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Social Media Marketing Funnel

A marketing funnel is a path that facilitates the conversion of the generated leads into customers. In practical terms, the funnel charts the path to conversion from the moment someone gets to know your brand to when they make a purchase. At each stage of the funnel, you have the option of using several tactics to influence the behavior of the user in order to steer them in the right direction.

In theory, a well-designed social media marketing funnel has five stages:

Awareness: At this point, potential leads become aware of the brand.

Consideration: in this stage, the lead should see your brand as a good fit for their business. Your brand should stand out from other similar businesses in the market so that the leads remember you.

Action/Conversion: The leads are encouraged to take action in the context of your products or services. Generally, this is where the sale happens.

Engagement: Even after the sale, it is important to keep the new customers engaged with your brand even after they have made the purchase.

Advocacy: At this point, the satisfied customers start recommending your products and services to their social media contacts.

Awareness

Awareness is the first stage of a social media marketing funnel. During this stage, potential leads hear about your brand. They get interested in knowing more about the use cases and benefits.

An excellent way to attract people’s attention to your content is to create content that discusses the problems and challenges that your potential leads face in their personal life or professional career. This attracts the leads’ attention because they are looking for a solution.

Now that you have their attention and they have entered the top of the funnel, you should offer solutions and valuable information. This leads them further down to the next stage of the funnel as they become more interested in your content and positioning as a solution provider.

Social media is a great medium for distributing content to a wide audience. All social media platforms come with features that enable you to create valuable and engaging content. Answering the questions of your leads induces them to visit your website.

2.Consideration

As your generated leads go down the social media marketing funnel, they hunt for more detailed information while contemplating the purchase of your products or services.

They want to be 100% sure that buying your product or service would really enhance their life, boost their business, or resolve their pain points. One thing that people consider at this stage is what makes your product or services different from other similar brands in the market. They should find a reason that convinces them about your competitive advantage.

In the Consideration stage, provide more specific information to guide potential leads towards the Action stage. Case studies, product reviews, or customer testimonials are some formats that work great at this stage.

3.Action/Conversion

In the Action or Conversion stage, the leads are ready to take action. This action is undoubtedly making the purchase. If you have had a virtuoso performance in the first two stages, the third stage will be successful.

The good thing about social media platforms is that they all include an analytics section so that you can check your performance. Using this feature, you can understand if your audience found your content interesting. You can also check how many people have clicked to visit your website landing page.

Your audience has progressed this far through the funnel, and that sales will begin to flow at this point. Keep potential customer contacts through your social media content until they are ready to buy. It’s also OK to encourage your clients to make a purchase by providing incentives such as a new customer discount or free shipping.

4.Engagement

You should be careful not to lose sight of your target market once you’ve closed the deal. This is where many brands fail and suffer the consequences. They forget that retaining the customers requires almost the same level of effort as getting them.

It could happen that once a customer makes a purchase, they become lifelong customers. But that is seldom the case. In other words, it is not that easy to keep your customer retention rate high if you do not nurture them on your social media platforms. Because, if you don’t, chances are that may forget about you and never buy from you again. To stay on top of the minds of the customers, you must continue to maintain the relationship.

It is essential to maintain contact with your customers and make them feel like members of your brand community. For this, focus on creating social media content that encourages people to buy again.

One good way of doing this is through Instagram hashtag campaigns. Instagram hashtag campaigns help you get a lot of User-Generated Content (UGC) from your followers, who can use a unique hashtag to become part of the campaign. They may share a photo while wearing your clothes, eating food in your restaurant, reading your ebook, cooking your recipe, etc.

Once they share the post, it also becomes visible to their network as well, with a further increase in the post’s range.

5.Advocacy

The last stage of a social media marketing funnel is brand advocacy.

You have now made the sale and added value for the customers. Now is the time to turn your customers into brand ambassadors.

If you have made your customers happy, they are most likely to recommend you to their family, friends, relatives, colleagues, etc.  You can also collect customer testimonials and reviews that highlight the benefits or USP of your product and services and use them in ad campaigns.

