Purchase Funnel is a customer centric marketing theory that describes the customers journey towards purchasing a product or service. Various goals and marketing strategies are working in different levels of that funnel convinces the customer to purchase a product or service at the bottom of that funnel.
Applying the same strategy on advocacy, the social media funnel works to convince your target population to add “value” to your advocacy at the bottom of the funnel. Value in the case of an advocacy may mean financial, volunteer, or whatever was the desired behavioural change set in the advocacies objectives.
The path through the social media funnel is illustrated in this diagram. (Hootsuite)
Note the different levels of social media goals and their corresponding categories. Social media channels and metrics can then be used to benchmark your work and demonstrate success.
Exposure is a measure of your advocacy/brand reach. Influence is a measure of how many influencers helped spread your advocacy messages. Engagement is a measure of how many people interacted with your brand. All this fit into the brand awareness portion of the funnel.
The conversion call to action is generally where lead generation fits. Hard leads are “converts” that will work directly for advocacy’s goals. Soft leads are those who exchange information on your network that is unrelated to your advocacy.
Advocate/customer retention is the most overlooked portion in this funnel. It is easier to maintain existing advocates/customers than finding new ones. Retained customers passes through the funnel much faster and they are better benchmarks to gauge your existing strategy.
For this activity, I want you to identify where your advocacy’s current social media strategy and where they are in the social media funnel.
We will then identify social media channels or tools to best suit your strategy in the next activity.
