Are you playing “online marketing darts”? It’s a term I lovingly use to describe when businesses post frequent content online so that they can be “on social media” but don’t really know how to benefit from all the hard work that goes into it.
When this happens, not only do people spend a lot of time and effort spent online with no return, but businesses commonly give away the wrong kind of information in the process. These consequences can equal thousands of dollars lost for a business and I don’t want that to be YOUR business.
Next time you go to post online, ask yourself these three important questions:
1) What action do I want my ideal customers to take as a result of this post?
2) How do I make it possible for them to take that action?
3) What feeling do I need to elicit in my ideal customers with my content to get them to take that action?
These are hard questions, but they are essential to your online marketing plan because they cause you to think about every single action of your marketing funnel.
Your social media posts feed the TOP of your online marketing funnel. Social media is where potential customers meet you for the first time but it’s not where most of your potential customers make their final purchase. If you keep making posts that don’t move your ideal customers DOWN your funnel by leading them to take other actions with you, that’s when you lose potential revenue.
Think about it this way—when you make a sale offline, you have a specific set of actions that you drive people to take to go from being a potential customer to a paying customer. You would never purposefully create a situation where potential customers have no way to become paying customers (i.e. a store with no cash register), yet on social media we do this all the time. We post without purpose because we think it’s what we’re “supposed” to do.
If you’re now convinced that you need a funnel behind purposeful social media posts, you can download a free roadmap here. Warning: You’ll also go deeper into my funnel?. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist the irony of calling that out.)