Many of your target customers hang out on social media. Research shows that over 4.60 billion people use social media.
Source: DataReportal
Having a great strategy for your social media marketing and creating an effective sales funnel can get those target customers engaging with your brand on social sites and even converting into customers for what you offer.
Through the sales funnel, you can nurture the customers, get them to know your business better, and start using your products or services.
This article will give tips on creating an effective social media sales funnel and engaging with your target customers as you build trust and nurture them through the buyer stages, converting and retaining customers to your business.
What is a Social Media Marketing Funnel?
Your target customer walks through different stages before they decide to convert into customers.
They research the business, consume content on the site and even check out reviews and testimonials to build trust with the business.
The social media marketing funnel targets how potential customers engage with your brand on social media and walks through all the buyer stages to build trust and convert them into customers. Here are the sales funnel stages for target customers.
Source: SalesForce
Understand Your Target Audience And Where They Hang Out
You need to know your target customers well to have a great sales funnel to walk them through to convert them into customers.
Since most target audiences use social media, having great audience research on those sites is essential, as shown by the Databox report.
Source: Databox
When you engage your customers in the places they hang out, you can easily drive them to your business, capture their attention and start nurturing them into customers.
When searching for customers, you can ask questions like:
- What are my target customer pain points?
- What are they searching for when on social media channels?
- What content do my target customers love to read and engage with?
- How do target customers engage with content on social sites?
- Which social media sites do target customers prefer to spend most of their time on?
- At what time will my target audience most likely be on social sites?
To help you easily understand your customers, you call look at your current customer data and their user behavior on social media sites. Here is what David Hoos of the Good says about your current or past customer data.
Source: The Good
Since your target customers have the same pain points as your current customers, they are likelier to have the same user behavior online.
Also, consider offline trends for your customers. For example, you may focus more on local customers who use your products. Understand how they engage with your business and the characteristics they share to help create a funnel that will engage and retain them more.
Have a deep connection with the customers, communicate and track their interactions on digital media channels. You can create content and related resources for lookalike audiences and engage them.
Another way to understand target customers is to use social listening tools. Through the tools, you will know what the target audience says about your brand and the content you update on social media platforms.
Create Compelling Content
Target customers want content that entertains, informs, and shows them ways to solve their challenges. Ensure your content delivers value, as that’s the key to the success of your brand
Source: CMI
Content will give them a takeaway they can apply and see the change in their problems. You can use content templates to make it easy, as Jay Bats of ContentBase says:
“ Creating unique and engaging social media posts can be time-consuming, especially if you are doing it from scratch every time. The good news is, social media templates can help you with that”.
The templates can help you create content that engages your audience with your business through your great sales funnel. Your content should address audiences in different buyer stages.
For instance, some of your target audiences are in the consideration stage of the buyer journey while others are in the awareness stage.
If you focus on creating more content for a particular buyer stage, you will miss the opportunity to engage more target audiences and nurture them through the sales funnel.
In this case, creating more content in the consideration stage, you lose driving engagement from the target audience in the other stages.
Most people love visual content and engage more with them. This is proven by Wyzowl’s research that shows video engagement as one major element of video success.
Source: Wyzowl
As you plan your content, ensure you create more videos and visual content with a captivating CTA. You also need to factor in mobile optimization for your website. Most of your target customers now use mobile devices to search for brands and engage them on social media.
Irrespective of your content’s quality, if the target audience can’t access it on their devices, you lose a great chance to engage and convert them to your customers through your social media sales funnel.
Use Social Media Contests And Giveaways
Motivating your target customers to engage with your brand, drive conversions and even make purchases is essential. The best way to achieve that through social media is to offer giveaways and discounts for your products or services.
For example, you run an eCommerce brand that sells shoes. A potential customer has been following up with your brand but hasn’t made any purchase because of the high prices of the products.
When they see discounts on their dream shoes, they will chip in and purchase them as they don’t want to lose that opportunity again.
With giveaways and discounts, other target audiences who don’t know what you offer would be intrigued to know about the discount and the product you’re offering.
Through that, you can drive more engagement to your business and get the target audience to know the value of your service or product.
Use Lead Magnets To Collect As Many Leads As Possible
It takes process and effort to build trust with target audiences and get them to walk through the buyer journey up to conversions and purchasing. Having a great relationship is essential, as Steven Pogson, founder of First Pier, says:
“ We provide integrated marketing solutions to like-minded partners who value relationships and enjoy working with other good people”
To engage the target customers, you can collect their contact information and use it to educate them more about the business and its value to solve their pain points.
