Fixing Your Broken Social Media Sales Funnel

Andréa Jones (00:00):
More often than not, if you are struggling with your social media, it's probably because your social media sales funnel is broken. And sales funnels can feel a lot like my one in year, half year old feels right now totally fickle, unpredictable, and they change their mind every single day. Well, in this episode, I want to talk to you about how to identify the areas of your funnel and how to fix the things that are broken so that you have a better and clearer path forward. Unlike my life right now with my year and a half year old, alright, let's dive into it.

Intro (00:49):
Welcome to The Savvy Social Podcast, the show that blends stories and strategies to help businesses create engaged and profitable online communities using the unique power of social media. And now, your host, Andréa Jones.

Andréa Jones (01:06):
Before we get into today's episode, I gotta recommend Riverside. It is the tool we're using right now to record our video podcast episodes. And y'all, we are really loving how sharply everything is coming together. So if you want to do the same for your podcast, head over to Riverside FM, use code Drea, that's D r e a, Drea at checkout, and you'll get a cool 15% off your monthly rate. And that's not just for one month, it's for all the months. So definitely check it out. And you can start for free by using the link in the show notes. Remember, the code is Drea, d r e a. Alright, let's dive into today's episode about sales funnels. I have been doing a lot of one-on-one conversations with our members in the Savvy Social School to better understand where everyone is struggling and how I can help them move forward.

(01:59):
And oftentimes in these conversations what comes up is a component of their social media sales funnel is completely broken or frankly, completely missing. And it's a very, very easy thing to do because when we think about social media, a lot of what we see is just one part of the funnel and the rest of the magic happens behind the scenes and it's not actually visible in what you see in other people's strategy. So if you're mimicking someone else's strategy, you're mimicking one fourth of what they're doing. And then you're wondering, why is this not working for me? So today I want to dive into all four areas of the funnel. Give an overview of that, and then how to know when to fix an area of the funnel. If you're sitting here thinking, Andrea, what the heck is a sales funnel? It's simply a path. Okay? So think about it as a journey. Taking someone from point A to point B to point C, except oftentimes this journey can be a little bit meandering or wandering, which is why I often relate sales funnels to dating. So if y'all been hanging out with me for a while, I love this dating analogy because if you think about dating someone like you're on the prowl, you're on the hunt for your person.

(03:08):
If you think about dating, what you're really thinking about is making a connection with someone and hoping that it turns into something deeper or something more. Or maybe you're just thinking about keeping things casual and you're looking around, or maybe you'll know when you see you look deeply into the eyes of the right person. You see how even starting the conversation, and there's three different types of ways people approach dating, and there's probably so many more that I haven't even mentioned. So let's say you decide that you want to date someone and you're looking for a life partner and you want to find someone who's committed. Well, when you think about that journey, that path, sometimes you talk to people and it ends at one date. Sometimes you talk to people, you go on a few dates, some people you meet the parents, some people have way more game than me and they make eye contact with someone and they're like, yep, you're it.

(03:57):
Let's go home. So all of those things, all of those paths, all of those journeys look different, not even for every single person, but also they look different at different stages of life. So if we think about the social media sales funnel and how we approach business, we're thinking about our customers and clients. They're all at different points of their journey. They're all looking for different things. And so your job as a business owner is to find a way to meet them where they are. And that's the key with the sales funnel. So there are four stages of the social media sales funnel. The first stage is the attract phase of the funnel. This is how you get people aware of you, who you are, what you're doing, they've never heard of you before, and you're going, Hey, I'm here. The second phase of the sales funnel is build.

(04:45):
So when you're building in this stage, you're building a relationship with someone. This is the stage we often see on social media. It's all the content. The third stage of the funnel is convert. So you're trying to take someone from, Hey, we're dating to let's get more serious. Let's put some labels on this. And so when we think about the convert stage, is this typically getting them to purchase something from you? It can also be if you are more of an influencer or creator. It can also be getting them to become a super fan. So getting them to take an action with you, whether that be signing up for a newsletter or something like that. And the last stage of the funnel is advocate advocates. We want to build a group of people who are, not only do I think this business is cool, I want everyone else to know how cool they are.

