Can Social Media Marketing increase Brand Awareness?

Social media marketing is one of the most powerful tools for increasing brand awareness. However, effectively establishing awareness of your brand is a lengthy, complex, and multifaceted process.

To succeed in social media marketing, you must determine a target audience that best suits your company, and create engaging, aesthetically pleasing content that generates clicks, views, and increased website traffic. There are numerous steps on the journey to increasing your company’s brand awareness in the highly competitive arena of social media.

In this article, we’ll discuss some of the best strategies and techniques for utilising your organisation’s social media presence efficiently to increase brand awareness and overall growth.

Know Your Audience

A company can do everything right in terms of hiring the most skilled employees, producing quality content, and posting that content regularly and frequently. However, if you don’t understand your audience, it’s unlikely that anyone will engage meaningfully with your posts.

Developing a customer persona or multiple personas can help your organisation determine the traits and desires of your target audience. What are your customers’ demographics, and how can you inform your social media branding to appeal to those customers?

Although no two social media users are alike, many users are capable of determining when a brand is out for clout and when a brand is authentic. Users can often tell when a brand is genuinely working to provide solutions or products to address their customers’ pain points.

It can be tempting to “go viral” by posting content related to current events or other trending media. However, brands often face backlash for straying too far from their core focus and, by extension, the core values of the organisation.

To better understand your target audience, it’s important to rely on up-to-date data and analytics. Social media sites provide valuable data and metrics about the users visiting your sites and interacting with posts or other content. This data can provide your marketing team with information about the types of posts that receive the most engagement.

Be sure also to conduct fairly regular surveys and thoroughly assess your customers’ feedback. If there’s something your organisation could be doing better or more efficiently, oftentimes, customers will express their issues or grievances in no uncertain terms. This si especially true on social media platforms.

Voice and Tone Matter

Innumerable resources laud the importance of finding the right “voice” for your branding, but what exactly does that entail? A “voice” or “tone” is as much about context and subtext as much as it is about the actual content.

One of the most important contributing factors to a company’s branding that’s often overlooked in relation to social media presence is your organisation’s mission statement. What does your company stand for, and/or what are your organisation’s core values?

Take your mission statement into account for every bit of content on your company’s website and social media outlets. Social media managers and those responsible for curating social media content must be intimately aware of the company’s mission statement to maintain continuity and authenticity of voice.

Another important aspect of developing the appropriate voice for your branding initiatives is understanding your audience.

Savvy consumers are always looking for the next best deal for a better method of addressing and solving their pain points. Without sufficient brand loyalty, you may lose customers to competitors if your branding message doesn’t inspire confidence or fealty to your company’s cause.

Bolster your understanding of your target audience by conducting customer surveys, assessing Google Analytics and other relevant customer data, and analysing your closest competitors.

Understand that this is a precarious endeavour. Working to cultivate a brand voice that is authentic helps you grow your business and audience, and maintain a positive reputation and perception. While all of these benefits perfectly coincide, it’s not easy to make it all happen.

There are countless ways to cultivate recognition, and there are some very fine lines between positive recognition and negative recognition, thanks to the current climate of divisiveness and polarisation in regard to various social and cultural issues. If your company wants to develop a brand voice that makes the most of contemporary, hot-button issues, prepare for the volatility that can entail.

The last thing you want to do is embroil your social media managers in a conflict that distracts from your ultimate objectives: providing the best quality service or products to your customers.

Utilise the Tools at Your Disposal

Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter provide integrated advertising opportunities that can be quite beneficial if used effectively. For instance, within Facebook’s Ad Manager, you can target your ads to highly specific demographics based on a wide variety of attributes and even behaviours.

Maybe your company wants to unveil a new product with several improvements compared to previous iterations – you could then advertise specifically to buyers who purchased older versions of the product. You can also deploy advertisements based on an audience’s geographic location, age, gender, and more.

Popular social media platforms also provide a wealth of analytics that can be invaluable to your social media marketing efforts as you work to better understand your ideal customer and curate your content with them in mind. Facebook’s helpful Audience Insights tool enables your company to better understand the bulk of your customers and subsequently empowers your marketing strategists to develop highly specific campaigns so that the right audience sees your carefully curated content and advertisements.

If you want to target parents between the ages of 26 and 48 who have a high school diploma, you can. If you want to target single adults between the ages of 18 and 35 with a college degree who live in certain cities, you can do that too. The possibilities are virtually endless and limited only by what your marketing strategists deem feasible.

These features and more provided by social media companies are changing and advancing practically all the time. It is best not to get complacent when it comes to developing your marketing strategy. You want a marketing team that fully understands the capabilities of each platform and how best to use them to your advantage.

Not only that, but you want to be able to adapt when website changes or updates affect the way your business advertises and engages with customers and social media users. In a highly competitive and volatile arena such as social media marketing, adaptability is key to the survival and longevity of your enterprise.

Don’t Underestimate Video

Youtube and Tiktok are two of the largest social media platforms in today’s world. Moreover, other platforms such as Instagram are taking note of these social networks’ success and prioritising video in their own algorithm. Though creating videos can be challenging, there are some relatively easy ways to get started, such as content repurposing.

Repurposing entails utilising already existing articles, videos, images, etc. to create fresh new content. One common example is to cut blog articles into small pieces and share that information as social media posts or infographics. In this case, many blog articles can serve as a script (or at least a framework) for a simple video in which you explain the basics of a topic by talking to the camera.

Interact With Your Audience

After you define your brand’s voice and post social media content, you can continuously increase brand awareness by interacting with your audience. One of the great benefits of social media is seeing comments, replies, and reposts of your content. As you post more content, you will be able to see how your audience receives your posts.

These responses provide you with great insight into what your audience is looking for. While it is crucial to use social media metrics to see how engaging your content is, you can also take note of what your audience says about your content. Their responses can guide you in creating more well-received content.

Social media sites also allow you to respond to comments made on your posts. This can be a useful facet in establishing your brand voice. If someone comments on your social media post with a complaint, you can respond to it quickly in a voice that suits your brand.If a comment expresses appreciation for your posts, you can send a reply thanking them for their support.

Continuously interacting with your audience encourages people to engage with your content, and keeps your brand at the top of your audience’s mind. This can greatly impact your brand awareness.

The Takeaway

In summary, social media marketing can play a crucial role in developing your organisation’s brand awareness and perception, but it’s easier said than done. It is certainly achievable to find the “sweet spot” within your industry that pleases current customers, attracts new ones, and staves off competitor campaigns. However, this requires a diligent and dedicated approach that makes the most of the resources available to your team.

As Forbes Finance Council member Joseph Lustberg states in an article about the importance of social media in brand recognition, “Through the use of high-quality images, content, video and more, you’re in control of your own reputation, and you’re able to manage how you want your business to be represented to the public.”

Perhaps that’s the most liberating and intimidating aspect of social media marketing – it’s entirely up to your company how to present your organisation online and engage with customers. But as we’ve discussed in this article, there are numerous steps you can take to ensure that your company’s digital presence on social media can help grow your customer base and even enhance the quality of services you provide your customers.

Thank you reading this article about how can social media marketing increase brand awareness, check out our other articles on how to design and implement your digital marketing strategy and how to use social media for your Ecommerce business.

WTBI is a creative, digital services consultancy based in Corby, Northamptonshire. Providing well-thought-out, digital strategies to solve difficult business problems for our clients. With technology changing at a high pace, we need to keep our clients engaged in reshaping their business through digital innovation and new opportunities.

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