Here we are, investing thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours into crafting a compelling brand experience. We build creative marketing strategies to attract more customers and write amazing content for them.
But for some reason you can’t seem to get those conversion up and your content doesn’t rank high enough.
You might ask yourself, ‘should I increase my budget for online ads or hire an extra content writer?’.
Theres a big chance that this isn’t the real problem.
When we’re so focused on building brand awareness and marketing our business, we forget about the next step…
Effectively acquiring all these valuable prospects and converting them into paying customers!
An old-fashioned but extremely effective strategy that streamlines this conversion process is building a marketing funnel.
Let’s explore what a marketing funnel is and what it can do for your business.
By the end of this article, you’ll be walking away with a practical understanding of a social media marketing funnel.
What exactly is a marketing funnel?
And a funnel is exactly what it sounds like. It’s an intentionally designed route a customer travels through when he or she is interested in your product or service.
This funnel, also called ‘sales funnel’ or ‘conversion funnel’, dates all the way back to 1898 and was invented by Elmo Lewis.
It’s a model that illustrates the typical stages a customer takes throughout the sales process. And this model gives us the opportunity to optimize our client acquisition process for higher conversions.
It’s been around for such a long time because it works for whatever you sell. Whether you sell physical products, ebooks, online courses or provide any kind of service.
There are many different types of funnel that businesses use for specific use cases. But in general, funnels have one of the following goals in mind:
- Selling a product or service
- Building a list of contacts
- Promoting products or events
Acquiring more prospective customers is not the only benefit a marketing funnel offers. When you have many different communication and marketing channels in place for your business, things can get messy.
You have a funnel for your landing page, monthly newsletter opt-in form, your online course and maybe also webinars.
Marketing funnels will help with keeping things organized so you don’t lose sight of the high-level goals. You won’t be wasting any time on doing everything from scratch every single time.
Your process is automated! And automation is good (to a certain extend).
The 4 stages of the customer journey
1. Awareness
At first, you’re trying to make your prospective customers aware of the very existence of your product or service. This is the hardest part in my opinion as you have to stand out from a crowd the size of our galaxy.
What helps particularly much here is being clear about who you are targeting. This will weed out all uninterested eyeballs and leaves more space for customers that can benefit from your solution.
This first touchpoint with your customers is an opportunity for you to offer as much value and support as you can. Definitely don’t pitch in this stage or you’ll lose them.
You want to give them just enough information that invites them to learn more about your product or service.
A good way to build this awareness is with lead magnets. This is basically just an item or service that you give away for free in return for contact details. Example of this are:
- Paid advertising
- Landing pages
- Educational content
- Free consultations
- Printable guides
- Webinars
How to fit social media in here
Use the power of Instagram and Facebook stories for example to initiate contests and giveaways. You could also pay for Facebook, Twitter or Instagram ads for content promotions.
Youtube is also a hugely underrated channel that very few businesses use to their advantage. Record video tutorials for your products or educate your audience on relevant industry insights.
Video marketing is becoming increasingly popular, especially amongst the younger generation, and it’s a chance for your business to stay ahead of your competition.
2. Engagement
Your prospect knows about your product or service and is expressing interest at this stage. It’s time to shine and show them why you solution is the right solution for their problem.
Provide them with the most important information about your product. If they can’t immediately find out how they can benefit from your solution, then you’re chopped liver.
You want them to engage! Make them so curious about what you have to offer, that they can’t resist learning more about your solution. Try to sit down to think about every word you display to them at this stage, they’re still only hanging by a thread here.
An example of engaging with a prospect could be when you’re offering an ebook is to give them a free sample of the first few chapters.
Automating the engagement phase
Since you’ll probably have multiple lead magnets working for you at the same time, all gathering prospects with different goals, I’d advise you to put some automated processes in place. This will help take a big chunk of manual and tedious labour out of your hands.
There are plenty of tools out there that can help you with this process of automating your marketing funnels. These tools help you segment your prospective customers into different groups by looking at which lead magnet they used to give their information.
A few popular funnel services that integrate with WordPress are:
- GetResponse
A complete all-in-one solution for setting up funnel automation. From email marketing to social media campaigns to landing pages and even webinars. - ClickFunnels
Designed for smaller businesses and entrepreneurs without much technical knowledge. - Keap
A pretty complete service that is marketed towards small to medium sized business owners. It also integrates with some commonly used eCommerce platforms.
How to fit social media in here
Since this phase is all about helping the customer decide and giving them the support they need to do that, think about live chats, Twitter chats, Instagram DM’s, LinkedIn & Facebook Groups and even IGTV.
3. Action
You have come a long way to get your customers to this point. They are at a tipping point where an extra push is needed to finalize their decision.
Now is the time to give them all the reasons why they shouldn’t be wasting any more time! Without this extra bit of motivation from your automated funnel, they might fail to find the courage to take action and commit.
Emphasize the limited stock that’s available for that physical product of yours. Show them the numbers, the testimonials, customer reviews and case studies. If you have a limited-time offer on this service they are interested in, let them know.
You just converted a prospect into a paying customer 🥳! Congratulations.
Before we move to the final stage of the funnel, there’s one more thing left that most businesses forget about.
Nurture your customer relationships
It’s tempting to quickly move on since your customer has already made the purchase, but that neglects the fact you’re dealing with a human being and they remember most how they felt after this buying experience.
Stay connected with your customers and encourage them to create some sort of content with your product. It invites them to be a part of your brand community and to interact with other like-minded happy customers.
You can also look into remarketing. Sending targeted promotions specific to the people that have interacted with that part of your funnel. You can plan a series of emails a couple of days after purchase that offers products or content related to their latest purchase.
This is a fantastic way to upsell or cross-sell but it also keeps them connected to your brand.
How to fit social media in here
Include strategically placed ‘buy now’ buttons on advertisements, Instagram stories and Facebook posts. Consider even placing links in your social media captions that lead to buying opportunities.
Ready to attract more customers?
We help brands like yours expand their social reach and attract more qualified leads by crafting marketing campaigns engineered for success. Get in touch with us and start generating results that have a tangible impact on your bottom line.
Schedule a call4. Advocacy
Last but not least, turning your customers into raving fans and brand advocates. This is the thinnest part of the funnel and is usually only for the elite, the ones who had such an awesome experience that they want to spread the word for you.
Show your uppermost gratitude to this group of people because they could potentially produce an amplified positive impact on your business. A few ways to go about this are with:
- Exclusive giveaways
- Partnerships
- Loyalty rewards
- Discounts
- Affiliates programs
Conclusion
Chances are that you will have many different ways you can approach your potential customers.
So rather than marketing purely based on gut feeling, track, test and tweak after you have launched your marketing efforts and once your funnels are experiencing traffic. It will take a lot of guesswork out of your strategies and will help you target the right audience more precisely over time.
This can mean changing the copy slightly to use more familiar terminology or including different elements such as social proof and videos.
You are ready to use this knowledge and get started with building your own marketing funnels!
We help our clients with delivering a complete and on-brand experience to their customers with the help of this funnel. If you realize your business can benefit from this process and you need help with it, we invite you to get in touch with us.