How to Increase Brand Awareness on Social Media
In 2023, there were 4.8 billion active social media users across platforms, which is more than half the world’s population. Having a strong presence on social media is critical for any brand that wants to connect with potential customers. Nailing your social media strategy will help you build brand awareness and stand out among the digital crowd.
But how can you cut through the noise and make your brand noticeable? Join us as we delve into essential strategies and tactics for building robust brand awareness on social media.
What Is Brand Awareness?
Brand awareness refers to the level at which your current and potential customers recognize your name. You might have high awareness among a specific niche within your target market, or you could operate a large, globally recognizable brand.
Wherever you are in your company’s life span, building brand awareness is a critical step in the client journey. Brand awareness is often the first stage, because customers can’t do business with you unless they know you exist. With so many choices available, customers value brand recognition. More than 70% of customers said it was important to recognize a brand before doing business with it.
How Can You Increase Your Brand Awareness on Social Media?
Social media is one of the most effective ways to connect with your target audience in the digital age. Maintaining a social media presence is cost-effective and offers a good medium to draw followers to your brand. With social media, you can communicate your mission and values and find your customers where they are. Use these strategies for leveraging your social media profiles to build brand awareness.
Know Your Audience
Understanding your target audience is the first phase in increasing your brand awareness. You need to know who your customers are and what kind of content appeals to them. Your customers might respond better to visual content such as static images or videos, or they might be interested in blog posts and other forms of written content.
Start by creating customer personas. Analyze your best current customers and your target customers to see what they might have in common. Organize your target audience into segments based on their similarities.
For example, you might determine that your best customers consist of women who are 35 to 50 and have older kids. Or you could find that your top customers are split between this demographic and single men who are 25 to 35 years old.
When you know this information, you can research where members of this target audience spend their time online and what kinds of content they like.
You can also generate ideas for topics, hashtags, captions, and other social media strategies that will reach your audience.
Know What Platforms to Use
Although many people spend time on multiple platforms, they usually prefer one platform over the others. In 2023, the majority of adults in the U.S. spent more time on TikTok than any other platform. But social media habits vary by age and other demographic information.
When you make your customer personas, do some research on which social media platforms are most popular with your target audience. Doing so will keep you from spreading yourself too thin on social media.
Instead of spending all of your time and marketing budget trying to post consistently on seven different platforms, you can focus on the two or three platforms that are most likely to reach your customers.
Posting consistently will allow you to build a larger following, and posting to fewer social platforms is more sustainable in the long run.
Create Content Specifically for the Platform
You could use a social media management solution to post the same content across platforms. Consider Optimize HQ. Its uniform dashboard gives you access to all of your inboxes and mentions on one platform. It also allows you to schedule multiple posts across platforms. Just remember that native content usually performs better since social media algorithms prioritize it.
Understanding what types of content perform best on each platform will help you build a social media strategy that works. If you’re going to post content on multiple platforms, make sure you’ve formatted it appropriately for each.
TikTok
TikTok allows you to post short-form videos to engage and entertain your audience. Funny and creative videos typically perform better on this platform. The best TikTok content feels authentic and personal.
If you’re building brand awareness on TikTok, search for relevant hashtags and look at your competitors to note what kind of content stands out. This isn’t the platform for formality. Making content for TikTok should be fun. It’s a great platform for highlighting a day in the life of your staff or jumping on relevant trends and challenges.
Add sounds and music to make your videos more memorable. Use your descriptions to add keywords and phrases that appeal to your audience, and don’t forget to link to your business's website in your profile. If you want to promote a product, TikTok gives you the option to make it available for purchase directly from the app.
If you’re a business-to-business brand appealing to decision-makers, or if your target audience leans more toward professionals, LinkedIn could serve as a great part of your social media strategy. This social media channel helps you highlight your products or services for a completely different audience.
You can post carousels and videos highlighting various aspects of your business. Or you can use the platform to establish yourself as an expert in your field by posting original blog posts with relevant information.
Make your posts stand out with visual content such as infographics that break up your text, or post a slideshow using multiple images with contextual information that helps tell your story.
LinkedIn is a valuable tool for networking and building relationships. Use this social media channel as a way to build brand awareness and nurture relationships with your existing customers.
Since Facebook posts are visual in nature, make sure you’re pairing valuable information with visually appealing imagery. Facebook is a great way to showcase and position your products and services. You can also engage your audience with memes and infographics.
When you’re posting on Facebook, write captions and posts that fit your brand's voice and tone. Make consistent use of branded colors and fonts. Each element of your post should solidify your brand’s image with customers. It’s important to make sure your social media presence is consistent with your website, logo, storefront, and other branding elements.
Find your audience by seeing what’s trending and hopping on relevant topics. Like LinkedIn, Facebook is a good way to establish your industry knowledge and brand yourself as an expert. You could post links to blog posts or infographics containing information that would be useful to your audience.
For example, if you run an insurance company and one of your products is homeowner’s insurance, you could link to blog posts about seasonal home maintenance tasks that will help your customers reduce their risk of facing a claim.
Instagram is a highly visual and engaging platform. Like with Facebook, your Instagram profile should be consistent with your brand. Use imagery that matches your tone and voice. For example, if your target audience is young and fresh, stay away from images that look stale or dated.
Crop your images to make them more appealing. Once you’ve identified relevant themes, you can curate your grid and draw people to your page. Use analytics tools to see which of your posts are most successful with your target audience and take note of the key themes.
Do some research on trending topics and hashtags and use them strategically to find your target audience online.
Use Paid Advertising
Paid advertising is an effective way to boost your brand awareness on social media. Paying to target a specific audience with your social media content helps get your brand in front of the right people. You can target your core audience, which would be people who fit into the demographics and psychographics of your target audience.
You could create a custom audience, which is a tool that lets Meta and other social platforms target audiences based on who they think would like your brand. Or you can target lookalike audiences, which are similar to your target audience, based on their behaviors and interests.
Each of these options lets you get your brand in front of new potential customers. Paid ads will expose you to the social media users who are most likely to buy your products or services. If you’re launching paid ads, format them similarly to native posts and make sure they're engaging.
Let Optimize Help You
Consistently delivering valuable content that's authentic to your brand helps you engage with your target audience. With a solid brand awareness strategy, you can leave a lasting impression on your target customers so they remember you when it’s time to make a purchase.
Measuring brand awareness helps you understand what’s working and what’s not so you can tweak your social media marketing strategy for better results. If you need help, Optimize is here for you. We'll work with you to develop a social media brand awareness and management strategy that helps boost your online presence.
Our team consists of experts in social media management for small businesses. Let us help you compete in your market by optimizing your social media presence. Schedule a consultation today to learn more