How do you make strangers trust you enough to buy your product?
A long time ago in a century far away, a marketer named Elias St.Elmo Lewis came up with a brilliant answer. His theory was that you could turn strangers into raving customers with a “funnel”: a series of steps the customer follows, each one leading them closer to purchasing your product.
According to Lewis, people follow these four steps before they’re ready to buy.
- Awareness: you need people to become aware that your product or service exists.
- Interest: people need to be intrigued enough to read your ad or click to your website.
- Desire: inertia is the marketer’s greatest hurdle. You need to get people to express interest or curiosity in your product.
- Action: people need to decide to take the next step, whether calling your sales team or adding a product to their cart.
Lewis came up with the sales funnel concept in 1898. But this AIDA (awareness, interest, desire, action) model is still used by professional copywriters. It’s also been revised and updated—for example, sophisticated marketers extend this formula into customer journey mapping. (Here’s the foundational article from Harvard Business Review that helped to spark the discipline of customer journey mapping.)
These days, most companies have some type of funnel in their marketing, even if the names of the stages change by industry or company. For example, in B2B marketing you’ll find an evaluation stage as buying a million-dollar software package takes more thought than deciding to buy a small item on Amazon.
Building your first social media sales funnel
In this post, we’ll take the DNA of Lewis’ classic sales funnel formula and apply it to social media.
As you’ll see, we’ve expanded it a bit. In particular, you’ll see the addition of the evaluation stage (as these days, it’s much easier to research and compare products online) and advocacy (as social media’s greatest power is helping customers attract more customers).
When building a social media strategy, a good plan of attack is to make sure your tactics cover each stage of the sales funnel. As you can see below, each step includes a specific question that your marketing strategy should answer.
- AWARENESS—How will potential customers find you on social media?
- EVALUATION—How will they use social media to compare you to competitors or similar products?
- ACQUISITION—How will you get them to buy or convert today?
- ENGAGEMENT—How will you use social channels to keep in touch with customers (so you can sell them more things later)?
- ADVOCACY—How will you get them to recommend your product on social channels to their friends?
A common mistake of amatuer marketers is to only invest in a few stages of the funnel.
For example, you’ll see popular YouTube channels with lots of traffic and awareness. But they don’t work very hard to sell you anything as they haven’t invested in their…
