We are all familiar with Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, and especially, with TikTok. This new contender, Tiktok, has entered the game to take over the social media world and has become a creative outlet for young adults and teens.
But... do you know how to use them to build up your brand?
Building a brand is the strongest way to last and succeed in business. Whether it's personal branding or branding as an organisation, this is the era of social media, and there is no way of building a strong brand without staying current in social media.
According to Our World In Data, social media platforms are used by one-in-three people in the world, and more than two-thirds of all internet users. This means that almost everyone is on social media.
It's not about running ads on the TV, or the radio anymore. Although this would help with visibility, it won't grant you the opportunity to connect with your potential audience.
It's true that now, most brands are overexploiting ads on social media. Advertising is getting more pervasive, obnoxious, and intrusive. People feel overwhelmed, interrupted, and stalked by bad digital ads.
According to SurveyMonkey, the ads you see every day on social media aren't going anywhere.
Did you know that...
🔧 Nearly 3 out of every 4 users 74% think there are too many ads
🔧 63% of users say they only see a few things advertised, over and over again
🔧 44% of users find the ads irrelevant to their wants and needs
People know what ads are, and they can quickly lose patience with them. These platforms are saturated and, still, new brands keep rising every day.
Branding is such a powerful tool. People want to feel as if they were part of a community, something bigger than themselves. You need to connect with them and work to trigger specific emotions and feelings.
By understanding this, you will build relationships and communicate with potential customers increase, and your brand visibility.
What is the first thing you need in order to introduce your brand to social media?
Exactly, a logo ❗️❗️
A logo is the anchor of a brand. When designing a logo, it’s an important point to consider what the brand represents - and what the brand doesn’t represent.
The 5 P’s of a successful social media strategy
Now you know how powerful social media is nowadays, and you have a logo - the next step to ensure you stay on track is the "5 P's" strategy. This can be a great starting point for campaign success.
1. Plan
One of the biggest mistakes many brands do is to use social media without any plans. They post random content hoping they will get results.
Take your time thinking, before actually getting started.
Bear in mind some aspects, like:
🔑 Who is your target audience on social media
🔑 What are your main goals on social media
🔑 How often are you going to create content?
🔑 Which channels do you want to tackle
🔑 What is your purpose? Do you want to establish your brand, sell products, build a community...
After considering these questions, you can start thinking about the rest: Getting started.
2. Produce
Once doing all the planning and you are ready to start, the next step comes down to creating valuable content.
Producing content is vital for campaign success when produced with a purpose. Any content you share with your audience should help you get closer to your goal.
Vary your content with images, videos and texts. Creative eye-catching visual content is key when it comes to engaging your audience.
And make sure to have a particular routine within your content, and that the content you are producing is adequate for selected social channels.
3. Post
Now that you have produced the content you will be posting, the next step is to post. And it's not as straight forward as it seems! There are things to take into consideration before publishing.
According to Dharilo, you should ask yourself several questions before publishing that post:
✔️ Does your update support your objectives
✔️ Is the post related to your brand/business
✔️ Does your update add value to your followers
✔️ Will your update make sense to your audience ✔️ Does your post make sense for the network it’s on ✔️ What are your peak posting times for the day
✔️ Have you included hashtags
Be reliable and remember that the algorithms on each of the channels are ever-changing.
4. Promote
Now it comes to the part where you have to make sure people see what you have posted. If nobody sees your content, then it makes no sense to publish.
Forcefully promote your post by investing in social ads. This will generate organic engagement. Segment your budget and align it with your community growth and website traffic. However, reaching a broader audience with a goal-orientated goal strategy, like building an email list and directly contacting those who are interested in your brand, would be perfect.
Check out our post on how to use email marketing for your brand here.
It really depends on the goal of your promotion. If you are expecting to sell a product or service, email marketing would be one correct way.
5. Perform
Through social media, it is easier than ever before to measure the outcome of your efforts.
Compare your results with your industry benchmarks. Use analytics to measure your performance towards KPIs.
Some social media channels provide some form of analytics. For example, Instagram or Twitter. In other cases, you will need external software or app.
Using Twitter's internal insights, for example, won't provide you with much metrics. You can only see how your performance during the current week has changed compared to last week. And if you want to see trends over time, you must record data manually.
We recommend using a social media analytic tool.
Sprout Social lists their tool in the top 1 of 10 of the best social media analytics tools for marketers.
Tips to be successful
Be creative
First of all, you need to understand that it's important than ever before to be more creative on social media, instead of just feeding your audience with harsh adverts. Engaging potential customers with your brand will rarely come solely from wistful writing or links navigating to non-social media websites.
