Today I want to demystify the social media sales funnel so you can see that it’s not scary or complicated. In fact, it’s just a list of the steps it takes for someone to buy from you, based on the understanding that not everyone who hears about your business will go on to make a purchase.

Here’s a very simple graphic to illustrate what I mean:

In step 1: someone comes across your brand on social media.

In step 2: they click your link in bio or stories and go to your sales page.

In step 3: they purchase from you.

Not everyone will go from step 1 to step 2, and of the people who DO go to step 2 not all of them will go on to complete step 3. That’s why we call it a social media sales funnel; a lot of people enter at the top, and only a fraction exit out the bottom.

What I showed you above is a very simple social media sales funnel, and it’s the way most of us WISH we could make all of our sales, but an exceedingly small percentage of our sales are likely to come from so few touch points.

The truth is though, usually there are more steps involved to capture a sale.

This doesn’t mean that your social media sales funnel needs to get scary or complicated, it just means you need to add steps so that you can get MORE people out the bottom.

You don’t need to add steps all at once, this can be done methodically over time so that you don’t overwhelm yourself. In fact, I highly suggest that you do it over time so that you can add a new step and see what kind of impact it has before adding another step.

Here’s what a more mature social media sales funnel might look like:

This particular funnel has someone being introduced to your brand on social media, and then instead of taking them straight to a sales page, you take them to a lead magnet (aka a freebie) where you can capture their email address.

Once you have their email address you can nuture them via an email sequence, telling them all about your brand, sharing customer success stories, and why your product/service is so much better than others on the market.

From the emails you can link the prospect to your sales page, and after they’ve learned how amazing your brand and offer is, they’ll be more likely to purchase!

Now, this is not the ONLY way to put together a social media sales funnel but it is one of the most common because it works well.

Another really common funnel that starts with social media might include direct messaging like this:

So in this funnel, someone learns about your brand via social media and clicks the link in your bio to get your lead magnet. In this case when someone fills in the form you ask for Name, Email, and Instagram Handle.

From there you strike up a conversation to get to know your prospective buyer more, answer their questions, and eventually send them the link to buy your offer.

If you use ClickUp, Asana, or some other project management tool, I recommend setting up a zap so that when someone fills in your from a task is automatically created for you to send a friendly DM to the person who downloaded your lead magnet.

You can pass their information into the task so that you don’t have to go hunt for it!

If you use ClickUp and you don’t have a lead tracker board set up for this type of thing, you can buy the template I use for KAC Marketing here.

This makes it so easy to reach out to everyone who has downloaded your lead magnet to start up your warm DM conversation to keep them flowing down through your social media sales funnel.

Adding lead tracking to your social media sales funnel does add an extra tech-y step but it’s one that can really boost your sales because it ensures no one falls through the gaps if you’re relying on DMs to move prospects through your funnel.

I hope these visual examples of social media sales funnels helped to demystify them for you so you can see they’re not scary or complicated, they’re simply a tool that lets you see all the steps in your sales process!