
A lead magnet provides interested buyers with the reason to share their contact information. The lead magnet can be a buying guide, template, checklist, or a mini course, calculator, plan, or tutorial. These should be placed in a focused landing page with one promise and a short form.
The offer should be related to the issue you have presented in the Awareness stage content. For example, if you teach busy parents the video with meal prep tips, a meal plan videos or a weekly downloadable meal plan is a relevant next step. A general nutrition ebook is less relevant content.
Retargeting ads can help you bring back users after they have watched your videos, viewed your profile, clicked your campaign link, or viewed your landing page. Keep the follow-up relevant. Some users who have downloaded your guides will need more advanced content than a follow-up ad that is introductory content.
From Prospects and Straight to Conversion
The conversion stage defines prospects ready to act as prospects taking the main conversion action. This could be making a purchase, starting a trial, adding an item to a shopping cart, booking a call, or requesting a quote.
Use a direct call to action that matches the page and buyer intent. “Start your 14-day trial,” “Book a free consultation,” and “Use code WELCOME10 at checkout” are examples of clear calls to action compared to the less direct action call, “Learn more.”
Your landing page or product page needs to work well on a phone. A good starting point is short forms, clear pricing, and all page and page content. If you have these things your customers are more likely to purchase.
The page or pages should encourage action whereas the product does the rest.
You can use limited time offers to provide some incentive for action. Just be sure they are actual offers, no fake countdown timers and permanent “last chance” sales.
Pay attention to forms and leads and how they correlate to sales, conversion rates, costs per acquisition, and abandoned carts. If you see social traffic but the numbers just don’t convert, check the page, not the platform or audience.
Tools For Effective Social Media Marketing Functions
Choose the right tool for the job you need done, not the one with the most features. Buffer, Later, SocialPilot, Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and Agorapulse can automatically post, manage and answer messages, and report on the performance of the platform.
Google Analytics 4 (commonly referred to as GA4) records people’s interactions on your website. HubSpot enables the connections of social marketing campaigns with contact lists, lead activities, sales calls, and customer data.
UTM parameters in your links allow you to track the source and medium of each campaign. You can then see whether Instagram Stories, a LinkedIn carousel, or a creator partnership produced any leads or sales.
A small business does not require a long list of apps to build a social media marketing funnel that is useful. You can start with a scheduling tool, an email service, GA4, and a spreadsheet that captures the dates of your campaigns and offers, the links you use, and the results you achieve.
Conclusion
A good funnel takes social media posts and brings them one step closer to the real customer journey. Design your audience and desired outcome. Once you have designed these, get useful content to interested potential customers. Then, use proof to establish trust, and make the desired next step in your funnel simple.
Once you have earned the loyalty of a customer, their referrals and continued patronage can become your most valued growth channel.
The best place to start is by choosing one audience, one lead offer, one platform, and tracking three funnel metrics for the next month.
