The social media marketing funnel is a tool that helps you determine what to post on your social media pages to drive customer action.

The marketing funnel describes how customers move through the stages of awareness, consideration, conversion, and loyalty.

It is useful for understanding how your different marketing activities work together to help you meet your goals. Businesses use the marketing funnel often in their paid advertising.

However, the social media marketing funnel is specific to social media and the ways in which it interacts with other digital channels like email and search engines.

This article will provide a breakdown of everything you need to know in order to create a successful social media marketing funnel. This will include understanding the different stages involved in the process.

Social media funnel maps

Another definition of the social media funnel is the process that potential customers go through when they become aware of your brand, consider it, make a purchase, and then become loyal customers or advocates for your business.

At the first stage, people are becoming aware that your business exists. This can be through existing followers of your pages or profiles seeing stories about you posted by friends or other businesses. It could also be through people noticing hashtags connected to your business that they’re interested in, such as #TacoTuesday if you run a Mexican restaurant.

When visitors come to your site and start taking more actions than just liking and sharing posts, it’s called the consideration stage. This is when they might sign up for your newsletter or download valuable content from you, like e-books or webinars, in exchange for their email address. They might also start engaging with other fans of your page by commenting on posts and messaging you directly with questions. This gives you more information about them and their motivations, so you can customize your content more effectively later on.

Stages of the Social Media Marketing Funnel

Stage 1: Awareness

The first stage of social media marketing is known as the awareness stage. In this stage, businesses try to introduce their brand to individuals who are not familiar with it. The goal is to convince potential customers that they need the product or service that the business offers and that the business is the best option to fulfill that need.

If you can’t grab a potential customer’s attention right away, then it won’t matter how well your content is crafted and targeted. This is why social media marketing funnels are so important because they help you get noticed by customers who might not otherwise hear about your company.

Your business needs to be present on social media to increase awareness. You can do this by posting regularly and using hashtags that are relevant to your brand and marketing goals. This will help people who are interested in your content to find you more easily.

There are a few things you can do to increase traffic to your social media pages. You can partner with social media influencers who will promote your content, or even create content for you. You can also use paid advertising on social media sites. Another option is to use contests or other events through social media to build interest in your company.

Research whether there are any LinkedIn groups which would be relevant to your target market. If there are, join in on the discussions and contribute with responses that are both thoughtful and contain information about your products or services.

Examples of awareness stage in social media marketing funnels

Awareness stage examples include:

• Instagram influencer posts
• Facebook ad campaigns
• Search ad campaigns
• YouTube ad campaigns
• Podcast ads

Facebook ad campaign 

You might also run a Facebook ad campaign targeting people who are interested in similar products and brands. Using Facebook’s targeting options, you could target people who like:

• Similar brands
• Similar pages
• Similar types of content
• Engaged with similar ads

Figure out how people are introduced to your brand 

To determine how people are introduced to your brand, look at data related to the number of people who visit your website, shop on your app, or sign up for an email newsletter. This will give you insight into which marketing channels are most effective in reaching potential customers.

It is important to understand your target market and ensure that the content you provide is relevant and interesting to them. For example:

• Are they sports fans?
• Do they frequent Instagram?
• What type of music are they into?
• What food do they eat?

Stage 2: Consideration

Goals: website visits and engagement

When you are considering your target audience, you want to focus on those who have already shown interest or who see the potential need that your product or service could fulfill.

You can reach potential customers who have already expressed interest in your brand or similar products by retargeting them. You can also use audiences who have engaged with videos related to your brand. Alternatively, you can try to reach potential customers who are engaged in discussions about your brand on social media platforms such as Twitter or Reddit, or who are following similar brands on Instagram. If they have already been engaging with similar content, they may be more receptive to your brand’s message.

You should test out different ad formats, like video and carousel ads, which are both great for engagement. You shouldn’t forget about single image ads, either. They often have a high click-through rate as long as the message and call to action are effective.

Metrics to measure consideration stage performance

Depending on your campaign goal, whether it’s website traffic:

• Link clicks: number of times the ad link was clicked
• Link CTR: the percentage of times a user clicked your ad after seeing it
• Link CPC: cost per link click

Or engagement with your social media content:

• Video views 25–100%: how many times your videos were watched to a certain timestamp
• View rate: how many impressions led to a video view
• Engagements: how many times users engaged with your ads
• Engagement rate: how many ad impressions led to an engagement

Or performing measurable actions on your website:

• Website micro-conversions: users entering your purchase flow or consuming content
• Website conversion rate: the percentage of users entering your purchase flow after engaging with your ad

How to optimize consideration campaign performance

You should check on your campaigns’ progress after they have been running for a week or two. Compare how they are doing against your chosen metrics.

See how your campaign measures up against both your own previous campaigns as well as other people in your industry.