(05:32):
So they're out there preaching the gospel of your business to everyone that they know. And this is really ultimately where I want us all to be. When we have those advocates telling everybody about their experience with us, it feeds right back into the top of the funnel to the attract phase. Advocates also tend to be your card carrying loyalists. They will buy all of the things that you put out. They will be there from beginning to end, and they're just great, fantastic people, and it's always my goal to build that with my people. But remember, dating is different for everyone. Not everyone is looking to become a loyal card carrying fan of all the things I do. Some of them are like, I just came here for one thing, I got what I needed, peace. And I'm like, great, nice to know you. So I'm not trying to force everyone to become loyalists, but I'm guiding people through that journey knowing that every step of the way, not everyone's going to commit to that deeper commitment.

(06:29):
They're not going to want to take that next step, but it's my job as a business owner to offer it. When we are thinking about our sales funnels and determining if they're broken, I got to mention metrics. I know some of y'all are like metrics. I got to look at these numbers. Yes, girl, look at the numbers. When we think about how social media works, when we think about how marketing works, we got to make sure that we are actually measuring our success. Because oftentimes what happens is our very human brains go, man, I feel like this isn't working and feel like is in quotes. I feel like this is not working, and we're lying on our feelings. And when we rely on our feelings, oftentimes that's just the soup of the day, how we felt that particular moment, that day, it may not be a great representation of what is actually happening in the business.

(07:23):
And if we go after feelings, we oftentimes end up chasing the wrong metrics. So when you're looking at your funnel, let's start with the awareness stage. If we're looking at our funnel and we're looking at the attract phase of the funnel, this is like people who don't know us. We're trying to get them to know us. The metrics that we're looking at in that stage, they are impressions, reach, video views, things like that. How do we even know that we are reaching people in the first place? And so if for instance, you have your followers and you see some engagement and you're like, man, my engagement isn't growing, my first question is always, well, are you attracting new people? Your current people, they're engaging as much as they're going to engage, right? They're showing you that. So if you want more engagement, you may need some fresh blood, you may need some new people.

(08:12):
And so this attract phase is the most common one that is broken. When I'm talking to my members, when I'm looking at my clients, when I'm coaching people, when I'm doing strategy sessions with people, because oftentimes nine times out of 10 when your social media is not working, you're just not reaching enough people, you're not reaching enough people. So take a look in your insights, go into your metrics and see if you are reaching enough people. I was recently on a strategy session with someone and they said it felt like stepping on the scale. They're like, Andrea, I don't want to look at my metrics. It feels like I'm weighing in. And yeah, I get that. It can feel that way sometimes. So it depends on your goals. Most of the business owners I work with still need to look at their numbers. I still have to balance my books as much as I do not like it.

(09:00):
I do not like it. I like to go off hopes, dreams and vibes, and unfortunately business doesn't work that way. And I've got to make strategic decisions based on the numbers, which guess what means? I've got to look at the numbers. It's the same in social media. When you're feeling like things aren't working, it's time to step on that scale. Baboo, check your number. So awareness, attraction, stage of the funnel. Look for impressions, look for reach, look for video views. If you see these things are stagnant, you may need to grow. And platforms like TikTok and Instagram will even show you how many of those users are new, meaning they don't follow you. And Instagram specifically does a really great job of this with reels. So if you look at your stats for Instagram reels, you'll see how many of those views were from people who don't know you and from people who follow you.

