Building a successful customer journey – Mapping Social Media KPI to Marketing Funnel Stage | Part 1

May 31, 2024 cvadmin

Customers in different marketing funnel stage have different characteristics. Therefore, measuring the social media marketing performance (social media KPI) in each stage of the marketing funnel accordingly is crucial for driving customers throughout the entire customer journey.

What does a typical marketing funnel look like?

Although the number of stages in the marketing funnel and their names can vary, the core purpose remains consistent, which is moving prospects through the funnel toward conversion.

A customer journey starts from learning about the brand and continues as customer has become a brand advocate.

Stage 1: Awareness

This is a top of the funnel stage. Customers in this stage have never heard of the brand. So marketing efforts in this stage is about attracting their attention, generating interests, and encouraging them to follow official social media accounts, subscribing to newsletter, etc. Although it may sounds counterintuitive, it may not really be beneficial for brand to use reach as the KPI in this marketing funnel stage. Find out more here.

Stage 2: Consideration

Interest

When customers get to know the brand, some of them become interested, and may take some time to further explore the brand and its products and/or services. The purpose of marketing in this stage is to establish trust with these customers, provide valuable information to keep them engaged, while conveying the brand values and propositions consistently, in order to move interested customers into the next stage.

Desire

As the customers continue to move down in the marketing funnel, the initial interest or curiosity of your product or service will develop into desire. At this stage, customers may need more convincing to understand the benefits of the products or service, or a little urge to make the decision towards taking the action.

Stage 3: Conversion

The customer has moved to the bottom of the funnel stage now. Usually, a conversion is the ultimate action the brand wants the customers to take, such as purchasing a product from the brand for the first time, signing up a service etc.

Stage 4: Loyalty

In this stage, brands has established long-term connections with customers, becoming their go-to brand; It is also worth mentioning that it is usually much more easier to generate sales from existing customers than acquiring new customers.

Stage 5: Advocacy

Customers that have satisfactory experience with your brands are willing to recommend the brand’s products or services to others.

What social media KPI to look at in the Awareness stage of the marketing funnel?

Customers’ first impression on the brand is particularly important.

The first impression will significantly affect the customer journey along the marketing funnel. Whether the customer will move down to the bottom of the marketing funnel? Or will they lose interest quickly? The first impression often holds the answer to this question.

The more the better?

Many brands take it for granted that the more customers they reach to during the awareness stage, the more customers will subsequently convert.

Unfortunately, that’s not true. Only customers that can resonate with the brand’s value, or that closely match the typical user profile of the brand are likely to convert in the later stage.

To keep up with the desires and needs of the customers, brands often need to adjust strategies in time to keep the customers engaged. But it is equally important to identify the customer segments that do not match the brands’ typical user profile, since these customers only have a low probability to convert. Therefore, avoiding targeting these segments prevents pouring money down the drain.

Pulse check your customer segments while running social media marketing campaigns

The process of understanding customer doesn’t happen overnight. It requires continuous efforts to use every opportunity to interact with the customer to understand and refine the understanding of their needs, and to adjust the typical user profile accordingly.

In this ever-changing world, there is no one-size-fits-all marketing strategy. Brands always need to plan, deploy, test and fine-tune the social media marketing strategy. When marketing resources are limited—especially if marketing budget was cut – identifying the best-performing marketing content and channel is crucial for efficiency.

Content is the king

In today’s diverse social media landscape, customers are overloaded with numerous content and often lose attention to a certain piece of content quickly. They have become increasingly discerning, and their patience for passively receiving brand messages is wearing thin. After all, average users only spend up to 7.5 minute each time they opened their the social media app. ¹

We have come to this stage that without good content, even influencer marketing will fail to deliver any results.

To captivate the discerning aesthetic of the customers, brands often needs to rack their brains to seamlessly place their brands and products into high-quality, entertaining content that is also relevant to the customers.