Customers can become your most potent assets in spreading the word about your brand. You should, of course, encourage this by providing incentives to customers who recommend your products.

Customers will convert from fans to brand ambassadors if you continue cultivating the relationship by providing helpful content and delivering a consistent user experience. Also, make it simple for customers to share their experiences and become your brand advocates. Customers should be able to easily express their gratitude by posting reviews or testimonials on your website or Facebook Business Page. In addition, work with existing customers or power users to develop content throughout the advocacy phase.

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Advantages of Digital Marketing over Traditional Marketing

Digital Marketing

Traditional Marketing

Digital marketing is marketing via any digital or electronic medium. This would include mobile phones, applications, websites, social media, and search engines. There are many strategies as to how to market in these platforms like affiliate marketing, pay per click advertising, influencer marketing, and such.

Traditional marketing is a conventional marketing method that has been used for centuries. They are effective even still but better and more effective modes of marketing have risen.

Types Of Digital Marketing:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Social Media Marketing

Content marketing

Email marketing

Types Of Traditional Marketing:

Television

Radio

Newspaper and Magazines

Billboards and posters

ADVANTAGES OF DIGITAL MARKETING OVER TRADITIONAL MARKETING:

      1. Less expensive than traditional marketing:

The advertising cost is very much less when compared to traditional marketing. It could be so less as in the hundreds. If you are a startup you would not have the funds for extravagant advertising. So, affordable digital marketing ways are a blessing to you. Using digital marketing platforms would help you to gain more customers at a reduced cost. With this awful marketing cost burdens off your back, you can spend your money on the functional requirements. With the help of digital marketing, your return on investments could be through the roof.

     2. Brand recognition and development:

You can achieve superior brand recognition when you are advertising through digital channels owing to all the time people spend on digital media. You can create a more consistent and reliable image of your business for your customers. Instead of a small column in a newspaper, you can give more details about your business through articles, blogs, and testimonials to the customers. You can create a very interactive and informative medium and attract the customer’s attention. If they start to frequent your website more often then you have created very trusting images for your brand.

       3. Easy to adjust and lesser commitments:

One of the key advantages of digital media platforms is that you have better control over them when compared to traditional marketing. You can customize your ads and create a more interactive and effective form of advertisement. You don’t have to sign a mountain of paperwork and for a strict period as you do in traditional marketing. If your campaign is not working you are free to pull the ad and only pay for your hours. So do not have to wait a long time before you decide to spend money on it or not.

4. Better endorsements from the customers:

Before there was” word of the mouth” and now we have the touch of fingers. When it comes to traditional marketing if the customers wanted to share an advertisement for a product that interests them, they probably had to wait for a gathering to share it with their friends. But if a customer encounters an ad in digital media, he or she can share it with others almost instantly with a click. This way, you are reaching a considerable number of potential customers with your advertisements.

Nonintrusive:

Digital marketing is giving customers the privilege of choosing to watch an ad. They can skip or ignore it if they want. When you take traditional marketing, the advertisements are almost forced to the customers like a flyer being handed out to you by a stranger and you have to answer his clear questions about your requirements. All of these interruptions are avoided when it comes to digital marketing. Also, these flyers are handed out to people whether they need it or not, meaning it does not reach the targeted audience for the product.

Global market:

When you advertise via traditional marketing mediums you only get exposure to a limited group of people. But through digital marketing strategies, you can reach a global market. Imagine how much business it would gather. There are many success stories of small startup businesses gaining huge popularity due to their exposure to global media. They say our whole world has turned into a global village of opportunities.

Targeted audience:

In digital marketing, you can target your audience and ensure that you reach the correct audience and those you were intended to reach. Determining target audience is very important because without them all the efforts that you have will go in vain. With the help of many online tools, you can identify the key demographic for your product. Tools like Facebook analytics provides you with that data, and you can reach your perfect customers. Segmentation is another concept that is implemented while identifying targeted customers. Segmentation is when a group of people is broken down further into other small groups of particular tastes. For instance, if you are advertising men’s footwear, you can pick out email solutions to forward your brochures to men alone. This will help you in saving your resources and also to reach many future customers.