Social media marketing is, or should be, at every stage of your sales funnel. The very first aspect of social media’s involvement in your sales funnel has to do with your website/blog. This is of course connected to all the various social media such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and so forth – depending on your niche and the interest your audience has for a particular social media.
No matter which type of social media you’re active with, social media marketing assists with every aspect below:
1. Awareness – Using social media marketing is a great way to bring awareness to your brand. You can use a multitude of different ways to do this, from posting more updates to buying an advertisement.
2. Community – Social media is a great way to bring a community feel to your brand. This can work before a purchase as well as after a purchase. Bringing your buyers together, or group members together, forms a community that can advocate for your brand to others. Thus, increasing sales.
3. Engagement – Using social media to engage and interact with others is a great way to improve sales. The engagement with the audience is something that everyone sees; customers and future customers. The interaction that is observed will influence others when choosing to do business with you.
4. Influence – Social media can act as a way to prove your influence and authority. The number of followers or likes that you have, as well as the amount of interaction that you have on your social media accounts, will help those who are just become aware of you to trust you faster. This then encourages sign-ups and purchases.
5. Leads – Social media makes it easier than ever to get more leads for your products, services and ideas. It also makes it easier to covert those leads to buyers because of the interaction that you can have. Once you make a connection with a potential buyer and they connect with you in a trusting manner, it’s that much easier to move toward conversion.
6. Nurture – Social media enables you to nurture new relationships as well as old ones. Whether someone is just a prospect or an actual customer, using social media to communicate, stay connected and answer questions is a great way to improve relations.
7. Conversion – Having active social media marketing campaigns at every level of your sales funnel, from initial lead capture to sale and after, improves conversions exponentially.
8. Loyalty – Social media can enable you to create a loyal following of customers who will sing your praises to those who have not become converts yet. The more you have, the more you’ll get. Plus, you can keep the relationship going – thus keeping customers that much more loyal.
9. Deals – Social media is a great way to tell the world about your deals. This is true whether the deal is for a new customer or a current customer.
As you can see, no matter where someone is in your sales funnel, social media should play an important part in capturing leads, all the way to encouraging multiple purchases from converted customers.