Brand awareness is a cornerstone of your entire business presence in consumers’ minds. Without it, you can’t really distinguish yourself from any one of your competitors as a distinct and separate player in your industry niche. Because of its crucial importance, brand awareness is one of your biggest assets when it comes to marketing and developing it effectively is guaranteed to give you a high ROI that works for the long term.
As for building this important marketing tool, well, you have more digital tools available for the job today than have ever before existed in the history of business and branding, most of these, at least the most effective ones are going to be digital and socially related. Going a step beyond the usual helpers such as online ad campaigns, the social tools we’re about to discuss are powerful building blogs for the kind of brand presence that delivers genuine long term fans that can sustain your business for a long time.
Let’s get down to some details.
Start Using the Right Social Channels
There are numerous social channels available to your average online entrepreneur. All of the major social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Linked in are just some of them. We can also add to these tools such as YouTube, Instagram, Foursquare, Tumblr and numerous other small niche social platforms.
With so many options, it’s easy to get confused about what you should take advantage of, and this is the key first decision you need to make: which social tools to invest your valuable time in.
The obvious answer is to see what would work best for both your niche and your target audience. If your business is geared to a teenage female crowd, you’re most likely going to move in favor of YouTube, Facebook or even Instagram than more mature audience oriented tools like LinkedIn or a niche professional social network.
Study your target market and find out what sort of social tool they use most heavily; base your involvement on what you discover.
Offer Options to your Followers and Visitors
While you don’t want to over stretch yourself and make use of every social media tool under the sun just because it exists, you also don’t want to overly limit the options available to your visitors. Even with a fairly narrowly defined target audience, you’ll have an assortment of different social media preferences amongst your fans. Thus, cater to this by offering at least enough social channel options to cover a decent majority of your readers.
You can easily implement this by making sure that any platform on which you’re demonstrating the value and usefulness of your brand (website, online photo blog, YouTube channel, etc.) has been configured to allow easy, quick sharing of its content through the social media channels most commonly used by most of your audience.
Interconnect your Social Channels
We’ve just gone over how you should make it as easy as possible for your visitors and customers to connect what they like from your branding efforts to their favorite social media outlets. Now we stress the importance of also interconnecting your own social accounts as conveniently as possible so that every one of them draws its visitors to the others in a way that creates a much larger, more robust overall brand image through everything you use to represent yourself online.
What we mean is that, if you’re posting informative content, infographics or promotions to your Facebook account, make sure they also get mirrored throughout your Twitter feed while also giving accessibility back to your actual website through both of these platforms.
Additionally, you can have different components of your branding separated based on the social channel that works best for them but all connecting to each other as complimentary components of an overall image. Thus, for example: your Facebook account can be used to repost blog content from your business website, while all of the images you use also link back to a large Instagram photo branding campaign.
Interact with Social Media Followers
Most importantly of all, be sure to interact with all of the brand fans you cultivate across your interconnected, targeted social media presence. Unlike a typical website + advertising platform, social media is built to be much more personal in nature. This means watching over your channels and network accounts for questions, complaints or compliments and responding to all of them in a way that showcases not only your expertise but also your accessibility.
This accessibility to potential clients will alone do a lot to separate you from a more average competitor who doesn’t deal with followers or customers on a one-on-one basis
Managing it All
If this entire strategy of social channel cross mixing seems like it could get confusing, there are multi-channel management tools that let you interlink and control your entire social media presence from a single interface. Hootsuite is one particularly powerful and well used example of this kind of tool.
