How many people heard your offer? Funnel Example, part 1

How do you set up your tracking before your launch so you can tell afterwards which sources of leads worked well and what hasn’t? How can you tell where to focus your energy next time?

That’s exactly what this series of blog posts will cover.

First, I gave you an overview of what sales funnels are, how they work, and how you can use the numbers you can get from them to help focus your time, energy, and money.

Then, we set up an example to really get to grips with the concept.

Now, we’re diving into that example to see how to get the numbers we need from our social media posts and what to do with them.

First route through the funnel: Coming from Social Media

Remember that we’ve broken our audience for this launch into 4 major sources:

• Your social media networks (Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn)
• Your email subscribers
• Your networking groups
• Your speaking opportunities in the 2 months before your launch

In the next few posts, we’ll start to look at the path of those coming from social media, and how leaky the funnel is for them. I’ve broken this into several posts so it’s easier to digest. This post will focus specifically on Layer 1.

In future posts, we’ll look at the same path again for each of our other audience sources.

Layer 1a: How many people are in your audience?

You will tell as many people you can about your free challenge, including:

• Your 2,000 Instagram followers
• Your 1,500 Facebook followers
• Your 3,175 LinkedIn connections

That adds up to 6,675 people. That’s the very top of your funnel for your social media.

Be aware that one person could be following you on several social media platforms, plus subscribed to your email list, so you’ll be counting them more than once. This number will almost never be wholly accurate, but it gives you an idea of your starting point.

Layer 1b: How many people heard your offer?

The next step of your funnel could be how many people saw or listened to your message?

Here, we’re trying to answer the question:

• How well did the algorithm like (or dislike) your posts?

If you got lucky with the algorithm, it’ll push your posts to more of your followers. Some of this is based on luck, like what else is being posted at the time you post. Some of it you can control, like:

• Did you use language and visuals that grabbed your followers’ attention? Did you manage to stop the scroll?
• Did you keep their attention long enough for them to engage with it?
• Did you speak their language?

What were your results?

Let’s say you check your numbers once your launch is done, and you find that your posts during your launch period reached:

• 1,000 people on Instagram
• 1,200 people on Facebook
• 1,058 people on LinkedIn

To get your conversion rate, take the number of people who your posts reached and divide that by your audience size.

• Instagram: 1,000 / 2,000 = 50.0% conversion rate
• Facebook: 1,200 / 1,500 = 80.0% conversion rate
• LinkedIn: 1,058 / 3,175 = 33.3% conversion rate
• Total: 3,258 / 6,675 = 48.8% conversion rate

What does that mean?

From this, we can see that a much larger slice of the pie of your followers heard your offer on Facebook than on LinkedIn. At this point,  you know that your posts on Facebook spoke to your people there much better than your posts on LinkedIn spoke to those followers.

Now you can consider why.

• Perhaps you used the same posts, and the copy simply appealed more to the Facebook audience.
• Perhaps your offer is simply more of a B2C (business to consumer) offering, so you found more consumers in your Facebook following.
• Perhaps you’ve cultivated a more engaged, loyal, interested audience on Facebook than on LinkedIn, so Facebook routinely shows more of your posts to more followers there, regardless of the content.

Or it could be something else altogether! You’ll need to give this some thought to work out what’s true in your situation.

What next?

We’ll carry on with the next part of the funnel in our next post. We’ll tacklethe number of people signing up for your challenge

You can see the full series here.