Your Ultimate Social Media Marketing Funnel

I’m a firm believer in using data to drive decision making, but also understand that the metrics behind social media marketing sometimes aren’t as black and white as we’d all like for them to be. More importantly, every business has a different way of measuring how their social media marketing efforts pay off. That said, I want to walk you through some of the KPIs I look at.

Have a simple conversion and more specifically, a social media marketing funnel to work with. This will help shape and guide how you’re going to reel in qualified leads and sales to your business.

• Locate where your target demographic communities and activities are online. Understand this will be key to framing conversations and specific outreach opportunities.
• Understand what type of content engages your target demographic – is it humor, informational or educational materials? Position your content in such a way that will compel your audience to want to be a part of your conversation and interact with you.
• Ask yourself, “How do I leverage the ‘where’ and the ‘what’ to drive some sort of action beyond the conversation?” Dive into different ways you can further nurture and pull your target audience through your funnel. (E.g. email marketing, marketing automation, remarketing, etc.)
• This sometimes can be the hardest question to answer, but “Why should people care?” As Simon Sinek famously asserts (and as I paraphrase), “People buy the why.” People have to understand why you’re product or service is different, going to make their lives easier or impact them positively. You have to show this in order to really make that conversion or push through that qualified lead.

Next, within each stage of your conversion funnel, input metrics to help you track and measure the performance of your efforts.

• List out the top 5 online communities/social networks your target audience is on and narrow it down to the ones that they are most engaged as well.
• Track the number of engagements (e.g. likes, shares, comments, reblogs, traffic back to your website, downloads, etc.) – that each piece of your content receives from the top 5 online communities/social networks.
• Take what you know so far and come up with creative campaigns, contests, sweepstakes, promos, webinars, whitepapers, ebooks, etc. that you can push to further acquire your target market. When I say “acquire,” I’m referring to an action that’s taken such as an email address captured.
• From there, you should be able to start measuring the number of conversions or leads funneled in from your efforts (e.g. whitepaper downloads, webinar sign-ups, purchases, etc.).

Know that all of the above takes time, so don’t expect that a week’s worth of work is going to give you an ROI that will help you reach your quarterly or even yearly social media marketing goals. Drive a strategy that’s organized with the purpose and intent to meet the needs of your target market, not what you subjectively think is going to work. In other words – test, test, test! This will enable you to continue collecting data and therefore, allow you to make better decisions.