Understanding & Building a Social Media Funnel

Whether your objection is getting a sale or driving people to dine in your restaurant, understanding and building a social media funnel is crucial for optimising your marketing strategy. If you are wondering what that is, a social media funnel is what we use to describe each step that a user takes in order to become a customer.

While there is a lot of variations into different sales funnel stages depending on individual business objectives, for the purposes of this post, we’re going to look at a sales funnel and explain how each stage works as a customer goes from a visitor to a prospect, to a lead, to a buyer.

Awareness
You need people to become aware of your brand

Interest
People are aware of your brand but need to be intrigued enough to read your ad or to click through to your landing page

Decision
You need people to express interest or desire in your brand.

Action
The customer acts purchasing your product or service

If we look at the top of the funnel, this is where new customer acquisition lies. Further down the funnel, you will notice a shift to audience retention.

So how does your social media fit into these phases? If social media is a part of your marketing strategy (which it very much should be!) you’ll be able to incorporate posts both on and off-page for each stage on the funnel and guide your audience through the customer journey organically.

To show you how this funnel can work on social media we have made an example showing you a simplified version.

Sally’s is a clothing boutique brand wishing to attract their Target Market of Female, millennial customers with an interest in streetwear.

Awareness
At this stage of the funnel, the audience isn’t yet aware of Sally’s yet.
Sally creates brand awareness, post engagement and video view campaigns on Facebook ads manager to their target audience.

Consideration
At this stage of the funnel, the audience is now aware of Sally’s, but haven’t expressed interest in the products.
Sally’s then creates a website visits campaign targeting users who have engaged in the awareness stage to get them interested enough to click to the website.

Decision
Users have expressed interest in Sally’s products. Sally’s creates ad that targets users that have already shown interest to encourage them to purchase. Sally’s is also sure to provide incentives in their ads like pointing out things such as free shipping Australia wide.

Action
The user has heavily engaged with Sally’s and have viewed several product pages or even added to cart. Sally’s creates a retargeting campaign offering those customers 20% off their purchase with a promo code.

Loyalist
As Sally’s continues to bring our new product every season, Sally’s continues to target their existing database and highly engaged users with offers and incentives.

Obviously, this is a simplified example and most businesses will have more nuances. However, it’s important to recognise that the consumer requires more persuasion than simply being exposed to what your business can offer.

Some things to remember about building a social media funnel

Invest in all stages on the funnel
A common mistake to only invest in a few stages on the funnel. For example, you might be spending too much of your budget on the top of the funnel and not getting enough users to your website for them to become a viable lead.

Similarly, if you’re pushing purchase conversion campaigns without building up your funnel, you will find that people are less incentivised to convert if they aren’t familiar with you. While it’s entirely possible to run conversion campaigns to an audience who haven’t engaged with you before, customers can sense overly-sales focused content without first building brand awareness or trust.

It’s a continuous process

It might seem like if a customer has made a purchase that they’re a lifetime fan – but that’s not always the case. You need to keep nurturing your funnel and re-engaging users who are further down the funnel.

Need a hand building your social media funnel? Contact the team at Milkbar Digital to learn how we can help