Influencing the Sales Funnel With Social Media
Guest post by Russel Cooke
Image Courtesy of Shutterstock
As e-commerce and online shopping become ever more integrated into the modern business world, the entire concept of the “sales funnel” has been redefined. Today, a business needs to do more than just install another lane of cash registers in order to optimize its checkout process. Now, with the help of A/B testing and analytics, every single place along the sales funnel can be optimized and tweaked endlessly. Increasingly, this starts with a strong and organized strategy even before beginning the traditional sales funnel: in social media.
This infographic examines how your brand can leverage social media to increase conversions, user engagement, and nurture a strong sense of brand loyalty amongst your fans. Read on.
Now that interaction with the consumer happens in their home and on their phones, social media strategy is a round-the-clock process. No more are customer interactions limited to the time the customer spends physically in the store: if you tweet, they’ll hear it, wherever they are. Today a brand is in constant dialogue with a customer, and in turn, the customer looks to the brand for updates, news, and even entertainment!
Social media can be used to enhance the brand-customer relationship and build it into one that benefits each party. When someone follows you on Twitter, likes your brand on Facebook, or subscribes to your videos on YouTube, you enter into a persistent conversation with that person. While a physical store needs to rely on the person’s memory or expensive mailers to get them coming in the door, a social marketer can constantly refresh the customer’s memory of your brand and in that way, reinforce the relationship.
Image Courtesy of Shutterstock
This paradigm-shift has not gone unnoticed. Indeed, there now exists a suite of tools to help the enterprising social marketer. We’ll go through a few of the various ways you can interact and build each step of the social sales funnel, enhancing your conversions and building up user engagement numbers.
Social media’s advanced user targeting abilities far surpass anything offered in the past. Simply take a look at the demographics of the people who are already your fans, subscribers, and followers using each service’s built-in analytics. Combining that with your own analytics data, from your website, gives you a very complete picture of what your user targets should look like. Then it’s just about plugging those parameters into your ad platform of choice, and you have the ability to run a campaign precisely-targeted at exactly the type of people most likely to be interested in your brand.
Remarketing pixels help you with user retention. Essentially, once a user visits your site, the remarketing pixel allows your brand to continue the marketing opportunity outside of your own website, providing for multiple chances for engagement. This helps dampen the threat posed by “bouncing” users, those who open your website and quickly exit. Even if they don’t initially convert, your remarketing pixel ensures their repeated exposure to your marketing and brand and maximizes the chances of an eventual conversion.
Community building tools allow you to coordinate your social media efforts across multiple platforms. They can include scheduling tools to let you write posts in advance, which can be used in conjunction with an “editorial calendar” to ensure a seamless and bulletproof social media coverage.
Modern sales is a lot different than the game your parents played. No more is it about cold-calling through lists of contacts. Now, with the ability to build a meaningful and enduring relationship with the consumer, brands have the opportunity to create lasting connections and develop long-term brand evangelicals. Check the infographic for more information about how to best take advantage of this new access you have to the consumer.
Russel Cooke is a CRM wizard and journalist based in Los Angeles, CA. His work often discusses big data, content marketing, and software engineering. Follow him on Twitter @RusselCooke2.
NOTE: Using Russel Cooke’s strategies for both career eadvancement and business will lead you to the Smooth Sale!
Read Addtional Strategies and Techniques:
Nice Girls DO Get the Sale: Relationship Building That Gets Results, Sourcebooks
