Funnel playbooks, per vertical

The common failure is not bad videos. It is a stream of decent videos that never asks anyone to do anything, pointing at a profile with no offer, feeding a landing page written for a different audience. Views accumulate, nothing converts, and six months later the conclusion is that social does not work for this industry. In almost every case the missing piece is a deliberate path: content designed for people who have never heard of you, separate content for people already weighing you up, and a conversion surface that matches whatever the last video promised.

These playbooks lay out that path one vertical at a time, because the shape genuinely differs. A personal injury firm can convert a stranger on a single video and a phone call in the same hour. A B2B software company runs a nine-month evaluation across a buying committee that will never once comment on a post. Building either funnel with the other one's assumptions is how budget disappears.

Each page maps five stages with the same four facts attached: the goal of that stage, the content types that serve it, the metric that tells you it is working, and the practical detail of how to produce it without doubling your workload. Alongside that you get the vertical's typical funnel length, the platform that actually matters, the conversion surface buyers prefer, and a realistic range for what a qualified lead costs once the system is running.

We also name the mistake that kills the funnel in that vertical specifically — over-posting brand content in home services, gating everything behind a demo in SaaS, pushing discounts in dental, running launch-only content as a course creator. Those failure modes are more useful than another generic diagram, because they are the ones we watch teams repeat.

Social funnels are hard to attribute cleanly and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling a dashboard. Most of the influence happens in places no tracker sees: a clip watched without a click, a profile checked before a referral call, a founder remembered from a video three weeks earlier. The practical answer is triangulation — a self-reported 'how did you hear about us' field on every form, UTM-tagged links in bios and pinned comments, and a habit of asking on discovery calls what the person had already seen.

Read those signals alongside platform retention rather than in place of it. Retention tells you whether the content is working as content; self-reported attribution tells you whether it is working as marketing. When retention is strong and attribution is empty, the gap is almost always the conversion step, not the videos.

For high-intent local verticals, the first qualified enquiries typically arrive within four to eight weeks of consistent posting, because the buyer already has the problem and is scanning for someone credible. For considered B2B purchases, expect three to six months before pipeline influence is legible, and longer before anyone will attribute a closed deal to a clip. Neither timeline shortens meaningfully by spending more; they shorten by posting consistently and by making the next step obvious.

The failure pattern is stopping at week seven. Content compounding is real but back-loaded — the library keeps working long after it is published, and the accounts that win are usually the ones that were still posting when the earlier work started paying. Plan the budget for two quarters, not for a trial month, or do not start.