Having spent the last few days learning more and more about multichannel funnels and examining the analytics of a number of people I work with, I can safely come to two conclusions for why social media marketing isn’t working for you. This is based on two metrics inside the multichannel funnel: assisted conversions and last interaction conversions.
Last interaction conversions are the ask, the “buy now”, the social pimp. They’re the final touchpoint before the goal is achieved. In order to make anything show up here, you need to have a fairly large audience of people who are qualified to buy from you, even if you have a product or service with a relatively short lifecycle. Asking the same 10 people over and over again if they’ve bought a car recently will generate rapidly diminishing returns and alienate them in relatively short order.
Assisted conversions are the high funnel “conversations” and interactions that eventually lead to and contribute to crossing the finish line. In order to make anything show up here, you need to be loading your traffic into the top of your funnel, which is marketer-speak for GET THEM TO YOUR WEBSITE. If all you’re doing is being friendly and conversational, replying to everyone on Twitter as fast as possible like a squirrel on crack, and generally not moving people to the start of the conversion process, you’re not going to show any results here either.
How do you make social media marketing work for you, then? Do the opposite of the above ineffective practices:
1. Constantly be building and growing a targeted network or you won’t have anyone to ask. The larger you grow your network, the more people who will be eligible and interested on any given day in doing business with you. This will produce more last interaction conversions.
2. Constantly be gently encouraging people to move into the top of the funnel by offering them content and value on your website, off the social network. I can’t stress this enough. Get them off the network and onto your site! This will produce more assisted conversions.
Do these practices diligently for 30 days and watch your social media marketing efforts suddenly blossom.
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Great advice Chris, refreshing to see someone stop the social media frenzy going on.
Off to put it to good use.
I loved this article.
I have social media friends boasting over 2000 followers on twitter and 1000 views of their blog and not one of them has turned any of that into money.
As every sales and marketing person knows (and I count myself amongst their number) all the noise in the world that doesn’t convert into sales cannot compete with a whisper at the right door.
The sooner people start looking at their followers in terms of who tweets regularly, who has followers and what kind of followers their followers have the sooner they may discover their twitter account is merely a random collection of names.
Good points … and I love the mental image I have of a squirrel on crack. 😉