Aside from the profound impact it has had on personal interactions, social media has also revolutionized the modern marketing industry.
From building email lists to generating direct sales, social media is one of the most effective marketing tools that businesses have at their disposal today. One of the areas in which social media offers the greatest opportunity is building brand awareness for new and growing businesses.
Here are four of the top tips you should know for using social media marketing to make clients or consumers more aware of your business.
Provide Real Value
One of the most common mistakes that new marketers make with social media is treating it like a traditional advertising platform. In order to resonate with digital consumers today, your social media profiles need to not only convey information about your brand, but also provide some value to followers in the process.
For example, you can create short videos for Facebook or use Twitter to post links to helpful articles on your blog. The more valuable content you provide the people who follow you on social media, the more you'll be able to expand that following and drive both brand awareness and conversions.
Target a Specific Audience
Perhaps the best thing about social media marketing is that ads run on social media sites allow you to reach a very specifically targeted audience. The problem, however, is that some business owners don't take full advantage of this capability, instead choosing to distribute their ads to a very broad audience.
If you want to see more return on your marketing investment, you should carefully consider the attributes and interests of your ideal audience in advance. Then, use the targeting capabilities of social media to be sure your boosted posts and ads reach that audience.
Dig Deep into Analytics
At the end of the day, social media marketing is a numbers game. In order to see how well your campaigns are really doing and what kind of ROI they're producing, you need to dig into the data they produce.
You can do some basic analysis using the data provided to you by the social media sites themselves, but most marketers opt to use a marketing analytics dashboard for more in-depth insights into their campaigns. Try to find the activities that are producing the best results and ROIs and focus more heavily on them. You should also continuously test out new strategies to find new opportunities to reach potential customers.
Diversify Across Platforms
Among the best things you can do to increase brand awareness through social media is to promote your brand on multiple platforms. Because of its ease and popularity, many businesses start out marketing on Facebook.
As time goes on, though, you should try to move onto Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, Snapchat and even LinkedIn. One of your central platforms should also be Instagram, which has become a surprisingly popular and profitable site for social media marketing. Each of these platforms will have different content formats and ways of engaging with followers.
Spend some time getting to know each platform before starting to seriously use it for your business, and you'll find it much easier to get started. If marketing across so many different platforms becomes too time-consuming or difficult for you, you can also consider putting together a professional social media marketing team.
Building brand awareness with social media is one of the most critical elements of marketing today. Whether your business is a brand-new startup or an older business that is taking advantage of digital marketing for the first time, social media can help you reach more of your potential customers.
