Become a Marketing Hero

Creating brand awareness is a key part of your overall marketing mix. And a balanced mix of marketing activity that works for your business will achieve that goal. It’s important to be aware that using only a single channel simply doesn’t work. We’re going to look at building brand awareness on social media, but in the context of this as a part of your marketing mix.

High brand awareness will make your product or service more visible to your target audience. So how do you increase your level of brand awareness through your social media marketing?

Here are three tips that will help:

Understand your Potential Customers

Before you go ahead and start setting up your social media channels consider who your potential customers are. Are they make, female, what age range are they? Are they likely to have particular interests? You can use your existing customer database to help research who your potential customers are likely to be. 

If you use a CRM system you may also be able to extract some data to inform you of who your target audience isn’t. You could also use that data to review your content for what works, what doesn’t work and how you can improve it. 

The data that you have will allow you to create personas for your different audience segments. How much detail you go into will depend upon the level of data that you have access to, your product or service and the complexity of your audience. You could have two or three personas, or many. 

This information will give you what you need to know about your audience, And that will allow you to move on to selecting your social media channels.

Choose your Social Media Platforms Carefully.

There is a wealth of data available online that will help you to understand which social media channels you should use to engage with your potential customers and develop your brand awareness. Sprout Social has published a wealth of information to help you understand who uses which social media platform. With that information you can decide which channels to use. 

It’s critical to use the right channels, and with your customer personas and social media insights and data you can match the two. With the right channels in place you can begin to consider how you will run your marketing campaigns and activity, tailoring them to your specific audiences. 

It’s all too easy to set up an Instagram account and take photos of your morning coffee. Does that benefit your business? Let’s look at tip number three.

Brand Awareness Campaigns and Social Media Channels

So the coffee and the morning photo. Most of your brand identity will be built around the people in your business. The way you communicate, who you speak to and how you are perceived. 

That’s different with brands like Coca Cola, but in the SME sector, building trust between people is key. Your potential customer will want to know that they can trust you and your team, with your brand recognition building from there. 

Whilst we wouldn’t advocate posting photos of your morning coffee, the point is that it gives some insight into the people in your business, And that is important. 

Using the information that you have developed to decide which social media channels to use, you can now look at the sorts of campaigns that you should be running to engage with your potential customers and turn them into actual customers. 

You’ll know age, gender and have some interest and other data. Different age groups will use different channels. They will engage with different types of content. Younger age groups will engage more with video than written content, while older age groups prefer written content. And there will be crossovers. 

A few other things you need to know about brand awareness and social media

There are other considerations when you’re setting up your campaigns. Every social network now utilises hashtags. Create your own, and research to find out the best words to use to reach your potential customers. 

Consider a blend of blogs and articles, video, and images. Pull together case studies, infographics and testimonials too. And research your subjects too. 

Remember what we said about building trust? Social media isn’t about selling. It’s about conversation. And building your brand awareness won’t work if you use it to make sales pitches. Brand awareness is all about building that trust, recognition of your values, who you are, and why your potential customers should engage with you rather than your competitors. 

Developing effective campaigns to build your brand awareness on social media can be challenging, but the key is to utilise the data that you can access through your customer personas and social media data. 

Finally, test and measure. Your brand awareness objectives will help you to figure out what you need to measure. Put your reporting in place, and launch your campaigns. And expect your first campaign to need changes as soon as you launch it.