The social media marketing funnel is a process where different social media tools are used to promote a business or product and to build a strong relationship with customers. It’s not only used to drive traffic on the business website but also helps in creating brand awareness and building relationships with potential customers. Think of it like a marketing funnel that moves your target audience from one stage to another, until they finally become loyal customers.
In this process, marketers use various tactics on each social media site their business or company is on.
People who find your business on social media can be grouped into four possible categories:
As such, marketing to them should be handled with slightly different methods for each group. For example, if a prospective customer’s first interaction with your company is via Twitter and they start following you for updates and blog posts, then that’s the platform you’ll want to use to show them things like case studies and customer testimonials so they can see what it’s like to work with you.
On the other hand, if they’re an existing customer and they follow you on Facebook and Instagram because they love seeing pictures of your adorable pets (or just really enjoy animals), then those would be great channels for showing off how much fun life is when you’ve achieved [Your Company Name]’s goal of becoming more beautiful through [Your Product or Service].
Social Media marketing Funnel ToC
Recommended read
- The social media marketing funnel
- Content marketing funnel
- Email marketing funnel
- Top of the funnel marketing
- eCommerce marketing funnel
How to build a social media marketing funnel that converts?
Step 1: Discovery
The discovery phase is all about awareness of your brand; this step might also be called “first touch” or “upper-funnel.” The goal here is to create content that’s entertaining, useful, and/or interactive and get the word out about it with paid advertising.
Some strategies you can use:
- Building a brand personality and creating an account on social media channels where your target audience hangs out
- Being consistent and active in posting, interacting with others’ posts, and listening to conversations on social media
- Researching who your target audience is through analytics tools like Facebook Insights or Twitter Analytics so you can start responding to them directly
Step 2: Consideration
- This is the decision-making phase of the funnel.
- Customers are deciding whether to buy your product or service based on information, so you need to provide it. Show customers what you have to offer and convince them that it’s worth their time and money. Give them a reason to go through with their purchase.
- Be sure that you have a strong call to action here. It can be as simple as “buy now” or “sign up for our newsletter,” but it does need to be clear and direct so that your potential customers know exactly what they should do next.
Step 3: Conversion
If your goal is to create a successful social media marketing funnel, then your third step needs to be focused on conversion. After all, it won’t matter how many people visit your website or download an app if you can’t get them to invest in you.
Converting a user to a customer requires a lot of information about the person in question. This is why it’s so important that you collect this data from the beginning—the sooner you can gather information on someone who’s interested in your brand and what your brand has to offer, the better chance you have of converting them into a customer and turning them into someone who positively contributes toward the success of your business. There are different ways to convert users into customers; this will depend upon the kind of business you have and what services or products you’re offering.
Step 4: Loyalty
As your customers move through the funnel, you’ll want to start building brand loyalty and advocacy.
Start by offering incentives that reward repeat customers, such as loyalty programs or rewards clubs—they’re a great way to keep people engaged with your brand. You might also want to offer exclusive content or discounts that are only available to members of your email list.
Another great way to build loyalty is by creating engaging content that showcases how your products can be used in fun ways. For example, if you sell handbags, you might create a video series of different ways that you can style them, or if you sell cosmetics, you might share celebrity-inspired makeup looks.
You could even consider hosting events in the real world where customers can meet and socialize with other people who like your product. These kinds of live events provide an opportunity for customers to interact with your brand on a personal level so they feel valued by it.
10 tactics for the social media marketing funnel
Warm-up cold leads
Before you can get a new prospect to buy from you, they need to know who you are. The best way to do this is by engaging with them on social media. When someone follows or likes your page, make sure that you thank them and give them an incentive for doing so (i.e., an eBook).
Also, ask them questions about themselves so that they feel more comfortable interacting with your brand in the future. This will get them engaged with your company and help build trust between both parties before making any kind of sale pitch over email or phone call later on down the line when they’re ready to buy something from you!
Don’t let engagement slip through the cracks
How can you tell if your engagement is good? It depends on the platform. On Facebook, for example, engagement means likes, shares and comments. But this doesn’t work for Instagram or Twitter—on those platforms, engagement refers to time spent looking at posts (in other words: how long users spend looking at your content before scrolling away).