Do you remember Spotify’s Wrapped campaign?
What they did was to give listeners a custom playlist of their top 100 tunes from the year that was, and let them see:
🎧 Total minutes of music streamed
🎧 Number of new artists discovered
🎧 Most-played songs and artists
🎧 Top genres
Here you can see 2 examples. In the first image, the artist was the users most listened artist. While in the second one, there are some statistics about the number of songs streamed, the amount of time listened and the number of albums.
Spotify encouraged users to share all this information with an automatically generated, beautifully personalized image on social media.
Everyone was posting images of Spotify all over Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
🤩 Now that is a creative way to use build up a brand with social media. A great example of promotion and shareability!
Know your audience
Knowing your audience is critical for a successful social media presence for your business. Knowing your audience equally helps you figure out what content and messages people care about.
In line with ActiveCampaign, when you know your audience, you can pluck the words right out of their mouths. You can read minds! An when you can read minds, these things will happen:
✅ You get more leads because people feel like you understand them ✅ You get more customers because leads feel like you understand them ✅ You get more referrals because customers feel like you understand them
The term knowing your audience sounds obvious, but it's a lot harder than it sounds. You want to know what they want to see. And equally important, what they don't want to see. There is a lot of work behind it. Take your time.
Develop a clear "voice"
Your brand image goes in hand with the voice you use to project the personality behind your brand. Your voice is what makes your brand stand out from the rest.
You can attract the right people to your account with the correct voice. And obviously, reinforce the relationship with your fans. Keep these questions in mind:
Does your voice sound formal?
Does it sound casual?
Does it sound friendly?
Funny?
To identify your voice, you need to ask yourself these 2 elements:
🤔 What you sound like
🤔 What you want to sound like
According to Zendesk, 65% of customers prefer their support staff to have a “casual” tone in the contents of their interactions. But the context matters. For example, a customer would not be satisfied if their requests were denied with a casual tone. They instead like it to be formal.
Alternatively, maybe casual, conversational, and moderately enthusiastic tones would perform best.
Talk like a human
Now that you have a brand personality, build a brand people can trust. No other media has ever changed the communication skills of brands this much. Before, brands didn’t use to communicate with consumers this close or this much.
Brands are now challenged to reconfigure the way they communicate with consumers. They need to exhibit their personality. They need to be more human when communicating with customers.
Here is an example of Pepsi responding to a question made by a Twitter user. Some brands take the "tools and tactics" too seriously, trying to improve their artificial intelligence and its incorporation into marketing automation.
However, they forget about the ‘human’ voice, the quality and authenticity of human interaction. Talking like a human being with a sense of personality will make a brand more relatable. This will definitely trigger your long-term brand loyalty.
Don’t be afraid to use colloquial dialogue and humour. And, you might get to go viral if it's genuine and entertaining enough.
Be consistent
We are building a brand. And according to the Cambridge Dictionary, the meaning of build refers to create and develop something over a long period of time.
So building a brand is not something that happens overnight. You need to put in work, spend time on it, be consistent across all social media platforms.
Create a routine. Maybe you would be posting quotes on Mondays and a Q&A on Fridays! Whatever you are going to be doing, follow the routine and be persist with it so your audience knows what to expect.
Auburn Advertising states out 4 types of consistency:
🎤 Consistent Voice (consistent in the tone used in social media messages)
🎤 Consistent Content (not to be scattered in what you share via social media)
🎤 Consistent Posting (a balance when posting content)
🎤 Consistent Aesthetics (an appropriate length)
Don't waste time on networks that don't work
Not all brands cover all networks of social media. Trying to be present on a channel that clearly isn't working is a waste of time and energy. And it is no good.
Spend more time on the networks that give you a return on your activities.
Buffer located Facebook and Youtube at the top of the 21 top social media sites to consider for your brand.
You might want to go for the networks where more active users are, to maximize your brand reach on social media, engage with the right people, and achieve your goals.
Yes sir!! I am sure you are confident enough to launch that brand of yours you have in mind.
And remember, every brand on social media has a few things in common:
🎗️ They all understand the needs of their audience
🎗️ All of them know how to reach their audiences
🎗️ And they all engage them with content that stays true to their brand
Go out there and stand out!!
Would you like to learn how to create content to share on your social media as well as with journalists so you become more visible, more credible and more influential? Sign up for 30 days for free!
About the Author
Peter is a Spanish Marketing Intern at Profile High Club. He studies a BA in Business Management with Marketing at London South Bank University. He is passionate about travelling, and loves learning and discovering new things. Peter, having grown up in Spain, can speak 2 languages fluently, and hopes to improve his French very soon.
Find Peter on LinkedIn.
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