If a business owner gets to meet a genie, what two wishes will s/he ask for?
- Covert their social media traffic into paying customers.
- Convert your social media accounts into customer- or lead-generation machines.
If you are a business owner, you don’t need to go looking for a greedy merchant who will fool you into going down a deep cave. In fact, you don’t even need an old, antique lamp to get your wishes regarding content marketing fulfilled.
You already have a magic lamp, you only need to use it properly. The biggest gift of the 20th century is social media. Social media helps business owners reach an audience which spreads across the world. Through a strong social media presence, a brand can well become a household name, gaining the trust of a large number of people.
However, many brand owners have complained about not getting the intended return on investment which made them stop using social media as a tool for marketing. While social media marketing is important to promote your business, creating social media accounts is not enough to pull paying customers to your website.
There are many well-defined frameworks and tips that can help you identify how to create a social media sales funnel and transform your accounts into customer generation machines.
Why Gaining Social Media Exposure Matters?
Today, traditional strategies that were used to create brand awareness are not working as well as they used to. With people spending most of their time on smartphones, outdated marketing methods like TV ads and billboards aren’t giving people the conversion rate they once did.
Brand owners are more likely to find new potential customers on social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter. Social media, as a result, plays an important role in raising brand awareness among people.
You can create brand awareness through continued postings and regular interactions with potential customers. However, you have to keep your social media accounts updated and maintain a constant presence. Many users will not search for your name if they don’t see a post from you. This is why it is important that you don’t go out of sight of your followers.
Social media exposure can have the following direct benefits:
Increased Visibility
Social media accounts will help you create your brand image. You can also use a conversational or humorous tone in your posts to reach a wider audience. For example, a US-based fast food outlet’s Twitter account responds to people’s tweet with witty and humorous replies. Today, people enjoy brands that are less formal on social media.
Gaining Traffic
As discussed, traditional advertising methods are not working anymore. People are now preferring an interactive model where they can get the maximum information about a product. Use your social media accounts to post a link to your website and allow customers to leave a comment about your products. Promptly reply to your customers’ queries and engage with them to form a bond. The idea is to use social media sites to send users to your company’s sales funnels.
Interacting With Customers
A user who will come to your page will not automatically develop a bond with your company or your product. You need to make an effort to convince users to buy your products or services. But before you spam your users comments with offers, engage with your consumers. You can engage with customers by posting fun questions that prompt users to leave a comment. Interact with users and ask for their opinions. You can also regularly post images and videos to help your followers connect with your brand.
Response Time
Do not compromise on your response time. A negative comment or review is damaging to your brand’s reputation. Listen to users’ complaints and give them a satisfactory response. Your social media team should be active all the time to monitor tags and mentions.
How You Can Get Your Social Followers Into Your Sales Funnel
The above-mentioned strategies will help your followers warm up to your brand. Once you have successfully created a connection with your followers, you can easily drive them into your sales funnel. This section will go over how you can get your social media followers into your sales funnel.
Like a traditional sales funnel, social media sales funnels are also based on the principles of awareness, interest, consideration, and purchase. But what’s in this framework is specific to your social media ads.
The first step is awareness. Combine this with interest and develop content that will drive your followers to land on your page and browse through. The biggest mistake that a company does is they go right for the sale. They make a page and start marketing their product. However, your followers or fans will not instantly buy your product just because you are offering it.
You need to take steps to build their trust in your product. For this, you can use article-style listicles or guides that talk about the topic of your fans’ interest. For example, if you own a gym, you can make a listicle of exercises that you can perform in your lunch hour.
This post on your page will bring your social media to your website. On this landing page, you can place an ad, not necessarily with an offer, for your potential customers. The ad can be placed wherever you want but is commonly placed at the end.
If you think that a visitor will not scroll down the page or leave the site, you can retain visitors through an exit intent popup. In this technique, a visitor’s mouse movements are tracked and if the browser detects that the visitor is about to leave, it will display the ad for the visitor to see.
You can link this page with Facebook or Instagram so you can track which social media platform your consumers are coming from and you can distribute your marketing methods accordingly.
The next step is the Facebook/Instagram retargeting ad. While the ad will have an offer, its main objective is to generate traffic and let your potential customers make an association between great content and your product.
This is a sort of ‘warming up exercise’ that you do before converting your social media traffic into paying customers. But be careful with your offer, you don’t want to use the ad to create brand awareness. The ad can be a free consultation or a buy one get one free kind of thing. You can also add some urgency to your offer, for example, a deadline, to get more people to land on your offer page.
This offer page should give them everything they need to know in a concise manner because more than 60 percent of the traffic will be coming from mobile. Mobile users don’t like lengthy articles where they have to actively search for relevant information.
You can also use the Facebook Messenger app to engage with customers and answer any questions that your followers might have about your product.
How to Increase Your Social Media Presence and Followers
Building your social media traffic can be taxing. You have to be available for both your existing and potential customers and answer their questions in order to build a connection with them. In the first phase, people who will approach you are defined as warm traffic. They already have the know-how of your product and are only looking for more information to make a well-informed purchase.
These people are very important, but in order to expand your business, you need to bring your cold traffic into your sales funnel. For this purpose, you have to make an effort to inspire your audience.
Out of the many techniques that you can use for engaging your audience, a few are listed below:
- Statistics show that posts that have visuals increase users’ engagement by 650%
- Finding trending topics, hashtags, themes for the week, social issues and using them to interact with your audience
- Make sure your content is mobile friendly and shareable
- Figure out what’s working: what type of content, to what demographic, at what time of the day and what day of the week is your content reaching the most people. Analyze these numbers and post accordingly
- Make sure to respond and engage in your posts. Interact with your customers when they leave a comment on your posts
In Conclusion
Brands are shifting to social media platforms for creating brand awareness and gaining customers because traditional marketing methods like TV ads and billboards don’t work like they used to. Use your social media accounts to gain more customers and warm them to your brand. Once you have made a connection, you can send your followers into your sale funnel that you built using ClickFunnels.