Social media is one of the most powerful tools that you can use to build brand awareness for your business. According to Datareportal, over a billion people now use social media, which means these online platforms are ideal for getting more eyes on your products or services.
But you shouldn’t just jump on the latest trends if you want to build your brand. Rather, you need to look out for social media marketing strategies that are truly going to be effective in helping you reach the right people and make more sales.
To help with this, let’s take a look at five great tips that you can use to build brand awareness on social media.
Partner with influencers in your niche
Influencers are popular online personalities who have large followings on social media and can influence the decisions of their audience. Working with these people to market your products or services can significantly increase your sales.
It can be as simple as providing influencers with free products or services, which they might then promote to their engaged followings. Or, you could pay the influencer(s) for specific content that they can create to promote your business.
Influencers are important in today’s world because they can sway the decisions of their follower bases and drive more sales for brands. This is why some companies even partner with them on a longer-term basis so they can promote their services over a set amount of time.
When choosing influencers to work with, make sure you go for people who are already operating in the same niche so you can have similar audiences. You also want to observe their interactions with followers so you can see whether they have good engagement. For this, you can leverage an influencer audit tool such as trendHERO.
After selecting your influencers, make sure to search for their preferred contact methods. Some online personalities like brands to send a partnership email, while others prefer a more casual approach like direct messaging on their active social media platforms.
You’ll also want to create a contract between you and the influencers you work with. This helps to outline the duties of each party so you can keep track of the expected results during and at the end of an influencer marketing campaign.
Now, for inspiration, let’s take a look at two businesses that know how to use influencers marketing strategies to their advantage.
FreshBooks is a company that provides accounting software for small and medium-sized businesses.
They have a business podcast where they talk about how to make a living and explore how different entrepreneurs have shaped their career paths. They often have big names on this podcast, and they post snippets of the episodes on social media. Sometimes, they’ll also invite popular online personalities to be on their show, which means their episodes are shared to a larger audience, raising more awareness of the brand.
For example, take a look at their episode with Lisa Song Sutton, a successful entrepreneur and public figure. She has over 73,000 followers on Instagram, which means posting about her podcast episode with FreshBooks opens the company up to a wider audience of engaged followers. And that in itself means a great increase in brand awareness for FreshBooks.
Let’s also take a look at how Dainty Jewells, an online clothing store, uses influencer marketing for its business. If you look through their Instagram account, you’ll find that they often have influencers wearing their clothes and then tagging them in the photos. Many of these influencers have lots of followers and can help the brand reach new customers when they mention that they got their clothes from Dainty Jewells.
For instance, check out this post by Jael Arleth, a popular Instagram blogger who has collaborated with Dainty Jewells to promote one of their dresses on her page. You can see that she includes a discount code for her followers, which is a great tactic that can encourage more people to buy the dress at a reduced price.
Giving influencers personalized discount codes to share with their followers is also a great way to monitor whether they’re doing a great job of sending high-quality traffic and sales your way. If someone bought a dress from Dainty Jewells with this discount, the company will know that this particular influencer made that sale for them.
You can learn a lot from these two businesses on how to use influencer marketing if you want to improve your company’s brand awareness and get more customers for your business.
Give people a good reason to talk about your business
If you give people a good reason to shout about your business, it will raise more awareness for your brand, attract more followers, and drive more traffic to your website. To do this, you could try hosting giveaways and contests, or give out awards with badges that can be shared.
You could also make it a point to reward loyal customers with free gifts or encourage your customers to share their experience with your brand on social media. To give you some inspiration, let’s study an example of a brand that does this well.
Best Value Schools is an online resource that regularly ranks different schools to help readers make the best decision on what school to enrol at. And they also give out badges to the schools that have been added to their lists.
The great thing about these badges is that a lot of the schools that make their coveted lists go on to share them on social media. Take, for instance, this post made by Westcliff University to show that they had been included in Best Value Schools’ round-up of the top 5 MBA & DBA programs.
Sharing this badge on their Instagram page works well for both brands because it shows that the school is credible and it can also get people talking about Best Value Schools. This, along with the other strategies mentioned, is a great way to draw more attention to your business. So, you should try using a similar tactic if you want to build more awareness for your brand.
