The main goals of social media marketing are to discover more about your target customers, build a community and drive traffic to your website.
But one of the most important goals is to increase your brand awareness. So how should you go about doing this?
Here’s a guide to getting started.
One Goal or Many?
It’s worth clarifying from the start that you don’t have to choose only one goal and stick to it. You can work on building awareness at the same time as directing traffic and building a community, for example. But they are different areas that require different approaches.
You might want to carry out a social media audit to help you decide which goals to prioritise. Which goal would benefit your business the most?
Why Use Social Media for Brand Awareness?
Social media is the perfect platform to get the word out about your business. With so many users (nearly 2 billion active users on Facebook), whatever you’re selling, your target market is going to be on at least one of the networks in large numbers.
You might want to increase brand awareness to accompany the launch of a new product or to reach a new market. Whatever your reasons, social media can help.
Focus on the Right Metrics
It can be tricky to track your brand awareness, but there are a few metrics that you can keep an eye on.
Two of the most important include the number of followers you have and the reach of your posts.
Also keep a close eye on the amount of engagement your posts get, including the amount of likes, shares and comments.
The amount of traffic you are sending to your site from social media can also be a good indicator. Although your main goal is brand awareness, if you start generating a steady amount of extra traffic, it’s likely your awareness is increasing too.
An increase in brand mentions is also a sign that your brand awareness is increasing.
So how do you measure all these metrics? The analytics tools included in the social platforms are a good place to start. Facebook Insights provides some excellent details, for example, that can give you a lot of information.
But you can also use other tools like Google Analytics to help, and for brand mentions you could use a social media monitoring tool like Hootsuite.
Tips for Boosting Your Brand Awareness
So now that you know what to measure to find out how successful your efforts are, you’ll want to make sure you increase your brand awareness by using various techniques.
The foundation of nearly all successful social marketing is creating and sharing valuable content. Remember the competition you face not just from other businesses but personal connections, and ensure you create content that informs and engages the emotions.
Don’t just post promotional content. You want to inspire rather than sell.
Add personality to your content and updates. This helps with brand awareness by showing the human side of your business.
You could also launch contests and giveaways to help spread the word. Just make sure you’re attracting the right type of people rather than people who just want freebies.
You can curate other posts as well, especially viral posts. Take advantage of popular posts from other sources and use them to engage with your audience.
Paid social is also an option. Advertising on social media can be highly effective because you can target audiences very accurately, so you might want to experiment with this.
Work on Increasing Brand Awareness
Boosting brand awareness on social media is not something that will happen immediately. It takes time to make an impact. So start now using these techniques, and track your efforts to see whether you are hitting your goals.
Then start to benefit from greater brand awareness from more effective social media activity over the coming months.
As a specialist digital marketing agency consisting of a number of highly experienced digital consultants, Web Results Direct is expertly placed to support its clients with advanced, and strategic, digital marketing consulting services. To learn more contact us – call us now on 01483 429222.