(09:51):
Okay? So when you're thinking, Hey, I'm not growing well, let's take a look. Are you reaching new people daily regularly? And if you're not, that could be why you aren't growing. To fix this stage of the funnel, you need to start getting proactive. My friend, oftentimes when we're sitting back waiting for people to discover us, that's a little bit of ego at play, okay, we just want to do our thing and we want people to come in and go, oh, they're awesome. Let me just organically share them with everyone I know. And it doesn't often work that way. So we've got to get proactive. You've got to start networking and connecting. Maybe even look at some paid advertising and not just traditional paid advertising like radio ads or television ads. Social media ads work great. You can even look at specific publications. I was doing a strategy session today with a student in the Savvy social school therapists and they looked in therapy publications and were placing ads there for their online program.

(10:53):
So look for ways that you can reach new people. That's the key here. If you feel like things aren't working, this is the place to start. We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, I'm going to talk about the next three phases of the funnel and how to fix them.

(11:07):
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(13:04):
And we're back. When we think about the next stage of the funnel, this is the build stage of the funnel. This is the one where people don't often have a issue with this stage, or at least the appearance of it at first because you're producing regular content. However, if that content isn't moving people to towards the convert stage of the funnel, it is broken, my friends. So when we think about the build stage of the funnel, its purpose is to build connection with your audience. The goal here is to have your audience complete micro actions that show that they're interested in what you have to offer.

(13:46):
So we're looking at metrics like followers. So if someone goes from looking at your posts in the feed in a discovery feed to following you, that's a micro action that they've done to go, Hey, I'm actually interested in taking this a little bit farther and seeing where it goes. We are looking at things like likes and comments, likes on a very light and it's basically eye contact. At that point. A comment is starting a conversation and it could be as simple as, Hey, I like your shoes. Or it could be like, what do you think about climate change? So when you think about comments on social media, we want to have deep, impactful, meaningful conversation, and it's very hard to do that on social media. I don't typically jump into conversations about what I think about climate change unless I know the person. So this is the point of this stage.

(14:42):
It's very, very hard to track this. It's a lot. If you started dating someone and you created a spreadsheet for every conversation that you had and you started categorizing them, most of us would not survive that process. I know I wouldn't. We want this to happen more organically and we may not be able to track or understand how that other person perceives us. It feels a lot like making a friend and not quite knowing how they think about you, but you think, oh, they're bestie material. Sometimes that takes weeks, months, years to build up. Some people are fast friends instantly, so you never know. The goal though, is to be open to the conversation. So when you're in the build stage of the funnel, you're creating content that connects. Now, I do want to mention here that on a platform like Instagram, the build stage of the funnel typically happens in your feed, the attract phase.

(15:38):
It could be a reel, okay, so when we're thinking about the different types of content pieces, we're thinking about where they fall in the funnel. So when you're building connection with someone, oftentimes it's just educational content. Oftentimes this is engaging content. So we're talking about us, our expertise. We're sharing what we know or we're asking questions, we're engaging, we're starting conversations. So if you are struggling with this stage of the funnel, if you're consistently attracting new people, yet those people aren't jumping into the conversation, think about who you're attracting. Are they the right people? Also, consider your industry. Same therapist that I was talking to earlier today, one of the things that we uncovered in the strategy session is that their audience doesn't typically volunteer information in the comments. They're not oversharers. And so when we think about our audience, we got to think about what are we expecting from them that's reasonable, that fits with their personality.

(16:39):
Some audiences love to share voluntarily. We'll share personal information pieces. Some audiences not. A few years ago, I was working with a divorce coach. That audience would never not ever comment on social media posts. We could see that they were looking, were looking at impressions and reach. We were reaching new people, and we were specifically looking at saves. So when you think about metrics, we don't necessarily want to look at comments, likes that doesn't tell the whole story. Looking at saves did. So we could tell their audience was taking that micro action towards building trust with them because they were looking at these posts, folks considering a divorce or in the process of it needing some coaching, and they saved the post to say to themselves, oh, I definitely want to come back to this later. So in the build stage of the funnel, look for things like that.

