With the ever-changing uncertainties we live by these days, brands are finally seeing the aggressive need in building their online presence. A solid foundation on your brands’ social presence naturally helps in increasing awareness of your products/services. In which it hopefully turns at least 10% of your audiences into converted customers.
The sales funnel runs on several levels before an audience converts into a customer. Building on your social media presence helps to seep through the different stages of the sales funnel – so if you haven’t started, it’s good to start now!
Mind you, already running social pages and building a social media presence are two separate efforts. Hence, this article is written to guide you through the different ways of building a strong social media presence for your brand.
1) Being active on relevant social media platforms
Facebook & Instagram
As of January 2021, it’s known that Facebook and Instagram are still taking the lead as the top social media platforms used by marketers.
(Statistics Graph by Statista)
With its dense popularity amongst brands and individuals across the market, ensuring content quality and relevance now takes precedence over how often you post. With that said, the minimum number of contents produced per month should not fall below 4 per platform.
“But if presence needs to be built, shouldn’t I be posting more often to make more of my presence known?”
Well, you’re not entirely wrong but think about that again from a consumer point of view. Would you prefer to have a brand pop up on your feed every now and then with content that speaks to you, or one that posts every other day with mediocre value? It’s time to go easy on the post schedule if you don’t really have anything new or valuable to post about. In all honesty, nobody really cares about the promotion you’ve been pushing for since the start of 2021 if you haven’t been gaining much traction from it.
Instead, focus on pushing out relatable topics and valuable information, and use the rest of the marketing efforts to run Facebook/Instagram Advertising Campaigns instead. This ensures that you’ll not only be able to reach your current audiences, but also have the opportunity to reach out to a new pool of targetted audiences in hopes of converting them to loyal fans of your brand.
Do also make full use of the potential that Instagram and Facebook Stories have in helping you grow your social media presence. Explore every single function they have and test the different ways that could help you to engage with your audiences best.
One of the most important factors in making your presence known is for the other party to know that they are being seen and heard by you. Apply that to the context of your brand online and communicate with your fans as a personality rather than a brand. Remember that you’re dealing with humans, and the best way to go about doing that is to cultivate your marketing efforts as much as possible.
Known as the platform to connect with professional individuals, LinkedIn is the place to be if you’re looking to connect with consumers who are looking to build on their professional skills, circle, and knowledge.
Promotions and product placements/features content are most likely not going to be as effective in building your social presence on LinkedIn (unless you’re selling a workshop). Instead, focus on pushing out content that provides tips in relevance to your brand.
Users on LinkedIn are seeking more content that would help build their professional and career skills. Hence, even a simple repost of a relevant and informational article, or commenting on someone else’s post providing bite-sized tips will do just the job for a potential target audience to notice you.
YouTube
The platform most suitable for long-form content, YouTube is not as necessary for all brands to tap on as compared to Facebook and Instagram.
However, it still does help as an added “accessory” to build on your social media presence. So only jump on YouTube if you are certain that you have enough extended valuable information to provide to your audiences on a constant basis. Take note that the content you’re pushing out should always lead back to allowing your viewers to find out more about your product/service.
With that said, if you do have enough time and content ideas to spare – YouTube does help in further increasing your brands’ social media presence and awareness while reaching to a whole new pool of audiences who enjoy digesting content in a different way.
The opposite of YouTube, Twitter is the place to be if you have constant short updates. The perfect platform to make your daily presence known to audiences, Twitter works best for brands that don’t take themselves too seriously on that platform.
TikTok
The new Facebook for Gen Zs, TikTok is the social platform to be on if your main target audiences are kids and young adults aged 50 years old and below. Just kidding – but honestly, TikTok is the perfect platform to get away with growing your social media presence in a completely different brand voice.
Known to be a professional brand? TikTok’s the place to be if you want to test and see if your target audiences enjoy light-hearted content instead. It could even earn you a new group of target audiences (the digital savvy Gen Zs) that you never knew would be interested in your brand.
