Social Media Marketing: Foundations to Practice · Foundations of Social Media Marketing
The Marketing Funnel Applied to Social
Not every social media post should be trying to sell something. This chapter maps social content and campaign types to each stage of the marketing funnel.
At the top of the funnel, social content should introduce a brand or product to people who have never encountered it, typically through broad-reach formats like short-form video, since the goal here is memorability and reach rather than immediate conversion. Judging awareness-stage content against a direct sales metric like conversion rate misunderstands its purpose and often leads teams to prematurely kill content that is actually working as intended.
Key Takeaways
- Awareness-stage content should be judged on reach and memorability, not conversion, since that isn't its purpose.
- Consideration-stage content benefits from third-party validation like testimonials and influencer content, which carry more weight than brand claims.
- Conversion-stage content increasingly uses native in-app checkout to avoid drop-off from routing users to an external website.
- Planning content without a clear intended funnel stage makes performance evaluation incoherent, since different stages need different success metrics.