Five steps of the marketing funnel: awareness, consideration, preference, action, loyalty – How to capitalize with social media at each stage?

In celebration of Cinco de Mayo 2010, enjoy this blog post with 5 parts

According to Forrester Research the five stages of the marketing funnel are:
awareness, consideration, preference, action, and loyalty.

From a social media perspective, how do you engage prospects/customers in these five stages?

Awareness stage

The awareness stage is all about introducing your brand to new audiences.

Brand awareness has taken on a new life in the last few years with the explosion of social media. It’s not just about hitting a target audience either. It’s also about hitting the demographic of people that the target audience turns to for product/service-buying advice; or, the social influencer.

Low-consideration products are like soft drinks or chewing gum and prospects don’t seek much buying advice for those. As a consumer, if I spend $2 on a soft drink that I don’t like I don’t have buyer’s remorse because I can recover from that modest investment of time and money rapidly.

A high-consideration product or service would be a college education, a plasma television, or a new car. I think of a high-consideration product/service being something that I can’t easily return and get a refund.

In the social media realm here are a few things that can be done to build awareness for the brand for both low and high-consideration products/services:

• If you haven’t already, set-up fan or group pages for your organization/brand at Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube.
• Set-up a “virtual gift” for your prospects and customers to share with each other. These are becoming increasingly popular.
• Create a Wikipedia entry.
• Encourage loyal customers to talk about your brand with their friends. Often-times incentives are the key to this kind of strategy.
• Upload videos to YouTube and tag them with keywords. Encourage the sharing of these videos through your Facebook, MySpace, etc, site.
• Set up RSS (Real Simple Syndication) for feeds from the public relations/communications part of your Web site.
• Reach out, and form relationships with, bloggers who are considered experts in your market and ask them to write articles about your product/service. Bloggers with large followings (examples: Engadget.com, about.com, etc) have major influence over your target buying audience.
• Use “share to social networks” functionality so purchased items can be share by customers.
• Use a social network to get behind a cause. These can be easy to set-up at www.causes.com .

Consideration stage

This is the stage where the organization wants to make sure that their offering is considered when a prospect is trying to make a purchasing decision. This is where you have to be convincing that your offering is the best one and you can do this by offering discounts (slash-through pricing), comparisons to other brands, show benefits (how the features will help), calculators or other decision tools.

This stage is crucial because you’re either going to move the prospect down the funnel towards “loyalty” or possibly lose them forever.

In the social media realm here are a few things that can be done to convince prospects that you have the best product/service offering:

• Give links to expert third-party reviews. This is the time to link to those influential bloggers that have reviewed your offering.
• Like Amazon made trendy, make available customer ratings and reviews. Any Web-savvy prospect will search for product reviews anyway and you have no control over that. Even reviews that aren’t as favorable are better to have on your site than somewhere else. Prospects appreciate honesty and might choose to buy the product from you anyway or find another that has a better review.
• Allow prospects to communicate with each other via Twitter, Facebook or MySpace. This has been made even easier now with Facebook’s new sharing tools that you can integrate right on your Web site.
• Monitor Twitter because it’s in this stage that prospects might be tweeting trying to get feedback on your product/service offering. It might not always be appropriate to respond directly to them but it’s good to know what’s being said so that you can possibly change your product’s decriptive content strategy.

Preference stage

This is the time when the prospect is seriously considering moving to the next stage in the marketing funnel which would be to buy your product. She is thinking about the product and imagining it in her life. She’s possibly thinking about how others will perceive her once she makes the decision to buy your product or how it’s going to make her life easier. She wants to be sure that she’s not going to have buyer’s remorse and she’ll try to validate that through a last little bit of research. She’s probably considered other similar products from your competition.

In the social media realm here are a few things that can be done to reinforce prospects that they’re making the best decision when they buy your offering:

• Blogs matter most at this stage. They’re also important earlier on but take on a new life here as the prospect is rereading their research to reinforce their buying decision.
• Videos and podcasts of product reviews/demonstrations will also go a long way in reinforcing the prospect’s buying decision.

Action stage

Congratulations. You have a customer because they have completed the macro-conversion on your Web site by either calling and ordering your product/service or by completing the transaction on your Web site.

At this stage in the marketing funnel you have an opportunity to reinforce the customer’s buying decision or to cross-sell (or to raise awareness) other products. You can also reinforce what they can expect if they need to contact your customer service department.

Now you’ve made a sale. What can you do now with the power of social media to move the customer into the next stage of the funnel (loyalty)? :

• Present the availability of following you on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and YouTube. You probably (should) have a different Twitter presence in social media for customer service related issues. You might have a different Facebook and/or MySpace page for existing customers too where you’re only concentrating on building community so that they can communicate with each other to strengthen their buying decision and to reinforce your brand to others. As Seth Godin would say, you are building your tribe.
• Again, it’s crucial here to provide the ability to share purchases on social networks.
• Draw attention to other popular products/services that also include social media ties such as customer reviews and ratings.

Loyalty stage

This is the most valuable stage of the marketing funnel. It’s here that you’ll find loyal customers that respect your brand and broadcast it to others. Before I even went to business school I had heard the phrase “A company doesn’t make money because they sell to one customer. They make money when they sell to that same customer over and over again. They make money when that customer refers those products and services to others.”

Look at the Star Wars brand. There are very loyal customers that will keep buying the Star Wars movies and merchandise over and over again with each variation of packaging. How do you emulate George Lucas’ business model on a smaller scale? You can start with social media marketing at the loyalty stage.

How do you keep customers in the loyalty stage with social media?

• Encourage your customers to share the word about your offerings. If possible give incentives to encourage this behavior such as coupons. Netflix sends an email to me once every couple of months offering my friends and family one free month if I simply forward the email to them.
• Give your customers the opportunity to review and rate your offering and spread them to social networks.
• Allow customers to connect to each other to form bonds in the social media community.

Ron Scott
Manager of eBusiness Strategy
ronscottjr@gmail.com

Sources:
Social Media Marketing for Dummies 2009
The Marketing Funnel: Forrester Research

Tags: call to action, conversion rate, marketing, money, profitability, social media