When I think of how many B2B organizations are using social media, you can group those uses into essentially five buckets. Before I could get to that in detail, I felt I needed to clarify and share a view on a revised sales/advocacy funnel.
The Funnel Lives!
Despite rumours regarding its death, the sales or advocacy funnel remains very much alive. It still serves as a logical way to organize your planning as far as it goes. What do you want people to do or know? From there you can build a measureable program to affect that opinion or behavior.
Awareness + Evaluation = Relevant Awareness
One suggestion - let's collapse the funnel one layer for the sake of social media marketing. In general, we are not using social media marketing for the purest form of awareness building, the kind we associate with television ad buys. There is just no reason to settle for all of the waste of that type of marketing. The solutions for that in the online space are all traditional ad buys on places like Yahoo homepage, YouTube homepage and other big portals. In social media, we are inherently being more relevant and targeting through affinities - let's reach folks who are passionate about playing golf, interested in virtualization for business, or who have tweens in their household.
Because we can identify relevant conversations online, we know where to reach a more qualified participant (audience, customer, consumer - all the names don't do justice to the multiple roles we have all become). Now, we want to reach or engage them to the point that they learn a bit about a product or service. Simply knowing about it isn't enough. The reason? We cannot shoot multiple impressions at people in social media. Awareness works through repitition - see that ad three times and maybe you'll remember it (does '3' do it these days or is it more like 7 or 10?) Effective social media marketing is always about relevance vs. frequency. Usually that means topically relevant and via a relevant source like a peer or a stranger with expertise. This is different than ad targeting. It is more about creating "pull" through genuinely being of interest to the person you are trying to connect with.
Let's call it "Relevant Awareness" - combining awareness and evaluation, the top two layers of the funnel. We want to reach and engage with folks enough such that they learn a bit more and become interested, start down the path of consideration, or pass something along to a friend. Awareness by itself just doesn't make sense.
Second Suggestion - the sales funnel outlines the steps from awareness to loyalty. The advocacy funnel was designed as a similar process tracking awareness to advocacy and is most used for cause or issue marketing. We need to combine them. Advocacy = Word of Mouth = Passing along something to a friend. Every program we do has a significant communication goal tied to activating some form of word of mouth. That could be sharing a link or content, posting a comment, tweet or review, a deeper 'post' like a blog post or creating and posting some form of multimedia. It's all word of mouth. Revenue-generating customers are valuable but so are vocal customers. This word of mouth starts much higher in the funnel, as well.
A lot of folks have tried to re-mix the funnel. Sometimes they confuse the funnel with what Ogilvy-ites call the "customer journey" - that meandering path through our lives that lead us toward a purchse. The funnel seems too rigid to reflect that. Truth is, it's not trying to. All the funnel is trying to do is document the commonsense truths of the basic pyschological and behavioral steps towards a conversion point and the magic happy land of loyal consumption beyond that.I have to know about something before I consider it. I have to consider it before choosing to buy it. What happens to affect those steps will continue to get increasingly complex.
Third Suggestion - if we agree that word of mouth in all its many forms including sharing and recommending is a behavior we are after and that it can happen well before purchase, then let's move up "advocacy" higher in the funnel. As you get lower on the funnel, the intensity of advoccay can rise. Loyal customers are more productive advocates - they are invested in the choices they have made and, depending on category, more likely to tell others about their preference.
Let's bring Advocacy up right after the Engagement layer of the Funnel. In social media marketing, we are constantly trying to connect with people who have an experience with a product - or something related to a product - to activate them to share their story. And we are also giving influencers experience with products and services to inspire conversation. Both are meaningful forms of engagement. In short, WOM is not something that comes solely after purchase. I could easily recommend a 2010 Taurus (Ford is a client) not because I own one (I wish) but because I learned a lot about it and drove one and am genuinely impressed by the car.
Changing the Funnel to articulate and value Social Media and Word of Mouth Marketing could change how traditional marketers concept marketing and communications efforts. If you were constantly judging your strategy and tactics against a "drive advocacy" goal, you woudl likely make different choices. Anyhow, its a start. Next time more on B2B....
