How to Increase Brand Awareness on Social Media? – Expert Advice, Trips, Tricks, FAQs, & More   

Social media marketing is often hailed as one of the best ways to increase brand awareness at all stages of your business’s journey. 

That being said, many people have trouble when they navigate through different social media channels. 

They know that social media can build brand awareness but they don’t know how.

Is it Worth it to Use Social Media Platforms to Boost Brand Awareness? 

In the digital age of today, it’s highly crucial that you value the online resources and channels available to you. When it comes to advertising your brand online, social media platforms are really a no-brainer. 

Nearly half the world is on some type of social media platform. So it would be a severely missed opportunity if you did not pursue forms of advertising on it. 

If you’re still unconvinced, here are a few aspects that social media marketing does better than other forms of marketing: 

• It’s highly cost-effective: Organic advertising through social media can often not even cost a single penny. In higher-scale social media campaigns, you may have to invest in a social media marketing tool but that’s pretty much it. 
• You can make changes on the fly: Your social media campaign settings and the content you put out may not perform as you hoped. In that case, you can quickly make changes to salvage your campaigns. 
• You can target specific audiences: As a brand, you’ll have an idea of what type of people and demographics would be interested in you. Social media makes it easy to serve your ads and content to those specific demographics. 
• It’s great for market research: If you run out of ideas for marketing content, surfing through social media posts can be a great way to find new ideas, trends, and fads. This can help you refine and polish your social media strategy. 

The Keys to Building Brand Awareness Through Social Media Marketing 

We’ve gone over some of the benefits of utilizing social media to build brand awareness. However, it’s important to note that you will only reap those benefits if you take the time with market research and implement campaigns properly. 

You need to have a well-planned-out brand awareness strategy. Otherwise, you might not see the results that you hope for. 

Here are some things you can do to ensure your social media branding efforts do yield good results and help build brand awareness: 

1. Identify and Acquaint Yourself with Your Target Audience 

One of the things that social media marketing does very well is that it allows you to specifically target certain demographics and audiences. 

However, that advantage of social media marketing is useless if you don’t know who you want to target.

This is why most companies that develop social media strategies often start with who their audiences are and who they want to target. 

Please note that you don’t have to target just one specific type of audience. You can have different audience segments that you can target at the same time as well. 

To identify your target audience, you need to identify what type of company you are and what types of products and/or services you want to sell. This will help you get an idea of what type of people would be interested in your brand.

Once you start to have some idea of what type of person would be interested, you can go ahead and try to build a buyer persona. 

A buyer persona is a description of a typical person from your target audience. You can list down as many traits as you want. Some typical traits you should account for include: 

• Age
• Gender 
• Income 
• Job
• Hobbies
• Interests 
• Geographic location 

Once you have your target audience or audience segments defined, you can figure out which social media platforms to use… 

2. Make Sure to Choose the Appropriate Social Media Platform (or Platforms)

We cannot tell you the number of times we’ve talked to small business owners that have trouble gaining an audience on social media. 

For many of these occasions, the problem is often the fact that they are using the wrong social media sites to advertise their brand.

How do you determine whether a platform you’ve chosen is wrong and right for your brand? 

Well, there are many factors that can play a role to determine this but the most important one is who your target customers are. 

We’ve already discussed how you can identify your target customers, the next thing you want to identify is what social media platforms they would use. 

You have to research the interests and habits of your target demographic(s) thoroughly and determine which social media channels they are most likely to use. 

Once you identify the channels, you can begin to develop your social media marketing campaigns for those channels. 

3. Use Distinct Content Strategies for Different Social Media Platforms 

It surprises us that most people don’t realize this but the same content strategy will not work for all the different social media platforms that you choose. 

This is because different social media sites are optimized for different types of content. 

Hence, the point we want to convey here is that you need to have different content strategies for different social media sites.

You should not restrict your brand to just one platform but at the same time, you should not use the same posts and content for all platforms either. 

Understand that people will interact differently with your content depending on the social media site that they’re on. Hence, be vigilant of this and compose content that suits the social media site that you use. 

4. Compose Engaging Content 

This goes without saying but even so, many newer entrepreneurs tend to think that they can just wing it with mediocre content. 

This is definitely not the way to go because when people scroll through social media, they want instant gratification. If your posts do not catch their eye at the first glance, they will just keep scrolling. 

Hence, please give your content the respect and time that it deserves. Make it engaging, eye-catching, and ensure that it provides genuine value to your customers. 

