How To Build a Profitable Social Media Marketing Funnel

Learn from Francisco Lacayo how to build a social media marketing funnel that converts prospects to customers.

October 17, 2022

Social media has revolutionized how people and brands interact with each other. When it comes to marketing using social media, brands should know how to build a profitable social media marketing funnel. Francisco Lacayo, CRO, White Shark Media, explains how to build a social media marketing funnel that converts prospects to customers.

It is no secret that social media has ultimately transformed how we communicate with one another and, even more, how businesses reach their target audience. As over 4 billion people worldwide are using social media, marketers must know how to incorporate these social platforms into their practice and strategy to ensure their efforts are profitable. The key to a successful social media marketing funnel is optimization. This allows marketers to find their target audiences, increase awareness, and boost sales through the buyer’s journey. Focusing on this marketing funnel gives marketers a roadmap that visually helps brands identify the steps needed to convert a prospect into a customer.  

Building Awareness Through Social Media

Making sure your target audience is aware of your brand or product’s existence is a key factor when trying to sell through social media. The first step is building awareness across social channels. However, to be successful, you need to create content that appeals to the audience that you are trying to reach. You may make educated guesses along the way on how to achieve this, but a key element is understanding your market before jumping into the social media pool. To do this, we build campaigns; we spend more time working on the strategy than actually building the campaign itself. 

See More: How Influencer and Referral Marketing Can Boost Brand Trust

Once the strategy and campaign are finalized, it is time to start creating and building awareness. If your brand or product is not as well known, you might not be able to market it as aggressively. However, most companies nowadays do a pre-launch campaign to build expectations, bring mystery and work with various influencers. Once you obtain data for the social media campaign centered on building awareness, you start seeing what works best and the audience you are attracting. You can then begin to optimize towards fine-tuning the funnel. It is more about audiences knowing your brand and knowing what you do.

Optimizing Your Brand’s Social Media

Optimizing your brand’s social media campaign is crucial in determining its success. When a campaign is launched, the goal is to generate traffic, which in turn, compiles data that allows marketers to see how often an ad is clicked on and how many times that ad is seen. Once this data starts rolling in, marketers can begin analyzing what is working and what is not. Based on the initial results from the key performance indicators (KPIs), strategies start adjusting accordingly within that campaign and may be adjusted repeatedly to ensure the biggest ROI. 

If engagement is low, the best strategy may be to optimize your social media audience to reach more of the initial targeted audience. The same goes for ad copy. If multiple ads are running, the copy may need to be optimized to determine what is working and what is not. Maybe the words need to change, or maybe the image itself. The only way to know for sure is to analyze the data consistently and, in turn, optimize it to better resonate with the target audience to make sure that you are gradually improving results and achieving your goal. 

Once you start optimizing your campaign, the platform’s algorithm will also work to show only ads that the audience is most interested in. As long as you consistently optimize the account and give the right message at the right stage in the buyer’s journey, you will get closer and closer to turning your audience into customers while weeding out those who are not a fit. 

Impact the Buyer’s Journey Through Social Media – This Is Where You Know if It Is Profitable

After campaigns run smoothly and target the right audience, brands can begin impacting buyers through social media marketing. This is where we begin to see a brand’s value, especially when it sells its products online. It is relatively easy to keep track of consumers who purchase the products online, which in turn, enables marketers to target them with specific, tailored messages to re-engage after the purchase. For example, let us say you have a monthly subscription service. Through social media, you can target all of your current subscribers in one place by creating a strategic marketing campaign based on their already collected data. This helps build your brand’s loyalty and extend the lifetime value of the customers because every message they receive is centered around what you already know about them. 

On the other hand, let us say that a customer is new to your brand. Maybe they have only purchased one or two items. A strong social media campaign that reflects the customer’s behavior to re-engage might turn a one-time customer into a repeat customer. There is also the possibility that the customer had an item in their cart but deleted it right before checking out, or maybe they spent a significant amount of time on one particular product’s page. All of this data can be used to create targeted ads offering discounts or referral gifts to bring back a customer.  

Depending on what you are selling and who your audience is, there are multiple strategies to consider to create the most profitable social media marketing funnel. Business-to-consumer brands are selling directly to consumers, so as a marketer, it is important to understand and know who exactly that consumer is and the best way to target them. In this case, Facebook and Instagram campaigns are proven to be two of the most successful platforms to use for social media marketing. Consumers use both platforms daily not only to keep in touch with their friends but also to find out the latest trends in fashion, products and more. This is a more general approach that allows marketers to reach a wider audience. 

See More: How the Metaverse Is Changing the Dynamics of Influencer Marketing

Business-to-business brands can adopt a much more tailored approach to their social media marketing, as their target audience is much more specific. Using LinkedIn ads is the best way to ensure that the right person at the right company will be targeted. Marketers working with B2B brands can go as far as selecting specific job titles within specific industries to target. 

Thanks to social media, brands can now communicate and relay information to their consumers more consistently and on a much larger scale. While the surplus of digital information and social media noise may seem daunting, it can also be highly beneficial for your brand. It helps marketers understand a brand’s target audience even further by allowing a constant flow of information and data to be received and analyzed, which in turn, helps to create a profitable social media marketing funnel that ensures higher ROIs. 

What steps have you taken to build a profitable social media marketing funnel? Share with us on FacebookOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , and LinkedInOpens a new window .

Image Source: Shutterstock

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Francisco Lacayo
Francisco Lacayo is the CRO at White Shark Media. Francisco has worked in the Digital Marketing industry for 13 years, leading different projects involving customer experience, product development and product innovation. With his background in behavioral economics, Francisco has also been able to develop several programs focused on client centricity, consumer behavior and digital transformation.
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