Breaking Down the 5 Sections of a Successful Digital Marketing Funnel. Part 5 of 5 – Brand Advocate + Ambassadors
Understanding the client journey through the five sections of a successful marketing funnel can provide great insight in creating relevant content tailored for step of their decision making process. In part five, we will discuss the Advocacy section. Tune in.
Breaking Down the 5 Sections of the Digital Marketing Funnel (part 5 of 5)
Hello. Good afternoon, Michael Winn, Chief Digital Officer of Digital Opps, a division of RB Oppenheim Associates. Thanks for joining in today, again as we cover digital marketing strategies and tactics to grow your business. Today is part five of a five-part series, the last part of breaking down the five sections of a successful digital marketing funnel. As I mentioned before, if you do a search for marketing funnel many of the images on Google you’re gonna see look like an inverted triangle with the widest portion at the top coming to a point. And what’s different about the digital marketing funnel that we’ve talked about thus far and are going to conclude today, is that a true digital successful marketing funnel really looks more like two inverted triangles kind of stacked on top of each other. So it’s wide at the top comes to the center and then kind of bows out along the bottom or almost like an hourglass type shape. And that’s because as they move as your clients prospects move from prospects into clients into loyal advocates or brand ambassadors which is what we’re going to talk about today. That base becomes wider and really completes that full circle of your brand awareness and then into consideration, the conversion stage, the loyalty stage, and then lastly the advocacy and ambassador stage.
So when we talk about brand advocates or ambassadors, these are folks who have purchased your product before. Maybe they’ve bought multiple times, returning customers but what’s different is they have an obsession to tell others about your brand. They absolutely love your brand and wherever they go if anyone brings up something that’s even remotely close to what your brand product offering is related to they’re like “oh my gosh, have you tried this? It is absolutely the best,”. Those are people you absolutely need to know who they are and you need to be aware of what they what their digital presence is because this is where the line of brand ambassador crosses over into social-media influencer. So you want to be keenly aware of and be able to identify who these brand advocates or ambassadors are. Let’s break it down.
We’re gonna talk about identifying who they are and how we do that. And then how to empower them to share and really feel comfortable in being that brand advocate. So we’re gonna break those two things down.
Number One: Identify The Ambassadors
Number one being able to identify who they are. There are definitely several tools out there, obviously you could do a LinkedIn name search, a Facebook search, or an Instagram search. There’s actually a couple of Gmail add-ons that you can service, where you can do an email search and try to find if a social media user profile has this email address in it. It’s important that if your business should leverage a CRM, a customer relationship management tool, so that you can identify who your brand advocates are by their social media handles, whether it’s Instagram or Twitter. You’ll have that information together so doing a social media scrub versus your database is step one.
Number Two: Create a Profile Label in Your CRM System
Number two is to make sure that you create a profile label in your database, in your CRM system that identifies them as a brand advocate or ambassador. So that you can target those people when we talk about the next item which is empowering them to share and really become strong brand advocates. You need to be able to group those and segment those out for your communication efforts.
Number Three: Leverage Hashtag Searches
Then number three is leveraging hashtag search or tag search for. Put in hashtag “your name brand” and do a localized if your business is a locally owned business and you serve your local area, you might want to do hashtag “your city” and then look for, cross-reference, and identify people who are your customers and who are talking about you. Here’s the mistake a lot of brands make, they think that no one’s out there really talking about their brand or that there are conversations going on in the social web about their company. And they are grossly mistaken. We’ve got several different tools that we use as sort of a listening dashboard to the social web for our clients so that we can pick up those comments and mentions. By tying those to your customers who have purchased multiple products, multiple times, and who are talking about you, so once you’ve identified who they are then you’ve got to come up with a strategy to empower them, whether it’s a content strategy or a process.
People Like to Know First
So number one, a lot of things I like Gary Vaynerchuk, who is the president of VaynerMedia -one of the largest digital marketing companies in the globe right now. I would say based on his 900 employees, he has a group called First in Line and what it’s really cool about First in Line is when new things are coming out and he’s got something that’s gonna release, drop, or happen in the coming days, these folks get an email. Because they signed up for First in Line and that’s a brilliant strategy to group these people and give them inside information that’s not readily available to the public yet. What that does is makes you feel like you’re a part of something and that you have the inside scoop. And we, as humans, love that we love to know something that other people don’t know, especially if we are just absolutely raving fans. Like tonight is the NFL Draft, so it’s gonna be a lot of people wondering who’s gonna get the first pick. So if you have insight into something that hasn’t been released to the general public yet, that’s very exciting and for brand ambassadors this is absolutely the kind of content and strategy you want to deploy in empowering them to share.
Beta Testers
You can also think of beta testers, this is a great pool for people to try out new products or demos of new products or services. You could talk to them and say “hey I’d love for you to give this a try. This is something we’re thinking about policing, we’d love to have your feedback,”. Again, that empowers them and makes them feel special like they’re a part of an elite special group. Then lastly empowering them to share is obviously with social contests being available you can empower them to launch the contest, to be the social media community driver of these things.
So these two items when you understand that as a potential consumer when I pass through that awareness stage and I make my considerations evaluations, I go ahead I may the purchase I walked through the conversion stage. I’m a loyal customer, I’ve bought more than once. I’m now a brand advocate, that is what a successful digital marketing funnel looks like and here’s the thing to remember guys, an army of ambassadors is a powerful communication tool for any brand so keep that in mind. Guys, thank you so much for your time today. I hope you had a great day. Don’t forget to join me tomorrow as I am joined by Katie Lilly as we cover the next chapter in the book Traction: Getting a Grip on Your Business. Thanks again, my name is Michael Winn. I am the Chief Digital Officer of Digital Opps, a division of RB Oppenheim Associates. See you guys tomorrow.