Marketing funnels are one of the most common digital tactics to build your business. Think of a funnel as a group of related content pieces; top of funnel builds awareness, middle of the funnel shows your audience how to find a solution, and bottom of funnel closes the deal.
Everything starts with the top. To succeed, you need to fill it and keep it filled with prospects. Social media can help.
Filling the Top of the Funnel
People who are at the top of the funnel are not buyers. They’re looking for information on who can help them. There are two attributes you need to get their attention:
- Quality: How effective are you at what you do? Do you have something they want?
- Trustworthiness: Is your information verifiable? Will you do what you say you’ll do?
It used to be easy to reach prospects. There were a limited number of channels to fill the top of your funnel. Broadcast TV, radio, print and billboards were important avenues for reaching an audience.
Then the Internet happened.
Suddenly, there were a number of new ways to reach your audience. Websites, podcasts, and social media created a fragmented world where attention was divided among many more channels than were possible before. But good marketers always go where the attention is, and for prospect generation, that’s social media.
Reaching New Audiences in a Fragmented World
There are a number of social media platforms you can use to reach your audience; which ones you use will depend on where your audience is. We’ve talked about this before; when you choose a social media platform, there are four things to keep in mind:
- Audience: Where are the people I want to talk to?
- Attention: How hard is it going to be to get my message across to them?
- Authenticity: Does my message match my brand and the resources I can commit?
- Advantage: What’s an ideal return on investment look like from social media?
Once you’ve chosen your platform, it’s time to bring people into the funnel with great content that establishes you and your brand as a viable option for their needs. How do you do that?
Discoverability
Through social media, people outside your current community can find you. I’ve run into this myself. When I was first getting into NBA basketball and trying to distinguish myself as a writer, I started a Twitter account focused on NBA salary cap analysis (particularly for the OKC Thunder). I never did anything to “grow” the account — it happened organically as people shared my work with their friends. It’s not a huge account now (~3,500 followers), but I’m known in my niche.
Hashtags are one key way to get discovered. These allow you to join an ongoing conversation about a topic; most major social media accounts support them, too. Research and use hashtags that are relevant to your topic, business and community, don’t just pick what seems popular. You can build your brand through clear and consistent hashtags that establish you as an authority.
Post promotion is another way to maximize discoverability. You have the option to pay money to boost posts on all the major social media platforms; this means that unlike traditional advertising, you can launch something organically and either juice it if it’s underperforming or spread it to a wider audience if it’s doing well.
Being easily discoverable by your audience allows you to bring them into the top of your funnel with your content.
Engagement
Engagement — especially post shares by your audience — is one of the best drivers of discoverability. Sharing a post is usually a sign of interest or respect — someone’s willing to stake their online reputation on the quality of your content. Of course, some people share your content because they vehemently disagree with the post, but that’s another story.
Unlike other marketing methods, social media lets you interact with your audience in real time. In fact, many communities demand real-time engagement from brands they support.
One of my favorite examples of this is the Amazon affiliate Twitter account Fat Kid Deals, which regularly goes viral for its sports or pop culture events “recommended products” . They use Twitter’s up-to-the-minute nature to “trendjack,” jumping on trending topics with snark and humor to regularly go viral.
A more practical example is the rise of customer service on social media; people reach out to companies regularly now via social channels for help, and unlike the traditional phone call, that help is public. If you’re on social media, expect your channels to be used for customer service. Plan for active monitoring. Nothing will disprove your interest in an audience segment like an unanswered post requesting help. There is no neutral action when it comes to audience engagement, and seconds matter. Good customer service will invite prospects to choose you again, and an effective public resolution of a problem goes a long way to convincing new audiences that you’re trustworthy.
Traditional channels don’t allow this sort of real-time engagement. You can build credibility and fill the top of your funnel with timely, accurate, honest responses.
Influencers
Social media also lets you leverage other people’s audiences through the power of influencers.
An influencer is a person who has authority with a certain audience, generally about a specific topic. Marketing through influencers allows you to take advantage of their authority with their audience.
Today, most influencer outreach is a form of paid advertising. You can find paid influencer outreach on every platform, but Instagram and YouTube are the most effective. Every gaming YouTuber I’ve seen seems to have a deal with Raid: Shadow Legends; they’ve obviously been engaged in a big influencer marketing campaign. These sorts of campaigns involve paying people to talk up your brand. If you pay for influencer marketing, make sure it’s clear that it’s paid; there are ethics and legal questions involved there.
Unpaid influencers also exist. These are your superfans — people who create user-generated content (UGC). These people are not what you’d traditionally call “influencers,” but they can become influencers to your audience and for your prospects. Many companies look for people who are already superfans of their products or services and turn them into paid influencers if they have enough clout. Showing appreciation to your audience is a very powerful tool.
Fill Your Funnel
Social media is the most powerful top-of-funnel marketing tool for most online businesses. Make sure you use it to its full potential. And if you need a hand creating a marketing funnel for your business, we’re here to help — just drop us a line, anytime.
Best Regards,
David Brandon
Copywriter
Rainmaker Digital Services