(17:33):
Look for signals from your audience that they are building trust with you. If you don't see those signals, try some different content. It's time to experiment. It's time to crawl inside of their brain and start saying the things that they are thinking that they don't know that we call this in our agency. I feel seen content. We want people to go, oh, I thought I was the only one. Or, oh, they know. I was thinking that, right? One of the recent examples for me for this, I think I've mentioned this on the podcast before, but I've been talking a lot about poop scrolling lately. Scrolling on your mobile device while you are doing the number two, because I'm pretty sure we all do it. If you don't send me a DM, you are a unique creature and human, and I applaud you for that. The rest of us, we absolutely have our phones with us while we are doing the dirty deed in the bathroom.

(18:27):
So I talk about this because number one, I don't see anyone else doing it. Okay? And number two, I think it's a connection point. I'm building trust with you by saying, Hey, this is the thing we all do. So during that time, we can get a little bit of work done. We can make some connections, we can watch some TikToks and be inspired, or we can just zone out and use that as a break. I know having content like that builds connection with your audience because they see a personality and entity behind the brand. All righty, let's talk about the convert stage of the funnel. When we're thinking about converting people into our world, we're taking them from, Hey, this is a casual relationship. I like hanging out to let's come home and meet the parents. This is a huge step for a lot of people.

(19:15):
For some people it's not, but we've got to make sure that we are offering. So when we think about this for social media, we're taking people off the social media platform somewhere else. Okay, bye-bye. Social media, and if you are posting on social media and you feel like you're not making sales, typically you're missing this step in your funnel. In the Savvy social school, we call this the next step. So as business owners, we want to go straight to the last step, come home with me immediately. We don't even need to talk. Let's get naked and do this. Most of us, we need the next step first. That next step is super important when it comes to social media marketing, and a lot of times it's email marketing. Even as a social media strategist, this is my business. This is what I do. Most of my sales come through email marketing through my email list.

(20:08):
So my goal on social media is to get people onto my email list because I know that's where they convert. Now, I would say about 80% of happen through email lists, maybe 70, 80%. The rest do happen through social. So I'm not completely abandoning promoting on social media. In fact, my personal Facebook page and my Instagram stories are the number one places where I convert people from social media. So I definitely post about my offers there. However, a lot of time, instead of posting the last step, I'm talking about the next step. I'm saying, here's a freebie. Join my email list. If you're interested, send me a DM, send me an email. Okay? So if you are in this stage, I want you to take a look. How often are you posting about the last step? How often are you posting about the next step?

(20:56):
Okay, you should be posting about the next step more than the last step. Generally speaking, I will say there are exceptions to this. One of my clients who was a product-based company, we would post about the last step all the time. Their people did not want just educational content. They wanted to be sold the product on social regularly. So with them, 90% of our content was like, this is the thing, here it is. This is why it's cool. Buy it. And people were like, yep, sign me up. So this is where metrics come into play. We've got to track this to see what works for you. Most of us who are online educators, thought leaders, experts, coaches, therapists, we need that next step. So maybe it's a lead magnet to an email list. Maybe it's a link to a website consultation form. Okay? Think about what that next step is and offer it regularly.

(21:49):
If this step isn't working for you, I want you to look at the micro actions on Instagram. When you say click the link in the bio, are people actually even going to your profile page? And then are they tapping on that link? I want you to seriously go look at these numbers. You can look at them at the post level. You can also look at them at the account level. So you go into your account insights and look at them there. When you're looking at platforms like Facebook or LinkedIn, are people clicking your links? If they are not, then this stage needs some work. You may need to work on your hooks. Maybe your posts are too promotional and people just think you're trying to sell, sell, sell all the time. Maybe you need to work on your calls to action, so maybe it's not encouraging enough for that person to then click the link, take a look at all of those components and see if your conversions are working for you.