Blog pages
The pioneer amongst all the social platforms, Influencers were known as Bloggers 10 to 15 years ago. A blog page is generally the worded content version of a video content.
Pushing out articles is more of a good-to-have, rather than a necessity for most brands. Similarly to YouTube, focus on it only if you have ample time to spare as these social platforms take up more time.
If your brand is generally focusing on long-form and informative content, then jumping on pushing out articles would be beneficial for your social presence. It not only helps reminding your audiences that your brand exists, but it also helps to increase your brands’ credibility through the information and knowledge of the subject provided to them, in relevance to the service or product you sell.
2) Constantly promoting Brand online
Creating contents out of Content Pillars
The first and most important step to increase your brand presence and increase awareness is to start pushing out content. Work on a content schedule each month, plan out the dates for each content post, and follow it religiously.
Not too sure what to market in relevance to your brand? Start brainstorming on the different contents you’d like to see as a consumer! Put yourself in their shoes, and start jotting down the content you would personally engage with.
Once you’re done with that, work on grouping the content ideas under the different content categories (mainly known as content pillars in the social media marketing world). Use these content pillars in the future as a reference on what to push out each month, and have them scheduled down onto a Social Media Calendar.
Ready to organise your content ideas even more? Read our other article to find out the 7 Steps To Creating A Social Media Calendar!
Ultimately, remember that if it’s something you won’t be intrigued to find out more as someone who is part of the brand, your audiences would probably not be impressed as well.
Advertising Campaign
Another method in which brands usually try to avoid is to tap on Advertising Campaigns. It’s normal to shun away from spending more money than they already are, but avoiding a cost-effective method is just a waste of effort altogether.
Many brands still have not come to realise that pushing out advertising campaigns is as important as pushing out content on their social platforms.
Solely focusing their time, effort, and money on pushing out more content alone is as good as focusing on exercising to lose weight without the change of diet. Not that it wouldn’t work, but it just takes a far longer process in comparison to working out and going on a diet at the same time! Eventually, you’d either lose the momentum or get sick of the “routine” and give up.
Perhaps advertising campaigns might seem like you’d have to fork up a lot more money than the usual, but a mere $5 – $10 a day might just make that slight difference in raising your brand awareness and presence.
The main purpose of pushing out advertising campaigns is not only to reach out to your current audiences, but to also help you gain new ones. So skip that Starbucks latte for a week and you’ll be able to save yourself some advertising budget to spare!
Hopping on trends in relevance with branding
A Brands’ main goal for its social efforts should be focused on creating a community, rather than being seen as a professional service provider or product seller.
Consumers want to be seen and heard, and a brand has to work towards being constantly relevant to their lifestyle to make them feel so. But by doing what? By jumping on trends, while making the context of the content relevant to the brand!
Regularly pushing out 101 way in which your product/service can make your consumers’ lives better will not work in the long run.
3) Collaborating with other brands with a strong online presence
Collaborative campaign is not anything new, but it’s something that brands are not leveraging on enough.
Some may see it as a competition, but I’m not encouraging you to collaborate with your direct competitors. Find a complimenting brand to leverage on while they leverage on yours, and it will be a win-win situation for both parties!
The key factor in this collaboration to take note of, is to work with complimenting brands to your company that already has a STRONG online presence.
This not only supports you in raising your brand awareness and presence to your current followers, but it also helps in reaching out to a new group of audiences from their end.
Collaborating with another brand (with an already strong social media presence!) also helps in raising the credibility of your company. So honestly, there’s no harm in trying this approach.
CONCLUSION
As we know it, marketing is not an easy task. It takes a day-to-day effort in building up your social media awareness and presence. To which, this can be easily destroyed by one mistake or a sudden lack in the strategic approach.
However, the best way (or only way in fact!) for businesses to survive in this pandemic is to grow their social presence in hopes of increasing their awareness and conversions.
So if you haven’t found the time or will to start yet, I hope reading this far has given you the motivation to start today.
Need some advice to kick start? Feel free to reach out to us at hello@plexxie.com