How to Build a Social Media Sales Funnel That Converts

Social media has become a powerful tool that enables brands to reach their target audience. However, just because you're on social media doesn't mean you'll profit from it. You must streamline and manage your social media activities using different tools. One of these tools is the sales funnel. This article will guide you on creating a social media sales funnel that converts. 

What is a Social Media Sales Funnel?

A social media sales funnel refers to the steps a customer goes through at the different stages of the sales journey. It begins with the potential customer becoming aware of your product and continues until they make a purchase and become a brand advocate. With the social media sales funnel, you can have a great brand image that will translate into positive word of mouth and turn your audience into customers.

Understanding the sales funnel is a good step, providing essential insights into how your customers think. Understanding the stages of the sales funnel enables you to easily turn followers into buyers without being pushy. A social media sales funnel consists of the  following stages:

• Awareness. In this stage, your goal is to make social media followers aware of your brand.
• Interest. After seeing the product, social media users will become curious. They will show interest by reading the post, clicking on the CTA, and visiting your social media page or website.
• Desire. At this stage, you need to make your audience desire your products. Understanding the audience’s pain points can help you address their needs effectively.
• Action. This is the stage at which your audience starts to take action, such as requesting a product demo, contacting the sales team, or adding the item to their cart. They can even click on the Buy Now item.
• Advocacy. This stage is when the customer likes the brand enough to discuss it and even recommend it to their family and friends.

You can customize the social media sales funnel to meet the needs of your niche or industry, but the above steps should serve as a guide. 

How to Create a Social Media Sales Funnel

A good sales funnel should demonstrate the customer’s buying journey and help you convert leads into customers. The same principle is applied on social media, where you need to use different social media strategies to influence the behavior of your prospects and guide them in the right direction. These are the stages of creating a good social media sales funnel:

Understanding Your Audience

Regardless of your marketing campaign, it is essential to understand your target audience. This is also a necessary step in creating your brand’s customer persona, which you can tailor to the needs of your products or services. A buyer’s persona aims to meet the customer’s needs based on their age, location, and pain points.

Some of the questions to ask yourself to understand the customer better are:

• Who is your target audience?
• What is their location?
• How old are they?
• What is their work?
• What are their hobbies?
• What do they do online?

Create Awareness Stage Content

We noted that the first stage of the sales funnel is the awareness stage. In this stage, you must capture people’s attention by understanding their priorities and providing solutions. You can research the questions people ask in your niche or on platforms like Reddit and Discord rooms. 

Pay attention to questions with many answers and those with few answers and comments like “I need to know too.” These kinds of content will make great topics for the awareness strategy. 

You can transform content to create content on various themes, such as how-to articles, videos, and podcasts. Also, ensure you conduct keyword research using tools like Ahrefs to identify topics with high search volumes. For instance, if you are a pest control service, in the awareness stage, you can create content on the pests commonly found at home and how to prevent them.

Offer a Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

After you have found your audience interested and curious about your content, you can create a unique selling proposition (USP). This is where you will provide them with the solution your business offers. 

Following our earlier pest control example, you already mentioned the bugs commonly found in the home to your audience. Now, in the USP, you can say your packages help eradicate pests. Since you are now mentioning real and tangible solutions to your audience, it will start generating interest in your brand. 

Start Encouraging Them to Buy

In the USP, you made the customers aware of your solution. However, it's easy for them to show interest but not make a purchase. Therefore, you still need to convince them to move from showing interest in the product to buying it. This is why you must take action to move your audience from the desire to the action stage.

In this stage of the buying process, you will need to create product-specific content. You can do that by publishing case studies that show the level of success of your pest elimination solutions. You will illustrate in detail how your products will deliver the desirable results that can lead to profitability. You can use several methods to nudge them, such as:

• Free product trials.
• Social media ads with offers
• Contents with products as rewards.

Post-Buying Engagement

A common mistake businesses make is assuming that the customer's journey ends after a purchase. However, customers expect their brands to care about how their products or tools work in the real world. That's why you need to continue actively engaging with customers. A well-designed post-purchase support system enables customers to become lifelong fans and potential brand advocates.

Therefore, ensure you remain connected to your customers by checking in with them, inviting them to try your new products, and sharing information they might find helpful to get more out of their purchase. Ensure that you continue making content on social media that supports their post-purchase experience. For instance, you can chat with them regularly on social media or engage them in a Q&A session. You can also offer customers priority support.

Encourage Customer Advocacy

Once you realize that customers already love your product, encourage them to share positive reviews and experiences. This is an essential step as word-of-mouth marketing generates great results. You can do that by:

• Creating private groups for your customers.
• Having a customer and employee advocacy program.
• Adding customer interviews and quotes.

Test Your Social Media Sales Funnel

A social media marketing strategy cannot be complete without checking if it's bringing the desired results. Therefore, the performance of each stage of the sales journey should be evaluated by examining social media analytics. Pay special attention to the stage where your customers churn out. Check various social media metrics, including impressions, reach, conversions, share of brand voice, referral ROIs, CTR, and response rate. 

In Conclusion

A social media sales funnel is an essential tool in today's social media marketing. It can help you establish a new level of trust with your audience. By following the above steps, it's possible to take your social media marketing to the next level. This is especially true when combined with the right AI-driven SEO strategies.