Tips for Building a Social Media Marketing Funnel That Converts

There has never been a better time for marketers to incorporate social media marketing into their sales funnels. There are more ways to send users from social to e-commerce than ever before, and brands that solely use their social channels for building awareness risk losing motivated buyers in the sales process. Social media moves so quickly now that moving from brand to brand is as quick as a scroll, and your competitors with seamless social media marketing funnels may be picking up customers that you have missed

In order to maximize ROI, you should determine your key business objectives for each social channel (perhaps you want to focus on e-commerce on one channel, and keep another focused on building brand awareness), and then map out a funnel as a way to segment and create content that contents. As this process is no simple task, we have outlined all of the steps of the social media sales funnel and highlighted opportunities that your brand should be aware of to succeed.

What Is a Social Media Marketing Funnel And Why Is It Important?

A social media marketing funnel is a path that a brand or business creates using social media as the starting point to guide a lead through a strategic journey to becoming a customer. A large part of the customer lifecycle occurs on visual channels which is why it’s so crucial to understand how your brand can cut through the noise of the competition. Understanding the social media marketing sales funnel steps ensures you’re leading your customers to purchase your products. 

Each stage of the social media sales funnel presents an opportunity to determine what’s working, and what’s not. Each step along the path to conversion should be optimized to maximize your chances of converting leads into customers. The most important steps to consider in social media conversion funnel marketing are as follows:

Step 1: Awareness

Awareness is the first stage of the social media funnel. The objective is to inform your target audience that your product exists. Here, you’ll want to lead prospects to blogs, TikTok videos, YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels that build your reputation and pique their interest in the product discovery phase.

Success means ensuring your content is engaging enough to inspire users to take action. Dash Hudson's Predictive Vision AI helps brands identify their top-performing content before even having to hit publish by using an AI lens to analyze parts of posts that users respond most to. Whether it’s a red lip or a green sofa, Vision can help you crack the code to create top-performing content every single time, ultimately generating brand awareness, which leads to step two.

Step 2: Consideration / Interest

In this stage, it’s important to provide specific information to showcase your brand's competitive advantage to stop potential customers from choosing your competition. Invest in developing and creating content, along with partnering with brand ambassadors, as this will ensure that customers ultimately convert. Examples of this include product reviews, testimonials, blog posts and webinars.

Brands are using LikeShop, our link-in-bio feature, to get prospects closer to checkout. By leveraging LikeShop, it gives brands the ability to treat Instagram and TikTok as their storefront and serves to create a seamless user experience. You can use this to help educate and differentiate your brand and products. 

The Havenly creates custom content to direct users to take a style quiz, read their blog, learn about pop-up shops, and (of course) link out to their shop. The brand also uses email capture to allow users who are further down the funnel to subscribe for news and discounts.

Step 3: Conversion / Decision

This is where you give your prospect a final nudge to ensure they convert. This can include retargeting efforts, promotion codes, and providing irresistible incentives. BEIS does this by sending a text with a discount code along with a targeted Facebook Ad.

Step 4: Loyalty

Now that you’ve gained new customers, you’ll want to ensure you retain them. Leveraging social listening tools can provide your brand with insight into overall satisfaction with your brand and specific products.

Last, optimizing user-generated content is a great way to foster community, which we know has become increasingly important in keeping customers engaged over time. Ultimately, these actions in the loyalty phase will lead to advocacy, which will help you gain even more customers.

Step 5: Advocacy

Brands can really tap into the power of social media in this part of the funnel. This stage is a great opportunity to partner with brand ambassadors to help create meaningful content. Advocates for your brand are held in high regard by their peers, and there is nothing more authentic than a genuine review.

Methods to garner and incentivize brand advocacy include affiliate programs, product review incentives and giveaways. Once you’ve collected customer testimonials, you can use this user-generated content in campaigns, webinars, and across social platforms to spread the word.

How Dash Hudson Can Help With Conversion Funnel Marketing 

Social media marketing funnels can help drive more of your audience from the start to the end of the sales funnel. It’s key to understand each part of the funnel, your unique audience, and KPIs to measure and drive success across social––and ultimately, increase conversions.  

With Dash Hudson’s proprietary visual intelligence technology, you can help ensure the content you publish is top-performing. Publishing content that resonates with prospects and customers is key to propelling people into the sales funnel.

To understand the holistic performance of social channels, brands leverage our Campaigns feature, which provides you with a complete analysis of how content performed for content groupings you choose (such as product launches) across all channels.