How to Optimize Your Social Media Funnel in 2022
Do you feel your social media marketing strategy is lacking? Perhaps, your social media engagements are just engagements — no conversions?
According to a survey by SproutSocial, 47 percent of social media marketers struggle to develop effective social strategies that align with their overall business goals. That could happen for several reasons, such as insufficient time to produce interesting content or targeting the right platforms for maximum engagement.
To make social media an effective sales medium, consider different touchpoints in the sales funnel, and connect with your audience across multiple social channels.
This blog post will teach you how to optimize your social media funnel for increased conversions in 2022.
Let’s start at the top.
What Is a Social Media Sales Funnel?
A social media sales funnel is a visual representation of your customer’s journey on social media. The funnel depicts the sales process of potential customers from awareness to conversion and beyond.
The traditional marketing funnel has five stages:
Awareness: The awareness stage informs potential customers about your business using relevant social content like tutorial videos or live videos. That could help drive organic traffic to your website and build an audience.
Consideration: As potential customers become aware of your products, they move to the second phase, the consideration stage. The goal is to retarget leads who previously came across your brand but did not convert and convince those who stuck around by showing value.
Conversion: Your leads move down the sales funnel to the conversion stage when they’re ready to buy from you. You can use social proof and discounted offers to nurture and persuade them to convert.
Engagement: The engagement stage is a post-purchase phase in the social media sales funnel. Here, you should employ social media strategies that groom and nurture current customers into lifelong enthusiasts.
Advocacy: This stage of the social media funnel takes engagement a step further by converting your brand enthusiasts into fiery brand advocates. And you can only do this through referral programs and by encouraging these customers to leave reviews or testimonials of your products on their social media.
On a good day, the above funnel should be a one-way street. However, in reality, some leads could drop off before getting to the bottom of the funnel.
Chances are, you’ve optimized your social media strategy for a streamlined social media sales funnel — which is not a bad thing, by the way.
But social media’s interactive nature makes it challenging to box your target audience into a streamlined buyer journey.
Why? Different strokes for different folks.
To simplify this, think of your social media marketing funnel as a spectrum of actions.
One customer can go from following you to buying immediately. Another might wait for months after following to buy.
The truth is, no cut-and-dried social media strategy exists. But if your current social media campaigns aren’t turning your leads into customers, then optimize your sales funnel using the tips below.
1. Identify Your Audience
Your target audience shapes your social media strategy.
Your buyer personas can serve as your target audience for social media. But if you don’t have one, analyze your current customers and use the data to create your personas.
Understanding your target audience before each campaign will help you target your content and reach the audience most likely to become your customers.
You can identify your target audience by:
- Creating a buyer persona from audience demographics and psychographics such as age, location, purchasing patterns, etc.
- Researching the social channels where your customers hang out
- Digging into the customer base to gather historical trends on buyer behavior.
- Analyzing your product or service to determine the kind of people who may find your products useful.
- Checking out the competitor
This information is essential to the success of your funnel because it helps to align your funnel content to your audience’s interests and challenges. It also helps you understand your target market enough to target relevant ads to an audience likely to convert.
2. Create a Strong Landing Page
Now your target audience is all set up, let’s get them into your funnel.
A critical part of any lead generation strategy is creating a social media landing page. This page will generate different kinds of conversion — clicks, sign-ups, likes, comments, or even follows — to move your leads down the social media marketing funnel. The specific action will depend on the landing page’s goal.
For stellar results, you’ll want to offer information a potential customer may find quite valuable to click through (more on this later). Depending on your campaign goals, you may want to use blogging tools such as Wix or WordPress to create a compelling landing page.
Keep your landing page layout simple, mobile-friendly, and campaign-specific to ensure your metrics are measurable.
For example, Cold Stone Creamery links to their landing page from their Instagram bio.
The landing page is simple and consistent with the brand’s colorful, laid-back personality.
Above, you can see a clear CTA that says “Order Online!” making the purpose of the landing page clear to visitors from the get-go.
You can also create multiple landing pages for product launches and new promotions. Use tools like Optimizely to test and revise each page’s performance through A/B or multivariate testing.
As a final step, set up tracking pixels on the landing page to gather information from the start. It’ll make it easier to create a remarketing campaign in the future.
