Today I’m going to show you how to build a social media sales funnel that sells—that is, how to generate direct revenue from your business’s social media marketing channels.
Without a funnel, you could be stuck in Donkey Land forever, doing sales outreach and lead nurturing manually and ultimately wasting valuable time and resources.
But with a social media marketing funnel in place, you can create a seamless path to Unicorn Land. Here, you can guide prospects through the customer journey efficiently while automating the process from lead capture to conversion.
So how can you create a social media sales funnel and start automating revenue generation? Here’s your guide to this unicorn tactic:
- What is a social media sales funnel?
- What is funnel strategy?
- How to build a social media sales funnel (step-by-step tutorial)
We’ll build a social media sales funnel together. You can see that live funnel in action on Instagram here.
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What is a social media sales funnel?
A social media sales funnel is a path or a series of steps that your prospects take as they move along the customer journey. A typical funnel has four stages:
- Awareness, where you introduce prospects to your business, products, and services
- Consideration, where you share solutions and provide value to prospects
- Conversion, where you prompt prospects to make a purchase or sign up for a service
- Loyalty, where you persuade existing customers to make repeat purchases
As you can see, these stages form a funnel shape. At the top of the funnel, the awareness stage attracts the largest number of potential customers.
At each stage of the funnel that follows, some prospects naturally exit the customer journey. Maybe they aren’t ready to buy. Perhaps they aren’t the right fit for your business.
Either way, later stages of the funnel naturally include progressively smaller groups of prospects. At the bottom of the funnel, you’ll find the smallest group.
But that isn’t a bad thing. People at the bottom of the funnel tend to be qualified leads who are ready to buy what you’re offering.
That means they’re your key to generating revenue—as long as you have the right tools to convert them. With Customers.ai, you can automate lead capture and qualification to maximize the value from your funnel.
What is funnel strategy?
To create a social media marketing funnel, you need to know the best type of content for each step of the customer journey. Let’s brainstorm content for each funnel stage.
At the awareness stage, think about social media content that entertains or educates. Focus on introducing your business and relating to customers—and save tutorials and hard sells for later.
Take a look at the Instagram Reel by @neilpatel below. It provides a short, entertaining introduction to Google Trends—a simple tool that can be a big help to prospects.
For the consideration stage, create content that provides social proof or inspires trust. Tutorials, blog posts, customer testimonials, and user-generated content (UGC) are ideal for driving consideration.
Check out the Instagram post by @yogaclubbox below. It’s user-generated content that shows potential customers how existing customers are styling the brand’s yoga gear.
At the conversion stage, prioritize content that captures the lead or closes the sale. Irresistible offers and limited-time or -quantity sales work well for securing conversions.
Get inspired by the Instagram post by @sofamaniausa below. It promotes a limited-time sale with deep discounts.
For the loyalty stage, develop content that encourages engagement and shares. Content that offers rewards or incentivizes repeat purchases fits well with this final stage of the funnel.
Look at the Instagram post by @hushpuppiesshoes below. It encourages followers to promote the brand in exchange for a giveaway entry.
Keep in mind that new prospects will continue to enter your funnel over time. Aim to publish a steady rotation of content geared toward each stage of the funnel so you can keep guiding prospects through the customer journey.
How to Build a Social Media Sales Funnel: Your Step-by-Step Guide
In the tutorial below, I’ll show you how to build a social media sales funnel that works for both Facebook and Instagram. You can apply the same strategy and tactics to digital marketing channels like Twitter and LinkedIn.
How to Build a Social Media Sales Funnel Step #1: Awareness
Start with paid or organic videos and carousel posts that attract attention and drive discovery. This is your opportunity to introduce new prospects to your funnel.
Try these ideas:
- Create a funny video or Instagram Reel that resonates with your target audience.
- Host an Instagram Live to introduce your business and go behind the scenes.
- Run an engagement ad to get prospects to interact with your top of funnel content.
For example, the @Customers.ai Instagram post above is designed to entertain marketers. By using humor to connect with prospects, we can start to build trust and create interest.