You can use tools like Klout or Buzzsumo to measure the quality of your engagement. Tools like these will tell you if people are reading your posts and sharing them with their friends. The better the quality of engagement (the more retweets per tweet), the more likely it is that you’re doing something right!
Tell a story with visual content
Visual content can help you attract and convert customers, which is why it’s important to use images and videos on social media. Here are some examples of the types of visual content that you should be using:
- Videos: Videos are a great way for you to engage with your audience and share information in a way that’s easy to digest. You can use them as part of an event recap or showcase what goes into making one of your products or services. For example, if you’re an eCommerce store, sharing short videos about items being shipped out will give customers peace of mind while they wait for their purchases to arrive at their doorstep.
- Photos/image galleries: A photo gallery is another type of visual asset that helps people understand what makes your business unique compared with competitors in the same space (or even just other local businesses). To make it even better, add text over each image so people know what they’re looking at! This will help them connect with the message behind each image more easily than if there wasn’t any explanation provided alongside them—which means more engagement between viewers who see this type of post versus those who don’t include any detail about what’s going on in their feed when posting something similar later down line.”
Build Brand Awareness on LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a great way to build your brand, market your business, find new customers and employees, grow your business and connect with partners, investors and more.
Using LinkedIn to drive traffic to your website can help you generate leads in other channels (like Facebook or Twitter) that may have a better conversion rate than LinkedIn alone. One of the simplest ways to get started on building this traffic is by creating a LinkedIn Company Page that includes valuable content such as blog posts or videos. You can also upload presentations from previous events or conferences you’ve attended so prospects have access to them when they’re looking for information about specific topics related to what they need help with at work.”
Use social media to drive word-of-mouth
Social media is a great way to drive word-of-mouth and get people talking about your business. If you have an awesome product or service, social media can help spread the word. This can be done in many ways including:
Target your ads better
You can target your ads on social media based on a variety of factors, including demographics, interests, and location.
To get started, select the campaigns tab in your Adwords account and click on “Ad schedule.” From there you can edit start times and end times for each campaign
Find your next customers with retargeting
Retargeting is a powerful marketing tactic that you should use to your advantage. It’s an effective way of reaching out to potential customers who have already visited your website or social media pages, and it can help you get more sales as well as more customers.
Retargeting helps you reach out to potential buyers who are interested in what you offer but haven’t made the purchase yet. This allows you to get more leads from each visitor, which makes retargeting one of the most important social media marketing funnel tactics for businesses looking for new leads and sales.
Be where your customers are.
The first step is to be where your customers are.
Your customers are on social media platforms, so you should be there too! But how do you know which platforms they’re using?
You need to do a little research and find out what social media sites your ideal customer uses most often.
Are they on Facebook? Instagram? Twitter? Snapchat? LinkedIn? Are they all over the place, or do most of them only use one or two sites regularly?
Try a chatbot for customer support
A chatbot is a program that can automatically answer questions, conduct transactions and provide responses to your customers. Chatbots work by using computer programming techniques to simulate conversations with humans.
The most popular use of chatbots is in customer service. Each day, businesses receive thousands of customer complaints through social media channels like Facebook Messenger, Slack and Twitter. These channels are difficult to monitor because they’re not always open 24/7 like phone numbers or email addresses.
When businesses receive these complaints via social media messaging apps, they can respond directly using a chatbot program instead of having employees manually manage them all day long (which would be very costly).
By automating this process with a chatbot system, companies can increase their sales funnel by saving time on customer support while also improving their brand perception by providing better service across multiple online platforms simultaneously!
Improve social media marketing sales funnel
Now that you have a rough outline of how to improve your social media marketing sales funnel, let’s look at some specific tactics you can use to do just that.
It’s important to keep track of what works and what doesn’t, so you can make more informed decisions as you go along. And we promise: social media isn’t a one-size-fits-all platform! There are lots of different ways to use these tools effectively (and others not mentioned here), so don’t get discouraged if something doesn’t work immediately—just keep trying until eventually something clicks.