In this epic, expert-level Strategy Guide…
We’ll cover the basics of a successful social media marketing strategy, including which content types serve what purposes (with examples and templates of course), and how a good social media plan can work for you across the marketing funnel.

You see, most businesses miss out on massive opportunities because their vision for social media is limited.

As a result, they’re posting regularly on Facebook and Instagram, but not getting great results. That’s because doing what we call Posting and Praying doesn’t work.  It doesn’t drive sales or traffic, and it usually only gets you in front of people that already know about you.

It’s 2018. You’ve got to try harder than that.

In 2015, BrightFunnel released a host of statistics that show marketing must work harder than ever and that its efforts span the entire buyer’s journey, from lead to sale.

It takes 52% more marketing touches to close a deal.
The total number of touches are evenly split between pre-sales (53%) and the sales cycle (47%).
The average path to sale for “high growth” tech companies is 512 days from lead to revenue.

Top of the Funnel Tweaks
1. Use a Pre-Signup Form
2. A/B Test Content Hierarchies
3. Use Remarketing Alongside Your Content Marketing
4. Use Behavioral and Exit-Intent Popups


Middle of the Funnel
5. Create Separate Auto-Responder Campaigns Based on User Stage
6. Offer a Free Trial Only If a Visitor Doesn’t Subscribe to Your Service
7. Send Summary Reports


Bottom of the Funnel
8. Consider Support Chat Widgets

Discover the latest research on interactive content and marketing, including the top reason for using it – Content Marketing Institute

Offline information sources remain important, supplemented by new online sources High-value B2B purchase decisions are typically complex, involving multipl. Marketing topic(s):B2B strategy. Advice by Dave Chaffey.

"The first step is to understand how the modern sales funnel actually works. The idea that the traditional, linear sales funnel is a flawed concept is nothing new. However, it’s something that seems to receive very little coverage.

One of the best explanations and representations of the modern sales funnel comes from an eConsultancy white paper written by Brian Clark of Copyblogger.

In it, Brian explains the failures in the traditional sales funnel and provides the below interpretation of the modern funnel."

The biggest blind spot in your sales funnel is not what you think it is. Check out this sales funnel infographic from Prezi to find out exactly what it is.

1. Driving Inclusion of Feedback: The Customer Journey Perspective

2. Inbounding and the Art of Being A Listener

3. Targeted Individualistic Approach

4. Timing the Content Within the Marketing Funnel

5. Targeted Landing Pages – Taking Personalization to the Next Level

6. Targeted Incentives

The Funnel Hacker’s Toolkit
1. The Customer Funnel
2. Fit for Purpose Tools
The key to Funnel Hacking is being able to choose the best and most suitable tools for your business and connect them together in a smart way, such that you can pass information between them about each user of your platform, whilst retaining the best of breed tool for each capability.
3. Playbooks
Growth Hackers have “growth hacks”, Funnel Hackers have “playbooks”. While a growth hack’s effectiveness is often short-lived, a playbook’s lifetime is unbound and less susceptible to the changing tides.

Build Awareness at the Top of the Funnel: An assessment tool helps your prospects define their business problem and shows how they measure up to industry benchmarks and best practices. 

Get Conversions to the Middle of the Funnel: A value calculator shows prospects how much money they’re losing by working around their pain points instead of resolving them, so they’ll be more likely to evaluate your solution. 

Closing the Deal at the Bottom of the Funnel: A Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) tool allows them to compare your product with a competitor’s.  Another powerful motivator towards closing the deal is a return on investment (ROI) tool, which shows your prospects how quickly their investment will pay off. 

Awareness Phase

• Social media posts
• Guest articles
• Infographics
• Blog posts
• Landing pages
• Free eBooks

 

Consideration Phase

• Comprehensive white papers
• Exclusive Webinars
• In-depth articles
• Brochures
• Input from brand advocates

 

Purchase Phase

• Free trials
• Case studies
• Free consultations
• 1-2-1 videos
• Demos

I’ve explored a lot of marketing tools over time, but here’s an updated list of tools that will fit well with any stage of your marketing funnel. In this article, I will break down the list of tools based on the different stages of the funnel. The stages that I will go through will include:

Acquisition
Activation
Retention
Referrals
Revenue

Learn what content people are looking for in every stage of the buyer's journey, including ideas for content you can include in your own strategy.

Top of the Funnel
At this early evaluation stage, marketers typically use long form blog content to grab referral and organic traffic and introduce a brand to the audience. Other types of content at this stage include:

• eBooks and white papers
• Reports
• Infographics

Middle of the Funnel
At this stage, it’s not uncommon to use email marketing, segmented by audience and intent, to build a relationship with the audience. Other types of content for the evaluation stage include:

• Comparison white papers
• Expert guides
• Live interactions including webinars

Bottom of the Funnel
At this phase, you want to leverage content that persuades your audience to make a purchase. This can include:

• Trial downloads
• Demos
• Infographics
• Product literature or buyer guides
• Further case studies

Sales - Follow these seven steps to consistently attract and convert more customers by building an automated marketing funnel.