There are tons of ways to make potential customers engage with your content such as: 

• Make use of infographics and interesting visuals in your social media posts. 
• Provide incentives for them to interact with your content. Examples of this can include to share your post so that they can be entered into a lucky draw for a free product. 
• Ask open-ended questions so that customers can comment on your posts. Examples of this can be to ask for feedback regarding your products and services. 
• Use genuine pictures such as pictures of your team or yourself rather than stock images. 
• Tell a short and concise but interesting story that gives your audience some insight into your brand’s story. 
• Include customer testimonials, stories, and experiences in your social media posts. 

5. Get in Touch with Influencers

A study stated that a whopping 61% of consumers online have been swayed at some point to buy a product or service after they saw an influencer promote it. 

Influencers can be an extremely powerful way to market your brand since they already have an established base of followers who trusts them. 

If you are able to secure a collaboration with such an influencer, it can bring a ton of traffic to your brand and its social media page. As a result, you may find new customers and you’ll see an increase in revenue as well as your customer base.

Naturally, the best way to go about this would be to get in touch with influencers that create content relevant to your brand’s niche. 

You also have to ensure that the primary social media platform of the influencer you wish to collaborate with is the same as your brand’s platform. 

If you want to focus on growing your customer base on Instagram, collaborate with an influencer that primarily makes content for Instagram. 

This will increase the chances of you gaining more followers and customers because your audiences and target demographics will be quite similar. 

6. Interact with Your Followers 

As we’ve mentioned time and time again throughout our posts, audiences hate it when they interact with brands and it feels like they’re talking to a robot.

Remember that coming up with content and posting it is only half of it. Once those posts are out there, it’s important that you keep an eye on them. Check out what people are saying underneath your posts.

Not only that but interactions like that also help cement the idea of your brand into their minds. As a result, they won’t forget about your brand after they have an interaction like that. 

You can probably guess why this is important: If they remember your brand, they’ll be much more likely to come back and maybe make a purchase from you. 

7. Take the Time to Optimize Your Social Media Pages

So you’ve done your market research and created pages on social media sites where you think your target audience will be. That’s great but you’re not out of the woods yet. 

To set up your social media pages in an effective manner, you must ensure that your brand is instantly recognizable. Now, this isn’t something that can solely be achieved through social media page optimization but it certainly can help. 

Your audience should be able to discern you from your competitors on social media. Additionally, they should know what your brand is as soon as they land on your social media pages. 

In conclusion, you want to ensure your social media page makes you recognizable at a small glance. 

A very simple way to do this is to have your company’s logo as your profile picture and a textmark as part of your social media banner. This will allow visitors to link the logo to your brand’s name. 

Make sure to keep your messaging concise and to the point. Ensure that you use a few words and that your pictures are clear. Always use high-resolution pictures for social media marketing.

If you’d like to add a link to your website or online store, make sure to shorten it through a URL shortener first. This will ensure that it does not get in the way of your brand’s personality, messaging, and content. 

To shorten your link through Pixelfy, register an account and log in. 

Step 1: You will be at the dashboard page once you log in. You can use the URL shortener box at the top of the page to shorten links to your landing pages and online stores.

Step 2: Copy the link you wish to shorten and paste it into the URL shortener box indicated in the screenshot below. 

Click the “Shorten” button to go to the next page. 

Step 3: On the next page, you’ll get the shortened URL that you can use with your social media accounts.

8. Make Use of Your Email List 

If you are a brand that has been around for a while but is just starting to focus on social media marketing, it can seem challenging. 

Too many business owners that are not well-versed in how most social media platforms work, can seem like they’re starting all over again.

However, you don’t have to worry because you can leverage the resources and leads you’ve gathered in the past to jump-start your social media journey. 

9. Study Your Competitors

We’ve always emphasized how you need to look at your competitors within the same niche to figure out how they’re doing things. 

Studying competitors can be a great way not only to find methods to perform effective marketing, it can also help you identify problems with their methods. As a result, you can improve on them and maybe do them better. 

This can help you gain an edge over them and stand out more with your social media accounts. 

Wrapping Things Up… 

A well-researched brand awareness strategy along with a strong social media presence can definitely be the key to building brand awareness. 

It can help you leverage trends to communicate your brand voice and develop a huge following through visual content. Brand awareness is something that will help your brand stay relevant for a long time. 

Hence, make sure that your social media content is engaging and that it’s shared in the most effective manner for the most engagement. 

If you have any more questions, please reach out to us in the comments below.