As you collect the leads, start with the main social media sites that can help you generate more leads for your brand. For instance, research by eMarketer shows Facebook is one great site for lead generation.
Source: eMarketer
Don’t just use one social media site to get leads. Use the best tactics and strategies to generate your social media sales funnel leads.
For example, you can have a webinar and reach out to target customers to register for the webinar.
Since the topic of the webinar is what the target customers want most, they will sign up, and you will get information for leads to help nurture them.
After the webinar, you can send them follow-up content and related information to build trust and engage them in your business.
Run Targeted Email Marketing Campaigns
Email marketing is still a great way to engage leads through the sales funnel. Your lead magnets have captured email subscribers and grown your email list.
Then start reaching out to your target audience and share resources that will nurture them through the buyer journey. Ensure that your emails are personalized for high engagement with your target audiences.
Also, segment your email list and share information based on their sales funnel stages. For instance, a prospect in the consideration stage doesn’t need to be shown how your brand works.
He wants to be convinced that what you offer is the best value for them so he can convert and make the purchase.
Provide Exceptional Customer Service
To drive more conversions and sales from your target audiences, you need to show them that you care for their pains and want to deliver the best solutions to those pains.
Research shows that customers can be motivated to purchase from a brand with great customer service.
Source: Zendesk
It is essential to have a great team that understands your customers well and is available to guide and help your target audience as they engage your brand through the sales funnel.
For instance, a customer can’t give a testimonial like this if they are not pleased with the product and the service they get from a brand.
Source: Bulk.ly
Convert Leads Into Paying Customers
At the bottom of the funnel, target customers are closer to converting into customers for your business.
You can show your leads firsthand what you can deliver them. For instance, with a SaaS business, you can open doors to how your services work and give them a free ride. Let them see how your business products or services will give them a solution to the most disturbing pains they experience in their business and life.
When target customers see your company’s value, their chance to convert into paying customers increases. Also, create content that will grow your social media backlinks to your business to keep engaging these leads as you nurture and convert them.
Use Social Media Ads To Sell More
Social media ads can be a great way to engage target customers and drive them to your business. Since you know your customer pains, create ads that target those pains and post them on social media sites.
Research by eMarketer shows an increase in ad spending over the coming years.
Source: eMarketer
The data shows that more brands are creating ads to engage audiences. Create more captivating ads with pictures of customer pains that attract leads, use the captivating headline for your ad, and include actionable CTA to drive the target audience to take action. These actions will lead your target buyer to your business or product page to learn and get to know more about how to solve their pains with your business. Take a look at this ad by LinkedIn.
Source: LinkedIn
If you’re running a B2B brand, you definitely would be attracted to join the webinar and get those marketing principles, right?
Or this other ad
Source: LinkedIn
If you have a brand, you want to hear what your customer says to help you give them the best services. You will be intrigued to click on the CTA to get a feel of this powerful social listening tool.
Tip #1: Track The Metrics
To get target customers to engage your brand on social sites and drive more actions that can lead to sales, you can track their actions. How are they engaging with the content that you share on social sites?
Analyzing the metrics of your target audience engagement can help you create more content and resources target customers love.
For example, you can share more content with likes, shares, and comments from your target audience.
As you track your metrics, spy on your competitors online and see the kind of content they post. See how their content is performing on social media by tracking their metrics.
You can create more and better content from your analysis that will drive the target audience to engage with your brand.
Tip #2: Start With Small Budgets
As you plan your sales funnel strategy and how you can engage and drive target customers to your brand, have a working budget that your business can handle.
If you don’t have a high budget or your business isn’t that large, you can start and manage a small budget. Hear what Mark Buff of ProfitFrog says on a tool to manage small social marketing budgets.
“We created a fun, accurate, easy-to-use tool that simplifies planning your business needs. Best of all? It energizes and aligns the team around a common goal, making life in business less stressful and more enjoyable.”
You can get your marketing team to work on some small marketing plans for your brand on social media, like posting content on sites where your target customer engages most.
Why Social Media Sales Funnel in important?
Many of your target customers engage brands on social media. They are always looking for the best brands to offer solutions to their pain points as they consume content through these social sites.
It is essential to have a great sales funnel with benefits like these:
Source: Salesforce
With a great sales funnel plan, you can engage more target audiences, get them to know more about your business, and convert them into customers.
If you have been looking for the best ways to run your social media sales funnel and engage your customers, the article gives you the best tips. Use them to nurture your audience down the sales funnel and get them to convert and become customers.