3 Effective Bottom-of-the-Funnel Marketing Tactics for Social Media

At this point, every marketer knows how important social media is for building a presence and making sales. However, marketers also know that selling products or services on social media requires a vastly different approach than "spray and pray." This is because most people simply aren’t surfing their feeds for sales pitches (although they’ve come to expect it now); they are looking for something interesting to keep them busy — away from work. While they certainly have their place, the flashy promotions and deals need to be placed perfectly to avoid turning people off. A study by Sprout Social found that 57% of social media users get annoyed by — and consequently unfollow — brands flooding them with promotions. That said, up to 74% of social media users have been influenced to make a purchase thanks to brand exposure. So obviously, sales are still taking place here. It just takes a focused approach to tap into the intricacies of the channel. This begs the question: Where do action-prompting, bottom-of-the-funnel marketing tactics fit into the complex world of social selling? Given the massive amounts of content being published every second, expanding your reach depends heavily on your ability to position content in the right place at the right time. What you need to consider is your industry, message, location, and platform. Let’s talk about how you can get your sales content on social media without getting on your followers’ nerves. Use Influencers and Brand Partners to Promote Coupons Coupons have been a staple in bottom-of-the-funnel sales tactics for generations. For retail or e-commerce businesses, coupon promotion is a necessary evil. While coupons have taken a number of different forms in the digital age, the effectiveness has remained constant. A report from Valassis found that coupons influence 80% of consumers to purchase from a brand. However, there’s no hiding from the fact that social media’s educational and informative nature is not exactly the ideal environment for coupons. Thankfully, there are a number of strategies you can use to get your promo codes and deals out there without making your page resemble an obnoxious salesperson. Perhaps the best way to promote your coupons on social media is through extensive partnerships; especially with influencers. Keep in mind, a few coupons here and there won’t annoy most social media users — at least, not to the point of unfollowing. That said, if you have a higher number of partners/accounts to spread out your coupon campaign, you are: Reaching new audiences, and Not overburdening them with promotional jargon. Influencers and micro-influencers can be instrumental in getting your promo codes in front of a larger, more targeted, more engaged audience. Having a micro-influencer or authority in a topic recommend a relevant product or service makes the audience more receptive toward trying it out, while building trust for the brand. SEMrush, my former employer, recently used this strategy to great effect by getting dozens of digital marketing experts to spread the word about its first-ever conference in India, using personalized coupon codes: [caption id="attachment_84691" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Credit: Twitter[/caption] When you are looking for influencers or brand partners to promote your coupons, you need to look for relevancy and content overlap. The key here is not to go overboard. For instance, let’s say you have two coupon codes you are looking to promote on social media. If you have six partners, you could have three of them promote one of the coupons and the other three do the same the following week, with a total of 12 posts over two weeks — a number that likely won’t irk followers. Pushing coupons on social media is a task where you want to tread lightly. Using a “proxy mouth” to spread the word is a fantastic way to draw attention, without agitating users. Use Chatbots to Move Prospects Through the Buyer’s Journey Chatbots are one of the most interesting (and widely debated) developments to emerge in social media in the past few years. Essentially, these are AI-powered tools that can be programmed to provide instantaneous, pre-fed or learned responses to customers and prospects. The machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) capabilities can spot the patterns in customer interactions and adjust accordingly. While many brands use these bots to handle common customer service inquiries on their Facebook pages around the clock, some use them to take and process orders. In fact, research by HubSpot indicates that nearly 50% of consumers would buy a product from a chatbot. So, while bottom-of-the-funnel content may have a limited place on your public page, it could be extremely useful if programmed into a bot. ManyChat is one of the of the most user-friendly Facebook Messenger chatbot tools. It requires zero coding skills and uses NLP to understand certain phrases and preferred responses. In terms of refinement, the program lets you split test certain responses to optimize your sales tactics. [caption id="attachment_84692" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Credit: ManyChat.com[/caption] Further, you could set up the bot to make upsells and cross-sells. However, creating a chatbot to do this seamlessly is no simple task. At the end of the day, robots cannot replace humans for all tasks (at least, not yet). Programming a chatbot to nurture leads and create revenue requires frequent analysis and refinement; especially when it has to be made to understand and use language. Keep in mind, this technology is still very much in the infancy stage. Social listening and monitoring tools can be of great help here. You can use them to generate vast datasets from social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, and more for market research, analyzing user sentiment, targeting segmented audiences with personalized content, and generating sales leads. For example, NLP processing would look for terms like “hate,” “love,” “favorite,” etc. Some of the more advanced tools are designed to recognize slang terms to differentiate the meaning of certain sentences such as, “That video made me sick!” from similar-sounding ones like “That video was sick!” Chatbots are fantastic for creating real and personalized sales experiences, without an expensive-to-maintain team. Used in conjunction with other platform-specific social media automation tools for building fan followings, content creation, scheduling, and engagement, a chatbot can potentially be your most powerful sales weapon on social media. Use Videos as Calls-to-Action It’s no secret that the essence of social media is shifting toward video. The major networks are slowly but surely becoming channels centered around video content. The big Facebook algorithm update in 2018 essentially proved this. Video now holds a great deal of weight, in terms of how content is placed on people’s feeds. There are many ways you can go about maneuvering your bottom-of-the-funnel sales content to play to this concept. Creating product demonstrations to highlight the best features is one of the most effective and proven ways to go about this. For example, Blendtec runs a series of videos titled “Will it Blend?” in which they famously blended an iPhone X. https://youtu.be/KWqw5SpITg8 They have also blended things like marbles, rake handles, Justin Bieber’s biography, and more. All of these episodes are shown on the "Will it Blend?" Facebook page. The beauty of these videos is they promote the blender, while displaying its capabilities in a comical way. So, it never really feels promotional or bottom-of-the-funnel-esque. The major social networks have made one thing blatantly clear: Produce video content, or be left behind. Now, if you don’t have much experience producing video content, it might take a while to find the groove, depending on your product or service. The most important part is that each has a clear call-to-action that prompts sales. For example, at the end of the video, you can talk about special deals or time sensitive offers to get people to take an action toward purchase as soon as they finish watching the video. Or, you can bundle it up with live streaming, with subtle sales pitches built in. Over to You Social media, in general, is at a transitional point in its short existence. It has morphed from a tool to connect with friends and family to a powerful engine that influences people’s mindsets. Simply put, pure sales-oriented content will not do well on social media, unless it is optimized for engagement. Further, you’ll constantly need to analyze your campaigns and the reactions of your audience. If you misread them and promote your BOFU content too hard, they’ll ditch your brand without a second thought.

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3 Effective Bottom-of-the-Funnel Marketing Tactics for Social Media

Rohan Ayyar

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Rohan Ayyar