Kassaundra 0:00

Today we're jumping into a series all about your social media marketing funnel - the stages you need to move your followers through in order to convert them to customers. And of course, we have to start right at the top with brand awareness marketing.

Kassaundra 0:25

Welcome back to schooled in socials. If you've been listening for a while, you might vaguely remember that we tackled brand awareness marketing back in episode 11. I highly recommend going back to take a listen to that one if you haven't yet.

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So this month, we're leveling up our skills and knowledge around the social media marketing funnel. Think of episode 11 as brand awareness 101, and today we're starting brand awareness 201.

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Before we talk specifically about brand awareness, it's important to get the full picture of the marketing funnel. Now if you've been marketing your TPT store for a bit, then you're probably familiar with the idea of a marketing funnel. It starts with brand awareness then moves to nurturing then to conversion. The idea is that you bring in a lot of people at the top of your funnel, just like the large part of an actual funnel, who could potentially be your customers. Then, as you create content, and begin nurturing those people in order to build your know, like and trust with them, some people stick around while others might fall off because it isn't a good fit. So the funnel narrows. Then, as people move even further down the funnel, they know who you are, and they have started to like and trust you, you focus on selling to them. Again, some people fall off because it isn't the right fit. And the funnel narrows again, with the idea that actual customers come out the bottom. And if we're good at marketing, we get those same people to re-enter our funnel for another offer. And the cycle goes again and again - bring people into your audience, nurture them, convert them. And since especially with social media, people can come into our funnel at any time, right people can find us and follow us 24 hours a day, we always want to be speaking to each level of the funnel, just the ratios of content we create focused on each level will change depending on our goals and what we're trying to accomplish. Sometimes we'll be more focused on brand awareness and bringing people into our audience, other times nurturing those people, and other still selling to them.

Kassaundra 2:35

So when should your content focus more on brand awareness than the other two parts of the funnel. Simply, you want to focus your content around brand awareness when you're looking to grow your audience and bring new people into your funnel. Times where this would work well would be when you're just starting out marketing your resources on social media, about four to six weeks out from maybe launching a course or a membership or a new bundle or product, as well as maybe like four ish weeks out from a TPT site wide sale. Your goal in this phase of marketing is to help people get to know you and your brand. You want them to know that you exist and have potential solutions for their pain points. If thinking about it, in the sense of know like trust, which is a phrase that gets talked about a lot in marketing, this would kind of be the know phase, people are getting to know who you are. And typically brand awareness phases of marketing last around four ish weeks, sometimes longer if you're prepping your audience for a high ticket offer like a course or an ongoing membership. Now remember, just because you decide to focus on brand awareness to grow your audience that doesn't mean that we completely ignore the other stages of the funnel, we just create the majority of content with the purpose of bringing people in to our audience during this time. And a little bit of content focused on nurturing and a little bit of content focused on selling. I like to think of the phases in terms of percentages. The more I want to grow my audience, the higher percentage of my social posts should be focused on that purpose. So say 70% of my posts, then I could create 20% of my posts to nurture my audience, and 10% of my posts to sell to them. This allows me to serve my whole audience no matter where they are in the funnel, while still focusing on my goals for my business.

Kassaundra 4:38

Now what kind of content should we be creating during a brand awareness phase? Remember, the goal is to get people to know who we are and how we can possibly help them. Two of the best ways to do this is to create entertaining content and connecting content. Entertaining content does exactly what it says - it entertains our potential audience members, it gets them to stop their scroll and hopefully come back for more. Now, don't panic. When I say entertaining, this doesn't automatically mean funny. People can be entertained by a lot of things. For example, some of your target audience might find it entertaining to watch you prep an activity, or tell a story about something that happened in your classroom. When it comes to connecting content, this is where you want to connect with your audience. You want to show your potential audience members that you know and understand their pain points. This is your chance to tell teachers that you know what their life is like, you've been there, and you can relate. Since we want to get our content in front of new faces, we want to focus on creating entertaining and connecting content using media types that get us the most reach on Instagram. This typically consists of reel,s with carousels coming in second, and on Facebook, videos tend to get a good amount of reach. And through my work with teacherpreneurs, I found that posts that get a good amount of comments tend to also get pretty high reach. So think engagement type posts if you are working on Facebook.

Kassaundra 6:27

There you have it, brand awareness 201. A little bit of a closer look at this stage of the funnel, and how we can execute it on social media. Remember, with brand awareness, we want to get people to know about us and how we can potentially help them. We want to move into a brand awareness phase before launching new offers or before sales in order to have more potential people to sell to when we get there. Finally, during this phase, we want to focus on entertaining and connecting content to grow our audience.

Kassaundra 7:00

Now I know that entertaining content can feel scary or hard. So your action step for this episode is to spend some time getting curious about what you find entertaining when viewing social media. This is one way to help you get started brainstorming different ways you could potentially entertain your audience. Once you have an idea of what you find entertaining, pop over to Instagram and let me know in my DMs and we can chat about how you could potentially use that idea on your own page.

Kassaundra 7:35

Alright, cold coffee friends. Thanks so much for listening. If you're loving getting schooled in socials, make sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode. Also, I would love it if you left a review so that other teacher authors like you can start getting schooled in socials too. All right, I'll see you in the next episode.