When building a social media strategy, you want to make sure your tactics cover each stage of the sales funnel.
How do you make strangers trust you enough to buy your product?
A long time ago in a century far away, a marketer named Elias St.Elmo Lewis came up with a brilliant answer. His theory was that you could turn strangers into raving customers with a “funnel”: a series of steps the customer follows, each one leading them closer to purchasing your product.
According to Lewis, people follow these four steps before they’re ready to buy.
Lewis came up with the sales funnel concept in 1898. But this AIDA (awareness, interest, desire, action) model is still used by professional copywriters. It’s also been revised and updated—for example, sophisticated marketers extend this formula into customer journey mapping. (Here’s the foundational article from Harvard Business Review that helped to spark the discipline of customer journey mapping.)
These days, most companies have some type of funnel in their marketing, even if the names of the stages change by industry or company. For example, in B2B marketing you’ll find an evaluation stage as buying a million-dollar software package takes more thought than deciding to buy a small item on Amazon.
In this post, we’ll take the DNA of Lewis’ classic sales funnel formula and apply it to social media.
As you’ll see, we’ve expanded it a bit. In particular, you’ll see the addition of the evaluation stage (as these days, it’s much easier to research and compare products online) and advocacy (as social media’s greatest power is helping customers attract more customers).
When building a social media strategy, a good plan of attack is to make sure your tactics cover each stage of the sales funnel. As you can see below, each step includes a specific question that your marketing strategy should answer.
A common mistake of amatuer marketers is to only invest in a few stages of the funnel.
For example, you’ll see popular YouTube channels with lots of traffic and awareness. But they don’t work very hard to sell you anything as they haven’t invested in their sales content.
Or you’ll see a small business with a beautiful website with lots of case studies, product videos, and sales content. But they don’t have a strategy—such as a popular Instagram account or Facebook videos—to get people to their website.
Use the checklist below to ensure you’ve got tactics that match every stage of the sales funnel. Avoid picking too many tactics. Limit yourself to one or two tactics for each stage, master them, and then add new ones once you’ve seen success.
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Your social media sales funnel needs to answer five questions. If you ignore any stage of the funnel, your marketing weakens. Pick a maximum of two tactics for each stage in the funnel. Once you’ve mastered those tactics, add new ones to your marketing plan.
There’s lots of ways to earn the attention of your audience. Pick one of these tactics rather than trying to do them all.
New to social ads? Check out our guide to social media advertising and click the relevant link below for our platform-specific how-to guides with tips, strategies, and examples.
Earning attention isn’t enough. You need to make sure you’ve got enough reviews, case studies, and credible information to persuade customers.
Prospects need a nudge to buy. Help them take the leap with these tactics.
It’s a lot of work to find customers. Stay connected with existing customers, so you can sell them new products in the future.
Make it easy for customers to share their experience and love for your products. This increases your credibility and attracts new customers.
The final thing about building a social media sales funnel is to always remember that the goal of the funnel is to lead the customer to action (and then eventually advocacy).
So I guess that means it’s time for my pitch.
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If you already have a Hootsuite account, you might like this expert guide to building a social following. The guide contains interviews with three world-class social media professionals. No fluff. No tired tactics. It’s packed with super-practical advice including the exact publishing schedule Mari Smith (the world’s top Facebook expert) used to build a global following.
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