Building Your Engagement Funnel: From Social Media to Online Events

The traditional marketing funnel is a useful concept, but it can be limiting as it focuses on talking to prospects instead of engaging with them. This one-way approach doesn't align with the personalization of the internet landscape. A shift to an engagement funnel is necessary for a more dynamic and personalized interaction with customers and will help you promote events on social media.

What is an engagement funnel?

Think of an engagement funnel as a methodology where your audience becomes customers by engaging with your brand.

Now more than ever, it’s easy for brands to communicate, connect, and engage with their customers. The brands that thrive will know how to authentically interact with their audience at each stage of the buying journey.

Calling it an engagement funnel rather than a marketing funnel accounts for the ever-changing ways customers and brands interact with each other. Instead of pushing customers down the marketing funnel and hoping they’ll eventually purchase, successful brands lead customers by the hand, engaging with them at each step along the way.

Engagement funnel vs. classic marketing funnel

When comparing the engagement funnel to the classic marketing funnel, the difference isn’t so much in the structure or stages of the funnel but how customers and brands interact at each stage.

While the traditional marketing funnel works in theory, it doesn’t account for how digital engagement impacts marketing a product today. The reality is that customers expect brands to behave differently than they did 20 years ago. Customers want brands to actively interact with them, answering questions, providing support, and being genuinely helpful.

That’s why it’s more important than ever to harness the tools available to turn engagement — not just marketing — into conversions. By focusing on creating an engagement funnel, you’ll reach more potential customers and get more conversions.

The structure of your engagement funnel doesn’t necessarily need to be different than the traditional marketing funnel. It can still contain the conventional stages:

• Awareness
• Discovery
• Engagement
• Consideration
• Purchase
• Retention

What needs to change is how your brand interacts with people at each stage of the funnel. You need to use strategies, tools, and platforms that promote engagement rather than one-way conversations. Whereas before, the education stage might have only included sending prospects whitepapers or case studies, now it might also involve inviting them to webinars or doing Q&As on social media like Facebook Live.

The power of video engagement

When it comes to engagement, few things are more powerful than video.

According to Wyzowl’s 2021 Video Marketing Report, 94% of video marketers say video has helped increase user understanding of their product or service, and 83% say video has helped increase the average time their visitors spend on a page.

Video leads to more conversions because it gives audiences a chance to see what companies are all about. Whether in the form of virtual events or product demos posted to social media, video allows customers to form deeper connections with brands, translating into more loyalty and sales.

How to build your engagement funnel

Now that you know the why behind engagement funnels, let’s talk about how to build one.

Awareness

At this stage, your goal is to make potential customers aware of your brand. You've likely already tried social media event marketing but this will help you go further.

Video can be particularly helpful in generating awareness for your brand. Because videos keep people on social media platforms longer than other types of content, they tend to be given more exposure.

So, for example, say you recorded a video interview with a prominent influencer in your industry. If you post that video on social media and tag the influencer, there’s a good chance that people who follow that influencer will see the video.

Or, if you posted the same video to YouTube, the YouTube recommendation engine will likely recommend the video to those who have watched similar videos.

When people interact with the video, respond to their comments! The more engagement the video has, the more the various algorithms will prop it up.

Discovery

Once prospects have become aware of your brand’s existence, it’s time to help them discover more about what you offer.

Your goal is to start showing up everywhere your prospects are. This means utilizing multiple marketing channels and strategies so that your prospects are repeatedly exposed to your brand.

You should maintain an active presence on social media, posting a variety of content types. Don't forget to check your social media event metrics to measure your progress. Depending on the platform you’re using, you can create retargeting ads that will be shown to those who watched the initial video.

SEO is also an essential strategy in the discovery stage. By creating optimized content on your site, you can attract organic search traffic for the relevant top-of-the-funnel keywords. One particularly effective SEO strategy is to put relevant videos within text-based content, such as blog posts. This keeps visitors on the page longer, which is a signal to Google that the content is both relevant and valuable.

PPC ads are also effective at the discovery stage. You can use them to target essential search terms on Google, retarget those who have visited your website, and get brand exposure on specific sites frequented by your target audience.

Engagement

At this stage, you begin to engage with customers on a much deeper level than in the previous two stages. Engagement in previous stages most likely looked like mainly responding to comments on social media or blog posts. Because the content itself was not extremely in-depth, the engagement isn’t either.

However, customers who have made it to this point are willing to give more of their time and attention to what you have to offer. You can provide them with more in-depth content that addresses their questions, helps solve their problems, and demonstrates your expertise.

This may take the form of a live webinar where you directly interact with those in attendance. You could also provide prospects with long-form blog posts or whitepapers that cover more technical subjects. Or you could host a livestream where people can ask you anything they want.

At this stage, you need to be willing to invest significantly more time in direct engagement with prospects. Yes, doing a live webinar takes more time and effort than posting on social media, but it’s also a really effective way to help prospects take the next step in the buying journey.

Consideration

At this point, prospects are actively considering who to purchase from. They’ve probably narrowed it down to a few companies, including yours. Now is the time to show them why you’re better than the competition.

Online events are really effective at this stage and can go a long way in helping differentiate you from the competition. Promote your online event or webinar to a wide audience to gather more leads.

Engagement is especially important at this stage. If you can connect more effectively and authentically than your competitors, you stand a good chance of winning a prospect.

Purchase

You have successfully converted a prospect into a customer. Congratulations! But you’re not done yet. The purchase experience has a significant effect on whether the customer stays with you for the long term.

You want to do everything you can to make the entire purchase process as smooth as possible. Every step should be clear, and it should be easy for customers to find answers to their questions. Offering a live chat support function can be particularly helpful in making sure a person completes their purchase. If they have a question or objection and can’t find the answer, they might not pull the trigger. Live chat goes a long way toward preventing this from happening.

Retention

As you probably know, it costs a lot more to get a new customer than to keep an existing one. Hence the need for a strong focus on customer retention.

Some effective ways to engage with customers at the retention stage include:

• Create a robust onboarding program that includes video tutorials about how to get started using your product.
• Build a thorough knowledge base that covers every aspect of how to use your product or service.
• Host ongoing educational webinars that help customers get the most out of your product.
• Have a strong customer support team in place who are willing to go the extra mile for customers.
• Regularly create valuable content (blog posts, videos, podcasts, etc.) that will serve your customers and build loyalty.

The key to retention is remembering that engagement doesn’t stop after the initial purchase. Rather, it’s an ongoing process throughout the entire customer lifecycle.

Choosing The Right Video Engagement Platform

To create a powerful engagement funnel, you need a robust video engagement platform.

You need a platform that makes it easy to:

• Create live or on-demand webinars
• Engage the audience through polls
• Do Q&A
• Chat with participants
• Have guest hosts
• Utilize screen sharing
• Create custom registration forms
• See analytics regarding how attendees participated in the events
• Automated email reminders leading up to events

Once you have a robust video engagement platform in place, you can begin creating engaging videos and incorporating them into your engagement funnel.

For more help on choosing the best platform, read our in-depth guide: What Is a Video Engagement Platform, and Why Should You Use One?