sales funnel — SEOPartner

Source: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/253460

Content can be written for a variety of purposes—to inform, engage audiences, promote your business, or motivate people to take action—but each piece can only accomplish one of these at a time. To successfully take someone from being a prospect to becoming a true customer, your content must be appropriately prepared for each step in the sales funnel.

Write pieces of content that perform different roles across your sales funnel.

Content should first create awareness. At this stage, your materials only need to speak to consumers’ pain points. This works to attract leads.

Next, it should educate those leads. Here is an opportunity to present content that’s more specific to your organization—you educate without pitching.

The next step is to call consumers to action. Now that your audience is aware of your business and has learned more about it, it’s time to provide more valuable content—you offer a way to take their knowledge further in exchange for their contact details.

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Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2434147/how-to-use-social-media-at-every-stage-of-the-sales-funnel

The sales funnel is actually just like social media, a consumer focused marketing model that’s withstood the test of time. Because of the constant changes in consumer behaviour as well as sales cycles, there had been numerous additions, adaptations and modifications to the funnel over the years.

Social media in your sales funnel

Nowadays, the purchase funnel isn’t in a shape of a cone channel anymore that sucks in more and more customers as they pass through it. It is in the form of an escalator instead, and its the marketer’s duty to keep the escalator continuously moving upstairs.

Awareness

In this stage, it’s all about the often neglected goal of social media on increasing user engagement. You, as a marketer, should ask questions, ask for feedback, post surveys, organize events, webinars and Q&A’s; tell people to post on your Facebook wall, timeline and your page by encouraging contributions. Basically, anything just to simply generate a response. Rather than getting your mind set on getting more organic traffic, which of course, means better search rankings, what really counts is that engaged audiences translate to more visits for your site and hopefully more conversions consequently.

Familiarity

On this stage, your customers are now familiar with your brand. And that being said, you would want them to consider your brand as one of the providers of products or services whenever they want to make a purchase. Look at consumers who are fans of your brand that read your blog and have your tweets as their favorites as well. This is where email starts to get into the picture, since we’ve all heard about how email is used by 91% of consumers daily. But rather than socializing with your customers using email, what’s better is using email and social media altogether. Driven by effective email auto-responders, this can be done even more effectively by looking at audience insights from Facebook and Twitter.

Consideration

In this stage of the sales funnel, your potential customer is now thinking of making a purchase. They are now weighing over their options and zeroing in on one offering, a single brand with one reputation with another. You will be able to manage your brand’s reputation through social media, since it’s a good source for positive sentiment reviews. And these kinds of reviews usually come from social channels and negative ones come from review sites. Utilize the ever popular share button combined with social proof on your blog post or site so every single one of your positive reviews can be spread easily throughout social channels. An active channel on YouTube can push postive content to the top page, so don’t forget about using videos as this improves site visibility, traffic and subsequently, reputation even more.

Purchase

At this stage, consumers have already decided to buy, and they plan to buy from you. That’s great and all, but you have to keep in mind that you need to constantly engage your customers even in the purchase period. There are a couple of key moments in this period – when they make the payment and when the product arrives at their doorstep. This is also the perfect opportunity for you to tandem email-social upsell or cross-sell. When targeted cross-selling email and Facebook ads are combined, they can make a significant jump in transaction rates. And also, take note that there are several social networks out there now that allow you to sell directly like Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter which all have the ‘Buy’ button.

Loyalty

At this final stage, you will have to look at how consumers divide into three groups after they make the purchase. First are those that will leave and never buy again. There are also those that will return for a few more purchases, and there are those that will become your brand advocates. And these are the best customers your brand will ever have, since these people will be the one to drive revenue and will be the lifeblood of your business. Use social channels as a form of customer support/customer care such as Twitter, make sure that you have a channel in Twitter which is solely dedicated for customer service. Also, put up loyalty programs and reward referrals.

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Making Content Work At Every Stage Of The Sales Funnel