Stick to this metaphor and achieve success or ignore it and keep wasting money on ads and content on social media.

While I was scrolling through my LinkedIn feed yesterday, I came across a video ad prompting me to take action. I watched the video ad as many times as possible to understand what the video was about but all proved abortive.

So I decided to check the comment because there was a single comment. But to my surprise, the person complained about not understanding what the brand is about just as I don't as you see in image.

This led me to write this post because I know there are a lot of social media marketers, bloggers, affiliate marketers, and content creators in the same shoe as the brand am talking about.

Stick to this metaphor and achieve success or ignore it and keep wasting money on ads and content on social media.

The metaphor I am talking about is called "The customer's journey".

So, let's dive in.

After knowing your audience,(I have explained that it is important you know who you are talking to)?mapping out your customers' journey is the next thing. It is the secret to effective social media marketing. It looks like a funnel. This is the metaphor you should have in your mind when thinking of ways to get the best from social media platforms.?

The social media marketing funnel contains three phases: awareness (know me, consideration (like me), and conversion(trust me) or?

Awareness Phase

This is the first stage of the funnel where your goal is to gain heavy visibility. You should focus on generating awareness for your brand. Post images of your products and services that will prompt people to pause and learn more.?

?At this stage of the funnel, your metrics should be the number of reaches (views).?So if your post is getting lots of views with little or no likes or comments, don't feel bad. After all, you are in the awareness stage.

Consideration Phase

Once people are aware of your brand, focus on making them interested in your services or product by developing some sort of in-platform credibility. Let people see a similarity in terms of branding, graphics, as well as other content cues so that your brand stands apart from everybody else. When you do this, your audience members maybe be inspired to click on the content you share through your social media accounts, they get a chance to like your page, follow your Twitter feed, pin your posts, or subscribe to your YouTube channel

Again, they may not necessarily be motivated to click, but with enough repetition through social media channels, targeting certain topic categories, and hashtags, your brand doesn't remain an unknown quantity.

Conversion Phase

In the final phase, you should focuse on converting your audience into leads. At this stage, you can post content that offers some sort of incentive. For example, promotions and special offers, free trials that prompt your customers to act now.

Whether you use freebies, special content, special free tickets to an online webinar that's pre-recorded, it doesn't matter. Whatever the case may be, the endgame is to get people to join your list.

Once people join your list, what they're telling you is that they trust you enough to want to have a business relationship with you. This means you should not abuse that relationship. You should not send them garbage. You should not send them spam. And by spam, I'm talking about material that is not related to the topic of your list.?Instead povide values with your content. Effective lead nurturing will turn your leads to loyal customers.

The metaphor is as simple as that?

Understood?

Best of Luck.