Here are some other tips on what to look for in the consideration stage:

1. Analyze the volume and quality of the website traffic coming from your social media campaigns. In your analytics tool, pay attention to the bounce rate and time spent on site after arriving through your ads.
2. Is your engagement rate up to the expected level, and what’s the quality of engagements? Remember to monitor the comments and replies you receive and perform community management.
3. Have your conversion campaigns completed the learning phase and started delivering fully? If not, maybe adjust your targeting to gain more data for the platform to optimize for your goal.
4. If you’re using micro-conversions as your campaign goal, are conversions coming in, or have you set the bar too high? Aiming for conversion events that are too far along the purchase flow in the consideration stage can easily lead to an unreasonably high cost per action.

Stage 3: Conversion

Goals: conversions, purchases, and leads

Make it easy for potential customers to finish their purchase by using the audience lists you have built during the consideration stage and retargeting them with your best direct response messaging.

Give your potential customers social proof that your product is great by providing awards, recommendations, customer reviews, or testimonials. Make it easy for them to get started with your product by providing a discount code or some other welcome present. Give them a reason to smile and encourage them to buy your product.

If you work in ecommerce, one pro tip is to use Facebook and Instagram’s intelligent catalog sale ads. These ads can remind users what they left in their shopping cart, as well as recommend other similar products that they may be interested in. The products are displayed in an easily browseable format, complete with your branded frame and an automatically displayed discount.

Your ad should have a clear call-to-action (CTA) that tells the user what you want them to do. Adding a sense of urgency often helps increase the chance that they will take the desired action.

Metrics to measure conversion stage performance

At this stage, it usually comes to your most business-critical metrics, such as:

• Conversions: the most valuable events you have set up in your ad tracking
• Catalog sales: items sold from your ecommerce catalog
• Leads, MQLs, form fills: form submissions on your website

And of course, the effectiveness of these, whether for you it’s the:

• Conversion rate: the number of conversions divided by visit,
• Cost of conversion: ad spend divided by the number of conversions
• Value of the items sold: revenue from sold items
• ROI, ROAS: the ratio between net income and investment or revenue and ad spend

How to optimize conversion campaign performance

This is the time to put your money where your mouth is.

Ideally, you’d know your target ROAS or cost per customer acquisition and be able to optimize the ad spend towards that value. At the very least, you want to:

1. Make sure that the cost you’re paying per action is reasonable to pay for the given action, knowing the value of your products.
2. Know which social media platforms perform better at driving home conversions depending on your industry and product type. Test what works best for you in each stage of the funnel. Spend a small share of your total budget on testing new channels.

Stage 4: Loyalty

Goals: upselling and cross-selling

The last thing you want after working hard to gain new customers is to lose them. Keep them happy by making them feel special and giving them excellent customer service.

This is just one part of a bigger experience that includes the efforts of many teams within your organization, including customer service, account management, marketing automation, website development, and social media.

It is important to follow and listen to what people are saying about your brand and products on social media in order to get valuable insights into customer satisfaction and how your brand is perceived. There are many social listening tools available to help with this.

It’s important to respond to customers through social media channels because every interaction matters.

Some of the ways you can support the loyalty with social campaigns:

• Get people to follow you and keep delighting them with good quality organic content
• Promote exclusive sneak peeks, early access to your products, and sales to your existing customers
• Express that you want to hear from them, maybe give a little prize for leaving a review
• Recommend products that you know they might like, based on their purchase history
• Let them know when the products they liked are on sale
• Let them know about new products and features that they might be interested in
• Give them industry insights, inspiration, and tips and tricks of how to get most out of your product

Metrics to measure loyalty stage performance

The loyalty stage really comes down to the customer experience, and there are multiple ways to measure it. Depending on what efforts you’re taking on social media, you might want to track:

• Reviews and review ratings: how many reviews your profile has received on social media
• Page likes and followers: new followers to your company page or profile
• Net followers: new followers minus unfollows
• Engaged users: the number of people who engaged with your page or profile
• Positive and negative actions: the type of actions taken on your posts

Stage 5: Advocate

Goals: social proof and credibility

The advocate stage is for customers who are not only satisfied with the outcome of their purchase, but are so happy that they want to tell others about it. Social media is a great way to harness the power of customer satisfaction to attract more customers.

In this stage, you can partner with famous people, experts, or other organizations to get them to advertise your brand to their fans.

Some of the ways to do this are:

• Collaborate with your fans and power users to create organic content
• Share the content they create and add a paid boost if possible to extend the reach
• Share positive reviews
• Partner with affiliates, offer commission and in some cases co-selling opportunities
• Offer a private group where customers can talk to each other and share their experiences and insights

Metrics to measure advocate stage performance

• Mentions: times your brand has been mentioned in social media posts
• Influencer content engagement: engagement and react or views of your influencer-generated content

Brand advocates can help support your social media marketing funnel by spreading awareness and influencing consideration to drive conversions and increase loyalty.

Social media marketing is a great way to connect with your audience, build trust and create an authentic base of fans for your brand!

Related posts:

From Awareness to Acquisition: Creating a Content Funnel that Converts The Ultimate Guide to Creating a Content Marketing Funnel 9 Ways to Build Customer Relationships Through Social Media Monitoring How To Develop a Profitable Digital Marketing Funnel