How Social Media Marketing Funnels Work

Did you know nearly 70% of e-commerce shopping carts get abandoned? Also… it takes consumers 6–8 touching points with your brand before they feel confident purchasing.

We all know that social media is a powerful tool that brands can use to build awareness and drive sales, but oftentimes they will pull their precious social advertising budget after a few weeks because they aren’t seeing the results they were expecting.

When it comes to social media marketing, it’s important to zoom out and see how it fits into the overall strategy of driving leads or sales. Where exactly does it fit and how do you most effectively use your budget?

While everyone has different buying habits, marketers understand the high rate of cart abandonment and have seen great success in leading consumers through what’s called a sales or marketing funnel. But first, I have a confession.

I’ll admit it — I’m guilty of abandoning my cart, too. It happened just this week. I went to purchase a pair of shoes from GOAT, that was already pushing outside of my budget, but I wanted them so badly I added them to my cart and even went as far as putting in my email and credit card information. When it came to pressing the final order now button, I couldn’t do it. The next day I started seeing ads in my Instagram stories and even got an email that said, hey you forgot to check out! After a few days of weighing it, I decided to go ahead and make the purchase.

The steps I went through aren’t dissimilar to many e-commerce shoppers and marketers know this. That’s why they create campaigns for every stage of that buying process. So, why do they call it a funnel?

As customers make their way to your brand, a lot of people will find themselves in front of an awareness campaign, but not all of them will continue through to learn more about the product and actually make a purchase. Some will! With social media, it makes it really easy to create specific messages to be sent to specific people during their journey through the purchasing process. Let’s go through each of the funnel steps together and explore possible solutions for each.

Brand Awareness

How do you increase brand awareness? This is where really good content comes in handy. You’ve probably seen videos or images pop up in your news feed showcasing products from companies you’ve never even seen before. The goal of brand awareness campaigns is to get your content in front of as many potential customers as possible. When it comes to measuring the success of brand awareness campaigns, you can’t get discouraged if you don’t see any conversions come through right away. Most people aren’t ready to make a purchase the first time around, but they may be willing to click on the ad and head to your website. Those are the people that move down through the tunnel to the next step.

Nurture customers through the buying process and into a conversion

After someone has clicked on a brand awareness ad, you’ve kinda caught ’em. It’s really valuable to get people, at the very least, through to this stage. Facebook has created what’s called a Pixel that you can put on your website that tracks the activity of each user from the time they click on your ad through until the time they exit your website. Then they share that information with you and give you the freedom to do what you want with it!

There are a few different people who come through to the website. Some of them accidentally clicked on the link and exit out immediately after, we call those bouncers.
Next, there are the people that scroll through the homepage then perhaps see prices or that your product isn’t interesting to them, and leave soon after.
You then have the people who wander around for a few minutes, browsing through different pages. Maybe they shop around, add a few things to their cart, and if you’re lucky, they might be like me and put in their email and credit card information.
Then, of course, you have the golden conversions of the people who actually came through and purchased without the need of much coddling.

When we talk about nurturing customers through the buying process, this is going to have multiple levels in and of itself, simply because you are going to want to send different messages to each of those different people.

For those people who quickly came and went, you will probably want to hit them with some more brand awareness messaging.
On the other hand, those who spent a significant amount of time on the website browsing through, say some skirts, you will want to hit them up with a carousel of the different skirts you have to offer.
For the people who actually put items in their cart, you will definitely want to do social media retargeting, but this is where email campaigns come in really handy because you can send them an email reminding them about their cart. You can even throw in a 25% off coupon or some other deal to really get them to convert.

Brand Loyalty

After you’ve made a customer, you’ll want to keep them as a customer. It’s more cost effective to keep past customers returning than to find new customers. Acquiring a new customer can cost up to five times more than retaining someone. After you have their email, you can send them deals and offers, sign them up for a birthday treat, or just hit them up frequently, reminding them you are still their trusty old friend! You can also incentivize these people to leave reviews or create user-generated content that you can share with new people. Social proof is really important in the buying process, and a good word about your product or service will do wonders when it comes to leading people through the buying process.

Audiences

As mentioned above, Facebook Pixels give you really valuable information about the people who have visited your website, but there are also other ways to target people.

One of the best audiences to use is called a Lookalike Audience. After downloading a file of all the emails you have gathered from past purchases, you hand them over to Facebook. Because they have gathered data from 2.5 billion people, they can create an audience of people who have similar interests and purchasing behaviors of the people who have already purchased from you. Similarly, you can create a lookalike audience of the people who have engaged with or follow your page.

Then you have, of course, the audiences that you can build out yourself, customizing age, gender, location, interests, behaviors, and more.

The funnel is a basic strategy that has seen a lot of success. Of course, each brand will need to create content and messaging that is unique to them for each stage of the buying process. When it comes to seeing conversions, it’s a bit unrealistic to see them come through immediately. Many brands get frustrated with the lack of results and can become discouraged seeing their precious advertising budget being sucked up by Facebook. Patience is key when it comes to funnel campaigns. It takes time to gather data from your website visitors and nurture them through the stages of purchasing. Don’t give up too soon! I suggest giving campaigns at least 3 months and $500/month before throwing in the towel.