Having trouble growing your brand? Struggling to get visitors to your website?
Perhaps you need to reassess your social media marketing strategy. With a few tweaks, you can drive serious traffic to your site.
Regardless of what your company does, you can harness the immense potential of social media marketing to build a loyal following of people who are genuinely interested in your brand, and the content, products and services you provide.
What business wouldn’t want that?
The trick is knowing just how to harness social media for better branding.
4 Vital Aspects of a Killer Social Media Marketing Strategy
There was a time when you could just publish a link to your WordPress blog on Facebook and then watch as the masses flooded to your site.
Unfortunately, it’s a different story today.
Here’s some interesting pub ammo:
- Most people are exposed to around 4,000 to 10,000 brand messages per day.
- Organic reach on Facebook is as low as 2%, forcing many marketers to opt for paid advertising.
- The average attention span of online readers is allegedly about 8 seconds – shorter than that of a goldfish.
All that to say, it’s going to be tough.
But before you give up all hope, know this:
While almost every niche is packed with competition, there are also tonnes of opportunities.
Why?
Because most companies are doing social media branding all wrong.
Let’s learn how to be a unicorn in a sea of donkeys.
1. Develop a Unique Brand Voice
A critically important part of successful branding is the development of a unique brand voice.
Before you can do that, you must get to know your audience.
Get started by creating audience personas that give you a clear picture of your ideal reader or customer. These will serve as a guide to craft your brand voice around.
Experiment with various elements of your content until you find the voice that works:
Writing style – Are you strait-laced or will you be warm and friendly? Will you use slang?
Humor – will you include jokes or puns? Will your brand be sarcastic or surreal?
Images – Graphs and charts? Inspirational quotes? Are memes a good fit for your company? What about emojis?
Whatever way you decide to go, make sure that your brand voice is relatable and humanized. It is essential that your brand voice resonates with your audience.
2. Maintain a Regular Posting Schedule
If your social media branding strategy consists solely of sporadic Instagram posts after you’ve had a few beers, then you need to go back to the drawing board.
Nobody will remember you if you only appear in their feeds once in a blue moon.
To really gain traction, you must develop a regular posting schedule.
Consider your audience and decide which platform will work best for your brand. It’s best to focus on one platform and give it your all, rather than spreading yourself over too many platforms with tame efforts.
Use a scheduling program like Sprout Social to automate your social media activity days or weeks in advance. That way you’ll maintain the consistent flow of content needed to make inroads.
By testing out different posting times, you can view the analytics in social media insights to assess engagement on your posts. Soon enough, you’ll figure out the optimum frequency and best times to post.
3. Get Visual
If you want to get anywhere today, you can’t rely on incredible wordplay alone. Not even if your name is G.R.R. Martin.
The rise of visual platforms like Instagram and Pinterest has made the world fall in love with visual content. People want to look at great photos and snazzy infographics.
BuzzSumo research indicates that articles with an image every 75-100 words received twice as many social shares than articles with less images. Adding even one or two great images can give your content the extra zest it needs to hook more eyeballs.
Determine what type of visuals aligns with your social media branding strategy and make sure everything is consistent.
Perhaps your graphics guru can come up with some slick templates for your images, adding signature logos, filters and fonts.
Ideally, in time people will spot an image or graphic from your company on any platform and immediately associate it with your brand.
4. Leverage Social Media Influencers
Today, many social media platforms are transitioning into fully-fledged advertising machines.
Facebook has a huge emphasis on paid advertising now, and since buying Instagram, more companies have jumped on the trend of visual marketing.
Many believe that organic reach is practically dead, and paid advertising is the best way to reach your audience on social media now.
But there is another way.
You can find influencers to amplify your content.
These are people in your niche who are aligned with your brand goals and company ideals. Most importantly, they must have a sizeable following on their social channels.
By teaming up with these influencers, you can leverage their reputation to increase your own brand awareness.
People can relate to these influencers more than big brands. They feel like they have a connection with them, and so your brand can use influencer marketing to gain credibility.
Mercedes-Benz used two influencers to tap into different markets in 2017, running successful campaigns on Instagram and YouTube that generated over 170 million impressions and over 2.3 million likes and comments.
Not only does this spread brand awareness, but it also earns your company valuable social proof.
This counts for a lot.
When an influencer advocates a brand and the products, a lot of people will listen.
So, how do you go about it?
First, you’ll need to nurture a relationship with key influencers.
Start out by tagging them in your social media posts, and commenting on their content. Over time, you can reach out in email, building the connection before suggesting a joint-venture.
Monitor, Engage, Adjust
Social media marketing is never a ‘set and forget’ task.
Keep an eye on your analytics, and continually adjust your strategy, voice and visuals until you find the sweet spot.
Once your brand takes shape, you have to nurture it.
You must remain active. You must engage with your followers, replying to them when they interact with your posts.
Stay consistent, stay persistent, and eventually the crowds will come.
