If you’ve been struggling to make your business stand out from the crowd, trust us, you’re not alone.
If you’ve tried all forms of advertisement and every marketing tactic out there, and things still haven’t worked out for you, you need to channel all that hard work in social media campaigns for creating awareness about your business.
Brand awareness stands at the top of the list of priorities of every social marketer.
Why use social media, though?
Well, for starters, 85% of brands prefer using social media to promote their brand.
That means something, right?
Don’t worry; we aren’t going to leave you hanging with just that; keep reading to find out why you need to use social media for brand awareness and how to get the most out of it:
So, if you’re among the 50% of businesses that aren’t on any social media platform, you need to get on board ASAP.
So, with 3.02 billion people worldwide predicted to use social media in 2021, you need to start posting on social media platforms.
Why Use Social Media for Brand Awareness?
Whether you sell a product or service, offer consultancy, or just create content, you need social media to reach more people and increase your brand’s awareness. 66% of digital marketers get more leads than their competitors, provided they spend at least 6 hours on social media.
Here’s why you need to use social media for brand awareness:
● Budget-Friendly
Compared to conventional methods of raising brand awareness with higher costs and lower ROI, social media costs almost nothing. Think of all the money you save by not hiring big production managers and other teams for advertisements!
So no matter what your budget is, you can always fit your marketing needs in it.
● More & Better Quality Leads
Posting on social media gets you more leads. This one is pretty obvious but always ignored. At the initial stages of running social media marketing campaigns, we believe that visitors would just view our posts, max leave a like or a comment, and go back.
However, that is far from true. If visitors find your content engaging, they would definitely want to visit your site and check out what you want to offer them.
Do you know the best part about these leads? They are already interested in your product, making it easier for your team to change them into paying customers.
● New Content Ideas
Social media is full of ideas and you can see new trends almost every day. With social media, you can find out what’s trending, what are the currently “ïn” topics, and even what your audience is interested in.
Therefore, you can check your audience’s likes and build your marketing strategy around it whenever you run out of ideas.
All three benefits come together when you opt to build a social media marketing funnel that guides the visitors to your social profiles into a structured path toward your landing pages or offers.
Here are some practical tips for you to get at the top of your game:
Top 13 Tips for Using Social Media to Boost Brand Awareness
These tips will not only help you increase your visibility despite the ever-changing algorithms of social media apps, but they will also help you improve your leads. So, let’s dive right in:
1. Use the Right Social Media Platform According to Your Audience
Managing several social media accounts is nearly impossible because it gets difficult to maintain consistency across all channels. Your first goal should be to locate your (potential) customers and where they spend most of their time virtually.
Once you do that, you can start creating content for that platform. Limiting your efforts to a maximum of three sites can help you ensure consistency, quality, and management.
2. Maintain Consistency Across All Social Media Handles
Even though it is kind of impractical to run more than three social media accounts at the same time, if you, nonetheless, decide to do so, make sure that you remain consistent in posting. You don’t have to post everywhere, simultaneously.
Instead, design a calendar, strategy, and branding style for every platform. And remain consistent! It will multiply the results of your branding strategy.
You can create a schedule for every platform and stick to it, for instance:
- LinkedIn: Thursday – 10 AM
- Facebook: Monday, Thursday, and Saturday between 8 to 11 PM
- Twitter: Wednesday or Friday between 10:30 am to 12:30 pm
- Instagram: Thursday – 11 am and Sunday – 11 am to 1 pm
3. Use Hashtags
Hashtags can help you increase your reach, place your content within the area of your targeted audience, let relevant people see your posts, and increase your engagement up to 50%.
Hashtags are one of the best brand awareness strategies because they attract new followers and visitors to your channels.
Here’s what you need to remember when using hashtags:
- Keep them relevant.
- Use trending keywords from your niche.
- Don’t overdo it by using 60 hashtags.
- Keep it specific and straightforward.
- Use tools like Ritetag, org, or Hashtagify.
4. Constantly Ask For Feedback and Modify Your Marketing Strategies
Keep an eye out for comments under your posts. Use the feedback and criticism to evaluate your content and see what kind of content performs the best and gives you the most leads.
Once you get access to such information, start framing your branding strategies accordingly to get more leads. Plus, if you address your customers’ feedback, they too feel valued.
5. Post Regularly
No one likes an inconsistent page that they think died a year ago because the last post dates back to 2010.
Regular posting is the key to more traffic. An irregular posting schedule will kill your branding efforts. If you don’t post regularly, your followers will forget about you. So, try posting regularly.
If you find it hard to maintain a schedule, use scheduling tools to post content when your followers are the most (AKA peak hours). This will allow you to use your content to gain the most visibility possible. A simple search about Agorapulse alternatives will get you started.
6. Understand the Tone for Every Platform
Never use the same tone and type of content for all of your social media handles. If you genuinely wish to increase your brand awareness, you need to post unique content according to the type of your audience.
For example, 71% of Instagram users are under 35, so Instagram is your best bet to promote something fashion-related. Similarly, to sell a certification, LinkedIn and Twitter will be better choices for you. Here’s a mini cheat sheet to tones of content:
- Facebook: Passionate, Deep, Thrilling, and Light-hearted.
- Instagram: Bold, Emotional, Creative, and Humorous
- Twitter: Crisp, Sarcastic, Witty, and Bold
- LinkedIn: Clear, Professional, and Direct
However, while deciding on the tone, ensure that you keep a uniform brand voice so that it helps track to your company every time!
7. Use Visual Content
Visual content gets people excited because they tend to interact more with visual content. Facebook posts with visual content get 2.3 times more engagement than posts without images.
Here’s what to remember when creating visual content for brand awareness:
- Use free resources to design visually appealing content.
- Decide the dimensions for every social media platform and then stick to them.
- Make the text easily readable.
- Keep copyrights in mind.
- Add alt-text in captions.
8. Collaborate With Social Media Influencers
To increase your brand awareness via social media, try collaborating with influencers. Influencer marketing can help you promote your business, service, product, or content to a broader audience.
It also improves your brand’s reputation, allows you to acquire more customers, increase your conversion rate, and read more leads.
Don’t know where to start? Use pikdo Instagram if you want to try influencer marketing to increase your brand awareness. It is the favorite platform of 78% of influencers for collaborating with brands.
9. Organize Competitions and Giveaways
Nothing attracts people more than rewards and free stuff. You can hold any kind of competition or giveaway. For example, a free giveaway for a milestone or a competition for the best idea for XYZ.
Share the rules on social media and watch people participate. And while you are at it, don’t forget to remind people to share your social media with their friends. This will increase your brand’s reach and awareness.
10. Leverage Breaking News and Trends
People prefer following pages that keep them up-to-date with the latest happenings in their related niche. So, if you have a quick-reacting marketing team, you can leverage the importance of being the first one to report the latest trends and breaking news.
This will increase your brand’s reach and increase your visibility as more people will save and share your posts.
11. Promote Your Social Media Handles
Promote your social media accounts at every chance you get to increase your following. Post links to your social media accounts on your website, in blog posts, marketing emails, newsletters, etc.
You can also add the links to your social media accounts in other materials, for more awareness, like labels, flyers, business cards, banners, merch, packaging, etc.
Wrapping Up
Social media and brand awareness go hand in hand as nothing can beat its reach. This is the year 2021, and it’s about time companies get on board with social media, no matter how big or small they are!
Since there is no cookie-cutter method for social media, you need to experiment and find out which ways work best for you and your team!
