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Brand awareness refers to how well a customer can remember or recognise a brand in different situations. In other words, brand awareness is about the reputation and image of your brand or business in your target market.
Brand awareness is important if you want to reach and sell to your target customers. It’s a crucial parameter to business growth, which can help your small business turn into a well-established company. It’s simple actually: the more people are aware of your business or brand, the more you’re likely to sell your products/services to them. And, of course, social media is one of the best places to find and connect with your potential audiences in order to increase your brand’s reach.
As of 2021, the number of social media users worldwide is over 3 billion, which is expected to reach 3.5 billion by 2023. Many of them might be your potential customers waiting for you to connect with them or looking to know more about your business. Need more reasons to be on social media?
Social media enables you to put your brand in front of your potential/target customers on social media, get their attention through curated content, connect with them and ultimately sell.
Wondering how to use social media to increase your brand awareness and reach? Here are some tips that can help you.
Selecting The Right Social Media Platform
Choosing the right social media site to find and connect with your customers is not just important but essential for the success of your marketing campaign.
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. are some of the top social media platforms. Using all these platforms to market your business will require plenty of resources and time. So, it’s better to find and start with one or two networks that can give you the best results with less input.
In order to find the right social platform for your business, you’ll need to do some research. Study different social media sites to find out which one your target audiences mostly use, where they are the most active, what kind of content they’re browsing, etc. Track your competitors to see which social media platforms they use, how successful their social campaigns are, and why.
Find a social media site that’s the best relevant to your business and has the right audience. For instance, if your business revolves around photos or creative artists, Instagram (photo sharing social media platform) may be the best choice for you.
Mind the Type of Content Your Share on Social Media
Each social media website is different from others in one way or more. So, the content type that will work on one platform may not necessarily be as effective on another.
So, once you have found the right social media platform for your business marketing campaign, spare some time to analyse the type of content you’d want to share to create the most impact to your audience on that platform.
Consider the context of a particular platform when producing content for it. Each platform is unique in its own way. The content that is shared on Twitter is of a different kind than the posts you’ll see on Facebook, and not just in terms of length.
Visual Content is the Key
On social media, attractive and appealing visual content such as photos, videos, graphics, etc. are the best way to create engagement. With so much content there on social media platforms, you can only stand out if your content is unique and eye-catching.
Photos are a better and more interesting way to convey a message to your target users. Most people on social media will ignore text content, but they will definitely check out your photo post and/or video if it looks appealing or useful to them. According to BuzzSumo, social media posts with images get 2.3 times more engagement than posts with text only.
When creating graphics or images for social media, make sure to use unique and interesting content. Add your branding (logo/image) on it as a way to build authority and increase brand awareness.
Talk to Your Customers (And Listen!)
Most companies use social media just to broadcast their messages, events, news and promotions. All they do is share 2-3 posts or links on a daily basis leading to some blogs or pages on their website and never bother to engage with users through comments and other means. They fail to understand that social media is not a place just to promote, but it’s a place to engage and connect.
When using social media for branding, focus on connecting with, talking to and engaging with your audience. Your customers must feel appreciated and valued when interacting with you. Reply to user comments on your posts, respond to their messages/queries, and say thanks for being loyal customers.
The more you engage with your customers on social media, the easier it is for them to trust your brand and eventually remember/recognise it.
Post Questions
Asking questions to your audience is a great way to inspire conversation.
Do you like our new product/service? What’s the best thing you like about it? What improvements do you want in the next version? And, so on.
Question posts are known to boost interaction, irrespective of the industry. Moreover, it will help you make more loyal customers once they feel that you care about their preferences. Posting questions on your brand social page is also a nice way to get to know more about your customers, their likes and dislikes and gain helpful insights for your upcoming campaigns.
Post Contests and Giveaways
Contests are interesting, especially when they are accompanied by attractive offers and giveaways.
Run relevant contents on your social media accounts and pages to engage your audience with the brand and build awareness. Use branding (brand name, logo, etc.) wherever possible in your content and posts.
Give free stuff like a free trial of your product, a surprise gift, movie voucher, etc. to keep the things interesting and inspire more engagement in your future contests.
Build Consistent Brand Image Across All Social Channels
If you are using more than one social media platform for your business, make sure to follow a consistent branding style across all the platforms. Use the one and only brand logo everywhere, in fact, use the same colours to represent your brand for all content and across all channels. This is important to help people easily recognise and remember your brand, which leads to increased brand awareness.
Make Use of Trends
Trends are common and very significant on almost all social media sites, including Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. There is always something trending on social media.
What you have to do is find a relation of your business with a trend and then use it to post something relevant about it. Trends can be a wonderful way to attract people to your brand and increase traffic, which may eventually help increase brand awareness.
However, it’s important that the trend you’re using on your post/content is somehow related to your business, product or service, or it can end up doing more harm than good. Use good judgment, and don’t just be opportunistic, when trying to get your brand into relevant trends on social media.
Give Answers to User Queries
Customers have more questions than brands can ever answer, so the best you can do is try and answer as many questions of your customers as you possibly can. And what a better way than social media to do that.
Being an open and free platform, social media is used by consumers not just to connect with brands but also to ask queries, make complaints and review them publicly. Depending on how your customers perceive your brand, it can make or break your reputation.
However, as long as you are answering to customers’ queries and responding to their posts/comments to keep them satisfied, you can expect them to be generous when talking about your brand to others, which might turn out to be a great way to increase awareness and bring more traffic to your business.
Track and Optimize Your Campaigns
Even if you’re using the best social media platform with all the right content and tools, success cannot be guaranteed, not unless you are tracking everything.
The only way to optimize results and get the desired ROI with your social campaigns is to track your efforts. All the major social media platforms, including Facebook and Twitter, have dedicated analytic tools for brands to track the performance of their campaigns in terms of likes, comments, reach, and engagement.
Only by tracking everything, you can optimize and improve the things that are not working so well for you on social media.
Conclusion
Social Media can be a great tool to increase your brand exposure and reach more of your target audiences. But, it can easily turn into a disaster if you’re not careful about what you share or how you interact with your customers on social media. Take your time to study your audience, understand their requirements and find the right approach to use social media for brand promotion.
I hope these tips and strategies help you get more exposure and increase your brand awareness through social media. If you need help or want to hire the services of a social media expert in Sydney, call us at 1300 160 807 or send an email to [email protected].
Proven Digital is an award-winning digital marketing agency based in Sydney, Australia that delivers tailored and affordable digital solutions to help local/small businesses grow online.
