How to Drive Your Sales Funnel with Social Media Marketing

• Updated on: 2019-04-24
• Read original article here

Business owners around the world have flocked to social media to increase conversions and build great customer experiences. When you look at the statistics, it’s not hard to figure out why. On Facebook alone, 78 percent of adults with Facebook accounts living in the United States purchased a product they found on the social media giant.

Part of increasing your conversion rate involves building awareness with your sales funnel. We are going to take a look at some tips and tricks for drawing more potential leads to your website through social media.

A primary goal of social media marketing is to make potential customers aware that you exist. Below is an example of a sales funnel with an illustration. The point of this image is to show the process involved in getting your leads through the sales funnel and down to advocacy.

The best way to make customers aware of your product is through targeted advertising. You can use a tool like Facebook Ads to create custom ads that appear to the audience you hope to reach.

As you’re developing your ad, think about what questions, concerns, or objections potential customers might have. When you’re cold calling, it’s easy to overcome objections because you’re talking to the person you want to convert. In this case, you have to draw in their interest enough to visit your social media page or in a best-case scenario, your website.

They are now in the consideration stage of the sales funnel.

We would all love to think that as soon as a lead sees our website they are going to make a purchase and our job is done. Anyone who has been in business for any longer than a second knows that this is seldom the case.

Leads will flow to your website, but many will leave. How to do you sway customers who leave into coming back and converting? You can use retargeting pixels, which are also known as browser cookies.

When a customer visits your website, a retargeting pixel will hit their device. You can design your pixel on your website’s back end to work in several ways. In most cases, the lead generation process involves tracking the customers’ behavior on your site. You may want to take note of what they were looking at, whether they added items to their cart, and so forth.

Once the lead leaves and goes back to browsing social media, they will receive ads (and exposure to your business) through retargeted ads from the browser cookie left on their device. Here’s an illustration depicting retargeting.

The goal here is to convince them that your product or service is worth their time, and becomes their preference. You can offer discounts to first-time customers, a gift, and much more to try and get leads to come back and take another look at your website and hopefully complete their purchase.

Once someone makes it down to the purchase section, your job still isn’t finished. You now can use your social media channel to build loyalty, and eventually advocacy.

The loyalty phase can occur in several ways, though it all boils down to engagement. If you get a message from a customer in your private messages, answer them and address their concerns and thank them for their business. Little gestures like this go a long way in ensuring that customers become loyal and tell their friends about you.

You can also increase loyalty and advocacy by engaging with customers on your status updates and new content. If someone takes the time to tell you that they loved your content or product, a public thank you will go a long way. This tactic can also be used to sway others who are in the consideration phase of the sales funnel. Here’s a simple question. Would you be more likely to buy from a business who has an active and public social media account, or one who hasn’t posted a status update or comment since 2013? Spoiler: We already know the answer.

There’s no doubt room for unlimited growth on social media. You have to think carefully about your marketing strategy and how you want to bring leads through your sales funnel. These tips will help you get started and give you the framework you need to push for your next big social media campaign.