As a company, one way that you can provide value for your website visitors or customers is by creating helpful blog content. For instance, you could publish buying guides that provide all the information necessary for buyers to make the best purchasing decisions. You could also create expert round-ups, which are collections of quotes or contributions from popular experts or authority figures in your field.
Many websites also provide how-to guides, which are designed to be very useful in helping customers or prospects perform specific tasks. To give you some inspiration, let’s take a look at an effective how-to guide that has been written and published by My Canada Payday.
As a financial lending company, a lot of people in My Canada Payday’s target audience will be interested in knowing how to save money. And, with the recent events happening in the world, many people have realized the importance of preparing for unforeseen circumstances.
So, to help these people, the company has created a post on how Canadians can invest for the long term. In the piece, they talk about high-risk and low-risk investments, the different factors to consider before investing, and they even include some markets and industries that have been recommended by experts for investment. It’s an excellent guide that can be of great help to their readers and other people when shared on social media or other relevant sites.
You could also create and share content that answers common questions your audience might have. When shared on social media, these types of guides are sure to send a lot of traffic to your website.
One way to find the questions you should be answering with your content is by looking through the queries that people send to your customer service team. You could also decide to join social media forums like Reddit or Quora so you can get an idea of the types of questions your customers are asking. Now let’s study a website that provides this kind of content for inspiration.
The RealFX Group is a company that assists people in buying the home of their dreams, so they understand the value of good credit. They might also have been getting questions on how to maintain a good credit score.
To answer these questions, they’ve provided people with a great guide on how to keep their FICO score high in order to get the best mortgage rates. The post includes various actionable tips that can help their audience maintain a great credit score so they can be successful when applying for mortgages. A lot of people with bad credit scores would really appreciate this information so it’s a great example of content that will do well with various audiences.
If you think you might not have the time or bandwidth to create these types of helpful website content for your audience, you can always outsource the task to an SEO copywriting service that specializes in creating high-quality and valuable content.
When you’ve created your helpful content, it’s important to share it on social media so you can reach a wider audience and raise awareness of your brand. After writing a post, try to summarize some of what you’ve written in a few sentences and include the link to the full post when posting on social media. This creates intrigue and encourages people to click on the link to read the full post. It’s one of the social marketing strategies you can use to share blog posts on social media and send more traffic to your site.
Post lots of visual content
Visual content tends to perform particularly well on social media. This is supported by a study by Buzzsumo, which found that Facebook posts with images received 2.3 times more engagement than those without. So, if you want to raise awareness of your brand, publishing plenty of visual content can help with this.
Some examples of visual content that tend to work best are infographics, high-quality product photos, or eye-catching graphics. You could also include photos of your staff that humanize your business or create helpful videos for your audience
To create great visual content for social media, try to make sure that you invest in quality photographers or use professional tools to make attractive visuals that can catch the attention of your target audience.
If you need some help in choosing good tools, check out our list of the 10 best video editing tools you can use to make engaging videos for your social media platforms. There are also other platforms like Canva or Visme where you can create eye-catching infographics or images.
Stay consistent to see the best results
To get the best business benefits from social media, you need to be consistent — this will help you reach the most people and ensure you stay on the minds of prospective customers. To help you stay consistent, you could create a social media calendar where you outline all the posts that are supposed to go out from your accounts in a specific period of time.
Now, you might be thinking that it would be too tedious to manually publish all of these posts at the correct times, and you’re right. Luckily, you can use a bulk scheduling tool to plan and post everything in advance so you can save time and stay organised.
Some of the content you post might not be seen by all of your followers, as people aren’t always online. However, if you’re publishing posts consistently, you’ll improve the chances of getting more people to see your content and improve awareness of your brand.
Summary
To recap, we’ve taken a look at the different ways you can build brand awareness for your business using social media. Some of these tactics include partnering with influencers, creating helpful website content that you can share, and creating more visual content for your social media platforms.
Make sure you get started on these tips so you can start to see results from your efforts. And, if you want to stay updated with more tips to improve your business, feel free to follow our blog as we regularly publish valuable content to help our audience.
Author bio & headshot:
Adam Steele is the COO at Loganix, an SEO fulfillment partner for agencies and marketers. We build easy-to-use SEO services that help businesses scale. If you liked this article, please check out our SEO guides and templates on the Loganix blog.