Optimize Social Media for Successful Brand Awareness Campaigns
Social media with its vast popularity, unlimited growth, and ease of access have become the latest trend. Social networking sites have indeed taken the world by storm. Gone are the days when televisions, radios, newspapers, and magazines were the primary sources of advertisement and in turn marketing a particular business. Now you can do all that and much more through social media websites. The opportunities are tremendous. You can not only initiate your business through social media but also attract people towards it, generate leads, turn these leads into your customers and also retain these customers over a long period of time.
Customer retention and bringing new people into your sales funnel are equally important. Both should be your priority if you want to leave a mark on the world with your business. However, before you think about retaining customers over the long-term, you need to carefully devise a strategy to successfully run a brand awareness campaign. This will help you widen your consumer base and is, in fact, the most fundamental step when it comes to business marketing. This is because it will not only bring new customers and increase your popularity by helping you gain an edge over your competitors, but it will help you establish yourself as a brand. Once you do that successfully, you can reap rewards and go from strength to strength. It all comes down to the brand name in the end.
Following are the steps that you should consider opting for if you want to run a successful brand awareness campaign through the efficient use of social media.
Pick and choose social media websites
The first step is to narrow down your focus. Obviously, it depends on your budget, your staff and the time available, but you need to pick the right channels for your business. The first question that you need to ask yourself is, “which social media website should I use?” The answer depends not only on your geographical location but also on the number of active users each particular social media platform has. Most businesses usually begin with Facebook since it has the largest number of users worldwide, but you also need to take into account your particular location. For instance, China does not use Facebook and so it wouldn’t be advisable for you to use Facebook for running your brand awareness campaign if your business lies in China. Thus, the bottom line is that you must do your research before you begin and you should not run campaigns on all social networking websites at the same time as it will divert your attention. It all comes down to the resources you have. Having an active presence on most social media platforms can help you raise awareness if you do it correctly.
Give your target audience what they want
The next step in your campaign should be to interact with your potential consumers. The clever thing to do here is to make people realize that they need the product or service that you are offering. This is a crucial step as you should not in any way act like you are selling or are eager to sell. Tune you prospective consumers in such a way that they feel like they need what you are selling. In other words, create the demand. The best way to do this is by sharing content which is informative, interesting, engaging and in line with your target audience. Share links to valuable content on your social media platforms. They must be updated according to the latest trends so that people can like, comment, and share or retweet it. This will initiate a cycle of awareness and the people will do it all for you. All you need to do is make sure you come up with content that people want and are looking for time and again.
Memes, polls, and contests are a great option to generate traffic, but it is the visual appeal through the use of photos and interesting videos which attract people the most. Consider that you run a business of music instruments and you are launching a new product; ukulele. Now the content that you post must also provide relevant ukulele info and should mention how to play ukulele. You can add interesting pictures along with videos to depict and explain further. Adding hashtags and promoting them can serve you well. Most importantly, it will help your business stand out which is exactly what brand awareness campaigns try to do.
Engage with people
Your best bet to turn people into your customers is by interacting with them. Posting content, pictures, and videos do that up to a certain limit but you need to take it to the next level. Ask for ways to improve, answer any questions that people might have and post good feedback that you receive. Reach out to as many people as you can and answer their queries as soon as possible in a way that leaves behind a lasting impact.
Advertise smartly
Paid social media advertising can help boost your sales and spread the word about your company. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram all provide you these opportunities. These paid adverts increase the number of clicks on your pages and generate traffic, which means that more people are likely to buy what you selling. There are different options according to various budgets that you can avail. These social networking sites use data analytics to feed people the advertisements that they are looking for and are most likely to buy from. Hence, it is an effective way to increase your consumer base.
Social media has the power to make or break your business. It minimizes advertising costs and is more effective as compared to previous methods of marketing which mean that it brings in more business. Hence, it is necessary that you optimize social media in order to successfully run brand awareness campaigns. Social media covers all basics. From a business point of view, you run your social media account or pages like your business websites. The better you do it, the more chances you have to survive in this brand conscious and developing world. Constantly look to improve and never settle for ordinary. Remember that whatever you are doing right now can be improved upon.
