Brand awareness plays a key role in enhancing your marketing strategies and improving results. It has become a major indicator of sustainable growth and market dominance that companies can no longer overlook or undervalue.
A well-thought-out brand awareness strategy can help you enhance your brand’s credibility and trust among your target audience. Let’s take a closer look at how you can leverage social media to reach your brand awareness goals.
Back to Basics: The Importance of Creating a Brand
At its core, branding involves your company’s reputation and how consumers perceive it. It’s a combination of all the things your company does to distinguish itself from competitors. Within this framework, brand awareness becomes essential, indicating how familiar audiences are with your brand’s identity and offerings. The strength of your brand identity influences the effectiveness of future marketing campaigns, directly contributing to their success.
But remember, brand awareness is more than the mere recognition of a logo. It’s an intricate blend of a company’s values, communication style, products or services, and the emotional impact it leaves on your audience.
Why You Should Care About Brand Awareness on Social Media
Here’s the thing – brand perception matters. It’s not just about how many people know your name but how they feel about your brand. You could have a huge crowd that recognizes you, but if they don’t like you, that crowd becomes meaningless. So, take this discovery phase as an opportunity to build a positive brand perception that aligns with your values and those of your target audience.
But where does social media come in? With over 55% of the global population using social media, its value lies in its ability to connect with new customers, especially for small businesses. It’s the avenue to reach and engage your target audience. By sharing valuable content, stories, and experiences, you can showcase your brand personality, values, and voice, and build trust and credibility with potential customers.
What You Need to Consider Before Getting Started
To utilize the potential of social media for brand awareness, you need a solid brand strategy – a blueprint that defines your brand identity, values, positioning, and how you communicate all of this to your audience.
Start by sharing relevant content regularly. Mix it up with carousels, reels, static posts, and stories to reach users at different stages of their journey. Another thing to consider is the time, money, and resources required to create and manage your social media accounts, so choosing the right channels is important to ensuring that your content effectively reaches the desired audience and that your resources are going to the right place.
Think about your goals, your audience’s preferences, your content types, and the resources you can allocate. Here’s a breakdown of when each of the major social media platforms works best:
- LinkedIn is the ideal space to enhance your brand’s reputation, establish it as an industry leader, and create meaningful connections with like-minded peers.
- Instagram is a great platform to focus on great visuals, creative designs, and live videos with a personal touch to directly engage followers.
- Pinterest is a one-stop shop for inspiration and discovering new products and ideas. It is the ideal platform for brands that resonate with travel, interior decor, fashion, lifestyle, or DIY.
- Facebook, being the world’s largest social media platform, is a great place to start posting evergreen content, connecting with your audience and creating a community.
- TikTok is an entertainment-first platform with vertical video feeds where users are accustomed to engaging content with a focus on lighthearted entertainment and comedy.
The Risk of Overlooking Brand Awareness in Your Marketing Strategy
Research proves that brand awareness is a potent factor in purchasing decisions. People tend to lean towards brands they know well, even if there are other options. Ignoring this critical phase puts you behind competitors who are actively building their brands on social media.
Attempting to skip this phase and diving straight into sales-oriented content is a recipe for failure. You’d be marketing to people who don’t know or trust your brand – a surefire way to lose potential customers.
How to Measure Brand Awareness
Measuring brand awareness isn’t always straightforward, but several tools and metrics can guide you.
- Reach and Impressions: Reach is about how many people saw your content, while impressions count all the times it was viewed.
- Engagement: This is how people interact with your content – likes, comments, shares, and more.
- Share of Voice: It compares your brand mentions to your competitors’, giving you an idea of your brand’s visibility.
- Social Listening: Keep tabs on how often your brand is mentioned, where, and whether it’s positive or negative.
Social listening tools can help you effectively track multiple social media platforms from a single dashboard. This allows you to monitor brand mentions, pertinent keywords, hashtags, and direct messages. Here are a few platforms providing social listening solutions:
We suggest thoroughly reviewing the product and pricing pages of any tool you intend to integrate into your team. And feel free to explore multiple social media tracking tools. This will help you identify the tool that best aligns with your objectives. Ready to get started on your brand awareness journey through social media? Glacier Media Digital can help! Get in touch to learn how we can create an impactful brand awareness strategy for your business.