How to Create an Effective Social-Media-Driven Conversion Funnel

Generally speaking, a conversion funnel (also known as a sales funnel) is a journey a person takes to become your customer.

That journey starts with a click, and that click can be originated from search results, an ad or, in this specific context, from social media.

Let’s talk about generating clicks and, more importantly, conversions from social media…

First Things First: Set up Your Digital Entity

While this article is all about creating a conversion funnel using social media, let’s start with the main step here: Social channels are not enough. You need to have your own site and / or your own app.

Your own digital entity is where your social-media-driven conversion channel will lead. It’s the only way for you to own your own data and your own brand identity.

These days it is not easy to find a brand name but you can still do that by using this cool company name generator which will also check your name availability on social media and create your logo.

Obviously, your site needs to be well-designed and load fast for a social media user to engage with it. These days a solid website builder can handle both of these for you, so setting up an effective digital entity is pretty easy.

In certain niches, you will also need a mobile app to create an effective sales funnel. According to Mobiversal, mobile apps are often what a product-led growth strategy needs.

Build a Varied Content Calendar

For example, you might have a comprehensive product brochure that people can easily view on mobile devices, or an infographic about the history of your company (a tool like Venngage, an infographic creator, will make this easy), or a buyer’s guide for your entire field (leaning slightly towards your products, naturally).

When you create content like that, you set a precedent about the nature and quality of your content production process, and you need to live up to it. As useful as it is to show people just how great your content can be, you won’t truly build up your brand name until you prove that you can do it time and time again. You need consistency.

Text Optimizer is a tool that will help you come up with diverse angles and content ideas on any topic:

Show Humanity and Personality

Lastly, we need to cover the most vital ingredient of social selling: talking like an actual person.

Plenty of companies make the basic mistake of being coldly formal, addressing people in a businesslike fashion and having every response polished and checked for potential legal ramifications before sending it. That approach might be practical, but it’s also ineffective.

And since there’s every chance that you’ll need to build up steam for quite a while before your work starts paying off at great scale, you can’t start questioning your strategy within a month because it hasn’t produced sales. Pick out a full set of metrics, value them accordingly, and you’ll have a much better understanding of the long-term prospects of your campaign.

Encourage Social Sharing

Let your site visitors enforce your content and product pages by motivating them to share your pages on social media.

Most of your site visitors aren’t even going to think about sharing your content if you don’t let them know it’s an option.

Even those readers that are extremely motivated to share your content will need to copy the page URL and paste it into their social media platform of choice. This is a clumsy process that can easily be bypassed with the correct tool.

There are quite a few tools and social sharing plugins you can use to drive those shares.

All you have to do is select the style of share buttons most appropriate for your site, select the content management platform that it runs on, and follow the simple integration instructions.

Including visible yet unobtrusive calls to action that make sharing as easy as a couple of clicks will see your sharing statistics skyrocket.

Set up Your CTAs

Visitors may leave a webpage within a few seconds unless they get what they are looking for or else know what action to take next. For that reason calls-to-action (CTAs) are used to guide those site visitors through the next step in your conversion channel.

CTAs come in many forms. These can be “Buy now” buttons, “Subscribe to coupons” forms or “How can I help you” prompt from a smart chatbot.

For example, an exit-intent pop-up which is a type of a call to action. These pop-ups may appear with a discount code of 10% on first purchase just when a customer is ready to leave.

An effective CTA may be as simple as a phone number that performs a call on a click of a mouse. Small businesses can scale and optimize their phone customer support using a business phone system that is set up so that cold leads are ready to become your long-term customer when they are connected to your sales person.

Components of an Effective Conversion Funnel

• Pre-action plan: If you don’t know the route from upper level to lower level of the funnel, how could you expect a conversion? You need to map your customer’s journey from any point on your site down to the conversion.
• Effective copy: The content is always king. No matter what you do, without well-planned content you can’t achieve anything. Effective content is an important element of any conversion funnel. Create clear content that puts your CTAs in a persuasive context that drives more sales.
• Testing and experimenting: Testing your conversion funnel allows you to eliminate distractions and find the most effective product positioning. The best way to test the performance of your site is by using Google Analytics.
• Fixing issues: Testing alone is not enough unless those identified issues are fixed. An effective conversion funnel is being tested and fixed on a continuous and regular basis.

Conclusion

Content marketing in the form of blogging is one arrow in the digital marketer’s quiver, but social networks present entirely new opportunities — and from their rise came the broad discipline of social selling.