Every business’s target is to get potential customers to trust their brand enough to buy their product or service. Most companies focus on marketing strategies that encourage content creations, SEO, and other social media-based campaigns to achieve this. While these are all important, the aspect of building a customer journey, from a potential to existing and then loyal customer, is often overlooked.
Thus your customer journey can be mapped out by creating a social media marketing funnel. Remember that several other brands are also vying for your social media target audience’s attention. So when you have a better understanding of customer interactions with your brand, it helps increase awareness and loyalty.
This article will break down the essential steps to creating a sales funnel for your social networks.
Creating a Sales Funnel Specifically for Your Business on the Social Network
When setting up your social media funnel, you need to visualize the potential customer’s path before the conversion occurs. There are three stages within the sales funnel, which are the top, middle, and bottom. Within these stages are primary phases that shape the customer’s purchase journey. Thus the steps a potential customer goes through before purchasing from you include:
- Awareness: this is how your target audience becomes aware of the existence of your product or service.
- Interest: grabbing the attention of your target audience to interact with your ads, social pages, website, etc.
- Consideration: this is how you can stand out from your competition.
- Action: getting your audience to take the next move, which is to make a purchase.
- Advocacy: strengthening the trust of your customers, so much so that they make referrals.
Now let’s see in detail how you can incorporate these sales funnel steps into your social media campaigns.
Awareness: How will customers find you?
Having your business on crucial social networks is the first step towards creating awareness for your brand. There are over 3.5 billion people making use of social media worldwide. Thus it’s guaranteed that these users will see your business. But what is more important is that product awareness is targeted at your potential customers.
One way to get the attention of your audience on social media is via organic or paid tactics. When building a social media marketing funnel for your audience to find you organically, you can make use of the following:
- Set up Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter Live.
- Social media giveaways, polls, or contests.
- Free content (how-to guides and blog posts or AMAs).
- Participate in Facebook or LinkedIn groups.
- Create visuals like videos, infographics, Webinars, or GIFs.
- You can likewise make use of paid social ads to create brand awareness. These include:
- Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, Snapchat, or ads.
- Hire and collaborate with social influencers to promote your brand to their followers.
When building awareness on your social media funnel, ensure that the content you share is relevant. It should be able to address consumer challenges and proffer solutions.
Interest: how do you get the audience to interact with your social content?
The interest phase of your social media funnel is where your audience carries out their research. They are going online to check product details, compare prices, and generally look at their options. At this phase, you’ll need to provide content that piques the audiences’ interest. Rather than making hard sales, this is the point you provide value and support. Answering audience concerns and questions will allow you to build more awareness and trust.
Your goal should be to establish your expertise. Provide tips to help your potential customer make an informed decision. For example, if you wish to provide custom writing services, you can get customers interested in your social pages or website in several ways: provide them with demos, samples, and writing tips around the services you offer. With this, you show them what you can do, so you grab their interest to look at more of your packages.
Consideration: how do you intend to stand out from the competition?
Remember, as your potential customers do their research, they are also checking out your competition. These are brands that offer the same product or service as you. So customers consider who the best is before making their purchase.
During this consideration phase, you want to stand out and remain number one on your audience’s mind. Therefore, you should provide more detailed information to guide potential customers towards the action phase. You can provide them with product details and other additional details on how to use the product.
Try to address their pain points as much as possible. Let them know you fully understand their needs. It helps you to build more trust and places you above the others. The use of existing customer testimonials is also helpful in creating your social media marketing funnel. Customers are often more willing to buy from you based on feedback from those who have used your product or service.
Action: how do you get the customer to make a purchase?
This phase of creating your social media funnel is where your potential customer acts by purchasing your product or service. Here, you need to ensure that your payment channels are user-friendly. If a customer finds it challenging to make a payment, they are reluctant to complete this phase.
The action phase does not merely come to an end after the customer makes their first purchase. You want them to become return customers. Thus, you need to activate a customer retention plan. Show the customer gratitude for buying your product or service. Let them know there is 24/7 support available. You can also ask for feedback on how you can serve them better. And you can offer them discounts or freebies if they make a second purchase. Over 67% of customers say they are more willing to engage with a product that is on discount.
Advocacy: How will you get them to make referrals to others?
Besides customer retention, it will help if customers refer your brand to their friends, colleagues, or family. Not only does it get you more clients, but it also improves your brand credibility. The approach to take in this social media funnel is to create loyalty programs. You can also make your existing customers brand advocates. Offer them incentives to promote your brand to others.
You can likewise make use of their review and testimonials on your social pages or web page.
Conclusion
A well planned social media marketing funnel enables successful audience engagement and increases conversion. First, you need to understand your customer journey in order to engage with them. It helps map out tactics for your brand awareness. You also can map ways to keep them interested and consider your product over your competitors.
The funnel allows you to make the action phase a smooth one for your customers. Lastly, it enables you to build trust and encourage customer retention, loyalty, and referrals. It’s essential to invest in all these phases by picking a few tactics to focus on each stage. Incorporating these will not only improve conversion and brand growth. It will also help you adequately address customer needs and build a loyal customer base.
Author Bio
John Edwards is a writing specialist who is looking for ways of self-development in the field of writing and blogging. New horizons in his beloved business always attract with their varieties of opportunities. Therefore, it is so important for him to do the writing.
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