— October 23, 2018
We talk a lot about marketing products on social media, but the simple truth is, social media marketing is just half the battle. Communicating your brand… now that’s the hard part! Everyone makes the whole thing sound so easy, where you just need to come up with an alluring brand name and logo, create a website and post a few cool pictures for customers to rush right in, right? But, in reality, it is easier said than done. It takes hard work and time to get customers to trust your brand. And let’s not even talk about the fact that you have to prove your credibility time and again and make customers see the value in what you are offering.
And that’s just the beginning! To finally get customers to buy into your products and make a purchase, it takes even more!
If your biggest challenge is finding ways to build brand awareness, we’ve narrowed down to a few ways you can effectively communicate your brand to attract and retain customers.
Let’s get started!
Develop Your Voice
Once you’ve set up your brand, you need to develop your voice. You want to make sure that your personality comes out in every tweet and every post so that your customers don’t confuse you for your competition. That said, however, it takes a bit of time to find your voice and settle into it. On the positive side though, once you find your voice, you’ll find it much easier to engage with your customers. Rule of thumb, when trying to find your voice, consider these three elements:
Your audience
When developing your social media marketing strategy, identifying the audience you are speaking to is at the top of the list. Not long ago, you probably wouldn’t have given much thought to your voice because brands consistently used a formal tone to reach their audience. But now, with varied and younger audiences in the picture, you need to find a voice that best resonates with the kind of audience you are addressing, or you’ll lose them forever.
Authenticity
Let’s set the facts straight. Customers will only trust your brand if you are consistent and authentic. You should always ensure that you don’t try to sound like another brand. Copycat techniques will result in you coming across as untrustworthy.
Your company culture
What is your company all about? What principles and values do you stand for? For example, if your company culture is honesty and integrity, then your social media voice should reflect the same. I know it seems simple, but it is so vital to your success.
Utilize Visual Branding
One of the best ways to communicate your brand is by using visual content, specifically incorporating images to your content. There’s a major misconception that all you need to do to sell your brand is to slap a few good blog posts together, and that’s it – but words alone won’t cut it.
Want proof?
First, social media platforms are known to prioritize visual content. In fact, Facebook became the largest photo sharing website with its users uploading about 350 million photos every day. Second, according to numerous studies, people tend to respond more to content that has at least one image than to content without any image at all. Third, according to a survey done by Adobe and Software Advice, the use of images is one of the best social media optimization tactics for businesses. Not to mention the fact that our brains tend to process visuals 60,000 times faster than text.
From the stats, it’s clear: visual content is the currency of sharing information on social media sites. So, capitalizing on visual content helps you attract more people and the more people that get to see your brand the more engagement you can expect.
Post Regularly
Some people say that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but that is not as true in branding as it is between friends. People tend to quickly forget you if they don’t see you as much – out of sight out of mind. There are way too many brands out there preying on your laxity. So, if you don’t post regularly, even your loyal fans will slowly slip off into your competitor’s hands. As a rule of the thumb, you need to frequently post content to ensure that you keep your fans engaged.
Build Relationships With Industry Top Players
Another surefire way of effectively communicating your brand is building relationships with top players in the industry. When established brands post something in social media, their post gets attention from millions of people. If you are relatively new to the scene, however, you might not get as much engagement because you probably only have a handful of followers giving attention to your content.
By building relationships with these established brands, you get an opportunity to piggyback off their audience and achieve faster results since they have already established trust.
Engage
Merely posting items is no guarantee that you will get the kind of audience you are hoping for. Plus, there is no guarantee that your posts will even build the brand awareness you are hoping for. Because of this, it helps to interact with other users on social media sites. Comment on posts on Instagram and Facebook, reply to tweets and start up conversations that stir reactions to keep your brand on the audience’s radar. As social interaction is quite fun, there is a chance that you will be carried away, and you will need to remember that making too much fun of your competitors unprovoked might annoy and repulse some customers.
Wrapping It Up
While the idea of communicating your brand might seem like a leap, with these tips, you will have enough to get started.
You might not get the response you are hoping for in an instant, but that can, and should be expected with every first attempt. So aim to be in your audience’s scope constantly. The more you put your brand on your audience’s radar, the more followers you will get. And once you have lured enough people, you can start working towards retaining your fans and building a larger and more established brand.
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