3. Decide What to Offer
As you create your social media funnel, it’s vital to consider what attracts your ideal audience and offer it as a lead magnet in the awareness stage. These can be tutorial videos or live videos you can promote on social ads or YouTube with a link to your Instagram bio.
The consideration and conversion stage can have overlapping content that convinces and converts your audience. For instance, you can offer;
use cases,
customer reviews for social proof, or
discounted offers on either stage.
But at the bottom of the funnel — engagement and advocacy — you’ll have to tweak these content offerings to keep them invested.
You can consider retargeting campaigns. Retargeting allows you to remarket your products to people who have been in the consideration stage for too long without converting. Nothing does the final push more than an offer.
Try product demos, discount coupons, free shipping, or other incentives that entice your buyer persona. Your remarketing campaign can also include product videos previously shared on social media that explain how your product works. Video marketing works wonders.
For example, Ahrefs uses a short video to show their Twitter audience how to find content ideas using their tool.
This video can be repurposed for a remarketing campaign in the future. Effective bottom-of-the-funnel offerings allow you to drive traffic to your site, develop customer relationships and increase conversions.
4. Include User-Generated Content (UGC)
It can be overwhelming to source unique, engaging content when you’re just starting a business on social media. User-generated content provides you with relatable content for your business and improves authenticity, leading to customer conversions in the funnel.
Moreover, UGC, as social media funnel content, is way cheaper to curate than influencer-type content.
Incorporate UGC campaigns like hashtag campaigns, surveys, and contests with incentives in the conversion stage of your social media funnel. That will give you free content, encourage audience participation and boost engagement and conversions.
Here’s a UGC example by a LaCroix water customer.
You can motivate customers to tag you with branded hashtags, so content is easy to curate afterward. You can even incorporate your UGC in email marketing campaigns. Just make sure you use email tracking tools that will allow you to quickly send the right follow-up that elicits your desired action from your subscribers.
While it’s okay to repost curated UGCs on several social platforms, it’s basic courtesy to seek permission from the original creators and tag them on the uploaded content.
Sharing engaging reviews, pictures, and videos uploaded by existing consumers creates available social proof that encourages conversions from new customers.
5. Create a Posting Schedule
Posting consistently on social media will increase your engagement rates. This study by Social Media Today reports that a brand that posts 3x a day gets 2.2x more engagement (on average) than one that posts once a day.
Be careful, though, as too much promotional content could be counter-effective on the wrong social media platform.
You can post on your Instagram feed up to seven times a week and on Facebook between one to two times a day. Twitter and Linkedin users can handle up to five posts a day.
Unsure of the type of content to share per week? Go for the rule of thirds.
- One-third of posts should promote your business
- One-third can share personal, motivating stories.
- One-third should focus on sharing informative insights in your field.
Identify the best time to post content on your social media platforms, as mobile users are not always online. That’s the key to maximum engagement.
An optimized posting schedule would help you access your target audience, improve engagement rate, and subsequently encourage conversions.
6. Track Your Campaigns
Finally, tracking your social media campaigns shows your strategy’s efficiency and suggests the next line of action.
You can monitor social media campaign performance using several tools like Hootsuite and Mentionlytics. Heatmaps and screen recordings can show people’s behavior on your sales or landing page.
Manually track audience engagement based on your posts’ number of shares, likes, and comments. Email tracking tools and Google Analytics can provide better, in-depth information on your campaign’s success. They help identify the best kind of content to roll out at each marketing funnel stage for increased conversions.
Implement changes to your overall social media marketing funnel based on your findings.
In Closing
Having a plan is essential to creating a successful social media funnel.
Identify your target audience before launching your marketing campaign. It’ll allow you to tailor your campaign to suit the audience’s needs.
A strong landing page retains leads and increases their chances of reaching the bottom of the funnel. Generate content from your audience and craft a well-designed posting schedule. You’d have an effective template for a social media funnel with the correct information about what you’ll offer and an effective monitoring plan.
Follow these tips, and you’ll get incredible results from your brand’s social media marketing campaign.
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Bio:
David Campbell is a digital marketing specialist at Ramp Ventures. He helps manage the content marketing team at Right Inbox. When he’s not working, he enjoys traveling and trying to learn Spanish.