We can also use the video post as a data source for advertising. If we ran Instagram ads to reach prospects further down the funnel, we could retarget people who watched this (or any other) video. To maximize the effectiveness of your social media sales funnel, don’t overlook the importance of video quality. Utilizing video editing software can elevate the appeal of your videos and make them stand out on social media, increasing engagement and drawing in new prospects for your funnel.
How to Build a Social Media Sales Funnel Step #2: Consideration
Next, publish social media posts that convey the value your products or services provide. If you opt for paid content, use a custom audience that retargets people who watched your videos or engaged with your content.
Try these ideas:
- Break down a new blog post and share some highlights in a carousel post.
- Share content your customers created to show your products in action.
- Talk about customer reviews, testimonials, case studies, or industry awards.
The Instagram post by @kim_larry above features a customer testimonial. By letting the customer speak for himself, the post shows prospects what they could achieve with Customers.ai.
How to Build a Social Media Sales Funnel Step #3: Conversion
Now it’s time to create an offer that your prospects won’t want to refuse. Encourage prospects to visit a landing page or request a resource from you—letting you side into their DMs and collect contact info automatically.
Try these ideas:
- Offer a free trial or a product demo so prospects can experience your product.
- Promote a lead magnet like webinar or a downloadable ebook or report.
- Provide a promo code or a limited-time discount to create a sense of urgency.
In the @Customers.ai Instagram post above, we prompted prospects to comment a keyword to see our Instagram comment guard tool in action. Anyone who comments receives a DM and enters our automated lead capture funnel. (Try it yourself here.)
With Customers.ai, creating an Instagram sales funnel to capture leads is super simple. In Customers.ai, open the Chat Starters panel and select Instagram Comment Guard.
Click the button to create a new Instagram comment guard. By default, comment guards work with all Instagram posts. But in this case, we only want it to work with the post above—so we’ll click the Choose post button.
Comment guards automatically respond to all comments. Since we only want it to work for certain comments, we’ll enter the keyword (“UNPLUG”) mentioned in the post caption.
Next, create the dialogue for your Instagram chatbot. In this case, we’ll add an Options widget so we can prompt people to reply with the provided response.
It’s always a good idea to collect contact info so you can follow up with leads or remarket to them later. Here, we’ll add an Ask for Email widget and save responses to the EMAIL attribute.
Then send your lead magnet. We’ll use a Text widget to send a link to the beta.
We’ll also add a Tags widget to automatically tag people who received the link. That way we’ll know who to follow up with later.
How to Build a Social Media Sales Funnel Step #4: Loyalty
Finally, it’s time to leverage your customers and loyal followers. With loyalty-focused content, you can grow your audience, drive more sales, and increase customer lifetime value over the long term.
Try these ideas:
- Ask customers to share what they’ve achieved with your product or service.
- Host an ask me anything and share your best secrets with your customers.
- Retarget existing customers with Instagram ads and offer upsells or cross-sells.
Use Ads Manager to create a custom audience of people on your VIP customer list. Or use the platform’s built-in audience retargeting tools to upsell and cross-sell to your best customers.
Launch Your Unicorn Sales Strategy With a Social Media Funnel
With a well-designed social media marketing funnel, you can guide prospects along the customer journey and turn casual followers into paying customers.
When you add a tool like Customers.ai to the mix, you can capture more unicorn leads and boost conversion rates automatically—so you can focus on closing done deals.
Ready to get more value from your marketing efforts? Get your free Customers.ai trial and start building your social media sales funnel today.
Important Next Steps
- See what targeted outbound marketing is all about. Capture and engage your first 500 website visitor leads with Customers.ai X-Ray website visitor identification for free.
- Talk and learn about sales outreach automation with other growth enthusiasts. Join Customers.ai Island, our Facebook group of 40K marketers and entrepreneurs who are ready to support you.
- Advance your marketing performance with Sales Outreach School, a free tutorial and training area for sales pros and marketers.