At present, with high digital penetration throughout the society, most people have at least some kind of social media presence. This presents the brands with an opportunity of making themselves seen throughout every demographic. However, the type of media channel where a person can be found, depends upon his or her social profile.
As Brand Awareness is the primary requirement of any business entity to succeed in business, this is a high priority task for brands. So do not shy away from finding out how the rest of the brands are trying to achieve it in the best possible ways. Though almost all the companies are aware of this opportunity and has dived in to explore it, the task at hand is trickier than what it seems on the surface. Here are 10 simple ways that can assist in your efforts to push your brand to the top of the mind space of your target audience.
1. Assign a personality to your social presence
Every individual is unique. So is every brand. It is essential to showcase the individual traits to distinguish your brand from the rest. Just following the steps to create a few social media posts by posting a picture or link and tag a few hashtags with it does not serve your purpose. You need to maintain a uniform appeal throughout your posts to establish your distinct identity. That will be the essence of your brand personality.
Image courtesy: Geek.com
As for instance, the above post is an invitation to create a personal museum with the dinosaur’s fossil models of a popular toy brand. The organization is an information site about technology and resembles the genre it represents from every perspective like approach, design, language and presentation. Such distinctions are great ways to establish your brand personality in your target audience’s mind.
2. Match physical features with virtual representations
We are inclined to glamorize our virtual presence more than our actual physical attributes. This is because there are ample opportunities at our disposal to showcase us in a better manner. And we simply love to see ourselves in a better light. However, whether it's a personal representation or a brand representation, if there are wide gaps in the physical version versus the virtual one, people fail to find the connection between the two. This hurts the very basis of creating the brand identity as people find it difficult to identify the brand in its image perception. So it is essential to maintain a balance between the actual brand with its created perception in the virtual world.
Another point to remember while creating your digital footprints is that people’s attention span is minimal in the digital domain, so you have only a small window to leave your impact.
3. Connect with relevant audience with hashtags
Digital domain is a great arena to get discovered. The way a brand looks for their matching audience, people also search for their desired brands. So assigning appropriate hashtags with your posts enables the matching audience to take note of your brand. Increase your visibility to your target audience with relevant hashtags.
Sometimes, creating your own hashtag might prove to be an intelligent move from a brand awareness perspective. Even smaller local brands can use their personal branded hashtags like established brands. After all, it’s all about reaching out with your identity and empowering others to engage with you. Spread out your reach to be accessible for others as much as possible, and hashtags are a great way to do that.
4. Engaging with others proactively
People receive real-time notifications for their social media activity. Posting creative or thoughtful comments goes a long way for brands way in showcasing their personality. It is quite an opportunity to show off your brand personality to potential audience, and to create meaningful interactions and forming new connections.
5. Adapt your content to the social platforms
It’s important to re-purpose your content to fit in with the best practices of each platform. After all, what works best on Instagram might not be ideal for let's say, Facebook or Twitter.
For example, let’s say, you publish posts for an interesting food show. Rather than posting a mere photo-shoot, taking the time to package it into a food lovers corner with enticing captions is a surefire way to score shares and links alike on Instagram. While on Twitter, you'll need to be very precise with your post copy owing to the nature of the platform.
You may use alluring images for its Instagram page, you may add descriptions of the dishes and their specialty for Facebook, you can add recipes of the dishes by the organizers with expert comment from celebrity chefs for LinkedIn and you can add video and visitors’ comment on Twitter.
6. Announce news related to your brand
You are interested to inform the world about your achievements and activities. Who can do it better than you?
Use your social media channels to update the world about your professional news. With a proper tone about your messaging with a refreshing enthusiasm and thankful note that connects with your audience, these announcements go a long way in engaging your target audience with you.
7. Participate in discussions that relate to your industry
Whether you realize it or not, your opinions about the industry you are associated with counts for something. If your company is carrying out any original research, it can be a significant authority enhancer for your brand. This is a major contribution towards your brand awareness growth.
Even if it is not possible for you to carry out an original research, there is no need to feel left out.
You can always comment on your industry trends and happenings from your perspective in the on-going discussions on various social media platforms. The point to be noted here is that you should be actively participating in the ongoing conversations and objective discussions of your industry rather than just reacting by clicking them. You can't just pretend your way into Social Media.
8. Be consistent in your social presence
Being active on your social media is your choice. But once you have decided to have a social media presence, you can not afford to be inactive or inconsistent on your social media accounts. That gives your digital persona a poor reputation.
Your brand image will suffer on social media if you don’t post consistently. To start with, nobody has the reason to look out for your posts. It is your prerogative to draw the attention of the social media traffic towards your post. Even when people are not exactly going through your posts, they are aware of your name in case they are coming across it regularly on social media.
There are certain suitable times to post on social media. Take benefit of this knowledge.
Brands are expected to push content out, multiple times per day across multiple networks to gain maximum chances to be seen.
There are useful tools that help in posting your content conveniently and smoothly. You save tons of time and hassle by scheduling your upcoming posts. There are a number of tools such as Hootsuite, Buffer, CoSchedule and Everypost etc. that help you save time and make the process of consistently showing up on social media much easier.
9. Use intriguing captions
Social captions are vital in arresting the attention of your audience. A striking social caption contributes in your brand’s voice.
You will notice every major brand or influencer add a commentary with every post they publish. This is to get their audience engaged with the post by introducing briefly about the content. Captions can get people interested and encourage engagement, giving insight about the taste and substance of the content to readers before they click through.
As seen by the stock of creative Instagram hashtags and captions, it is well-known that creativity counts, a lot. Be it by the means of emojis or adding humor, captions are primary way for connecting with followers and letting them identify with your actual self.
10. Content curation
To engage your audience on a regular basis, you have to provide something of value so that they keep coming back to you. The value need not always be in the form of discount coupons, free subscriptions or free passes etc. They can be even in the form of useful information, data or knowledge that educates them in better understanding of a certain topic. Content curation helps greatly with that objective.
Content Curation is the practice of discovering, gathering, and distributing digital content that touches specific subject matter.
Content curation is now an active method of marketing for many companies with a successful online presence.
Content curation does not necessarily require generating original content, instead it requires aggregating content from a variety of sources, and delivering it in an organized fashion. So a content curator is not essentially responsible for creating new content, but instead, for finding relevant content pertaining to a particular category and channelizing this information to readers in a mash-up style.
Educational and “how-to” content is regularly sought after on just about every social network. Posting such content on a regular basis helps you to be identified both as a positive resource and a thought leader. This is a huge advantage in pushing your brand awareness.
Following what we discussed in this article, will prepare you towards becoming a brand that sticks out in the minds of your audience.
Get started with your Social Media Content Development with The Rolling Circle
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