(22:37):
You'll know this is working if you're making money. So if you're like, man, I'm attracting all these people. They're engaging with me, but they're not converting, this is where you need to spend some time. Hun, look at if people are taking that next step action or if you're posting about the last step way too much. Okay, so this is where traditional funnels come into play. When we think about marketing funnels, we're looking at things like tripwires, upsells, downsells, email funnels, all of those things, landing page conversions. We're looking at all of those things now at this stage. So deep dive into those and figure out what's wrong and fix it. Okay, last stage of the funnel is the advocate stage. This is my favorite stage because again, it works in your favor. We see this works so well with our clients because honestly, at some point, their audience is doing a lot of the heavy lifting for them.

(23:35):
Like, yeah, we're still running ads and things, but a lot of our ads are testimonials or a lot of our social posts are resharing people going, I bought this product and it's fantastic, right? That's ultimately where we want to go with our offers and with our product. But for this stage to work, you have to have an amazing product or service. A lot of times when I get to this stage and I ask people, okay, what makes you different? What sets you apart? What are your clients say that's so amazing about what you do? If you can't answer those questions, you got to actually start taking a look at the core of your offer. Is it great if people are buying it and they're not saying positive things? Take a look at your offer. Now, if people are buying it and they think it's great, but they're not saying it, we need to prompt them to.

(24:22):
Now, my therapists out there, my lawyers out there. This is very challenging because of the boundaries around what you do in your industry. I'm going to set you all aside for a second. The rest of us, we can ask. We can say, did you like this course? Here's a feedback form. Fill it out. We can say in an offboarding call to a client, Hey, we love working with you. Can you give us some feedback? We can say in a yearly survey to our clients, Hey, we'd love to check in, see how things are going, get some feedback from you, get some positivity, or you'd just be straight up, I love to do this. After I've been talking with a client or a student in the School. If we've been chatting back and forth, they say something nice. I say, Hey, you said this thing. Do you mind saying it again in a video or writing it down?

(25:07):
Can I even screenshot it? Use it in a testimonial? All of those things are great. Okay? Sometimes we need to prompt people a little bit. I believe this is human nature. We are very quick to say something when we don't like it. When we do, we're like, that's nice in our heads to ourselves. So we may need to prompt our people a little bit to get some of that feedback. A great way to encourage this as well is to ask them to share on social media. When you sign up for a visually savvy course, just the course by itself, there's a prompt right at the top that says, Hey, you signed up for this course. Share your excitement on social media. Now, we used to have a one click tweet this out. We wrote this tweet for them. Now that Twitter's now X, a lot of things are broken, and that doesn't work anymore, unfortunately.

(25:52):
But you could have something like that right away. Hey, you joined us. We're excited for you to be here. Are you excited? Share this out on social media. Or, Hey, tag us on your Instagram story. Or, Hey, post this on your Facebook feed, right? We can encourage loyalty and advocacy by giving them the tools they need to be able to share. This stage is working. If you're actually collecting testimonials and feedback, specifically if people are tagging you on social media. So if you're seeing tags come in on social media, especially if you have a product, you're doing great, even if you have a service. Oh, one of the ways we do this with our service-based clients is we send welcome gifts. Probably two out of 10 people will take a screenshot or take a selfie and post it on social media, and we appreciate that they're excited about working with us, and we want to share that excitement as well.

(26:42):
That's why we send the welcome gift, but it's one of the ways that we encourage loyalty with our people just by being a little bit different. Okay? So those are your four stages of the funnel, attract, build, convert, and advocate, and all of the ways that you can prove along the way. The underlining commonality is looking at your metrics. If you can't point to that point in the funnel and go, I know this is working because, or, I know this isn't working, because it's time to start tracking that, okay? It's time to start tracking that. If you don't track that, you're going to feel like there's those quotes again. You're going to feel like it's not working, and that's never a good feeling, and it's not a great way to show up. So what do you think my friends are? I'm going to start measuring your metrics. I hope you will. And remember, if you want to try Riverside, which is the tool that we use for recording our podcast, use code Drea, d r e a at checkout and get 15% off all of your monthly memberships. I'll see you next time. Bye for now.