How To Build Your Brand Awareness With Social Media
When it comes to building awareness for your business or organisation, social media is your best friend! It’s an incredibly effective way to get in front of a large targeted audience with your content. But if you’re a little confused and don’t know what you should be doing, here are a few tips to get you started.
Why Brand Awareness Is Important
Generating revenue is almost always the most important thing you need to do, but you also need to be building your brand. The way you approach awareness vs generating revenue (or leads) is different.
Lead generation and sales campaigns are about direct-response advertising where you specifically ask customers to buy from you, whereas brand awareness is more about sharing your story and building an audience, even if you’re not explicitly selling/asking for something. Brand awareness is also fantastic because it:
Builds social proof
People naturally want to go where everyone else is going. If your audience is growing and you’re getting lots of engagement, it ‘validates’ your business (as opposed to cold advertising that hasn’t built a relationship, it’s just asking for customers to buy your product).
Establishes Credibility
Having a strong brand shows you’re a ‘legitimate’ cause, and can often make you look bigger than you are (which can help). We recently built a website for The Rangelands Restoration Trust. A high net worth individual saw the website, thought it looked great and invested a huge chunk to get it off the ground!
Lasting Results
Lead generation and sales are great, but once that campaign stops, the revenue usually stops too. By building brand awareness and a following, you’re creating a long-lasting reputation that stays in people’s minds and will bring in customers, followers and opportunities all year round.
How To Generate Income
Now… we’re not saying don’t run sales campaigns! You should definitely have those campaigns running as well, I’m just encouraging you to do both because it will enhance the results of each one. We’ve got some other blogs and resources specifically around that to help you out.
Objective
Okay let’s get stuck in… Awareness is all about getting new eyeballs. But whilst the aim is to reach as many as possible, there are two key things to point out:
You want to reach the right people (not just anyone).
Your content needs to be good (otherwise you’re just loud, but not relevant).
That means you need to have the right targeting and engaging content, otherwise you’ll waste money. Simply put, starting with a solid strategy is the difference between posting valuable content, and just posting for the sake of it. Don’t worry, that’s coming up in a moment!
Types Of Content
Most people have no idea what to share on social media. The irony is, they are doing really interesting stuff every day, but they think it’s boring because they do it all the time. But remember… you are not the audience, your customers are!
Rather than thinking about creating content, think about broadcasting what you’re already doing. If you can get this right, all the great stuff you do offline will be reflected online for thousands of people to see. Here are some ideas:
Stories
The ultimate content! We all love stories, whether it’s a positive story that leaves you feeling good, or a sad story that inspires you to take action. Who or what did you help this week? What are you working on? What was the last inspiring conversation you had? It’s happening all around you, you just need to capture it!
Before & Afters
Another thing we all love is a transformation. It’s technically also a story, but the visuals can be a bit different. You can show the before and after with a carousel; for example on the first photo shows the customer before they met you, and the second is after you helped them achieve a great result.
Statistics
Stats are a great one. They can be positive (e.g you’ve planted over 10,000 trees), or negative (e.g 8 million tonnes of plastic enters the ocean every year). I personally love statistics because they are easy to understand and paint a clear picture of something tangible you can appreciate the impact of.
Education
You can’t sell someone a solution if they don’t know there’s a problem. This is particularly relevant with charities — a lot of people would support your cause but they are uninformed. E.g people don’t realise the impact of single-use plastic, or that to get milk, cows have their calves taken away from them when they are born. Educate them on the problem, why it matters and what they can do about it.
Copy What Works
If you’re stuck for ideas, one of the best strategies is stalking the biggest players in your space. What content do they share? What ads do they run? What does their branding look like? Let them do the heavy lifting, and cherry-pick what’s already working (given your resources).
Content medium
Every social media strategy is different, so in terms of what medium you should use (e.g photos, videos, animations, blogs, infographics etc), just do whatever comes naturally to you (e.g if you don’t like writing, don’t write blogs!). That way, it will be easy for you to create. Whatever you do, try to make it as visually attention-grabbing as possible.
If you’re stuck for ideas, copy what’s already working.
Boosting Posts
Nailing your content is just one part of the recipe, but it’s no good if barely anyone sees it. Here’s how to get it out into the world:
Increasing Reach
Once you’ve created engaging content, you need more people to see it! Social media is very saturated these days, so even if you do have existing followers, only a small percentage of them are going to see it (meaning you can spend a lot of time creating great content, just to hear crickets).
Also, whilst you love your existing community, these people are already on board with you. We want to reach people who don’t already support you, to build your following. By using Facebook ads to ‘boost’ your posts, you can reach thousands of people who aren’t already following you, and you may even change someone’s mind about something important by educating them.
Target relevant Interests
Facebook ads are different to Google, because you’re putting content in front of someone who wasn’t actively searching for it (as opposed to Google where they are looking for something specific). So what you want to do is target relevant interests, so it will show your post to people who are similar to your fans.
You can also create Lookalike audiences, where you can upload your database and it will make an audience similar to your existing supporters. Perhaps a little creepy but super handy! (More on this soon).
How Much Do You Spend?
It really depends on how much you want to spend, but you can easily start with $5 a day. Let’s say you sponsor it for $5 a day for 7 days and see how much engagement it gets. Then you can do it all over again, constantly improving the content and getting more reach, likes, comments and shares!
Key Metrics
How do you know if your strategy is working? Track these…
Reach — how many individual people saw your brand
Impressions — how many times it was seen in total
CPM — how much it costs for 1000 eyeballs (lower the better)
Engagement Rate — what % of those people like/comment/share
No. of of new followers per month and the follower growth rate
Percentage of website traffic that comes from social media
Boost your posts so more people can see your content.
Time To implement
I want to give people as much value as a I can, so I’ve gone into a lot of detail in this blog. But even though I’m trying to help, there’s only so much you can cover in one blog and I know it can be overwhelming! If you want a hand implementing or you just have a question, feel free to reach out and I’d love to give you a hand (just click the button below). Either way, I wish you all the best and stay awesome!