Establishing brand awareness is crucial if you want to build a sustainable and growing business. It’s the all-important ingredient that helps you achieve your goals while developing a long-term business that’s able to grow, adapt and develop.
There are a variety of tools to help you achieve this, not least delivering a consistently high-quality service to your customers. One of these vital tools is social media. It’s no longer an optional extra for the vast majority of businesses. It’s a critical element of the marketing armoury.
Why is social media important for business?
Social media is deeply embedded in our lives. As a result, it’s an incredible tool when it comes to reaching people. Doing it right, however, can be challenging. If you get it wrong and people think it’s too much hard sell, it can be counterproductive. To better understand how you can use social media effectively it’s helpful to understand the reasons why it’s so effective.
Here are some of the key ways in which social media, when used well, helps to support brand awareness.
- It makes engagement easy Social media is so addictive because it encourages us to engage with each other. Brands can tap into this by producing content that encourages engagement. This can be through targeted ads, associated brand content, how-to guides or simply chatting and answering consumer questions.
- It makes promoting content easy If you create great content, social media can be a place to both host and promote that content. Whether it’s blog posts, new product launches or video content, social media is set up to promote your content through your network.
- It’s good to share Social media allows other people to share your content. Get it right, and your content could go viral. It can be particularly useful when you’re building a local profile. Often, people will be keen to support and promote any new venture locally, especially if it’s something that catches their attention.
What are the benefits of using social media?
Social media is hugely beneficial to businesses which is why even small to medium-sized businesses will frequently employ someone to take care of their social media presence. It’s easy to get started and ultimately doesn’t cost much. It can help you communicate and stay engaged with your target customers in a way that businesses in the past could only dream of.
Advertising and marketing have evolved from being a timetabled event into an ongoing and interactive process. Social media makes marketing more interactive, less linear and less one-sided.
Examples of business successes on social media
There are countless examples of businesses using social media to inform, spread and support brand awareness and it’s not just the big global brands that get it right. The beauty of social media is that it gives single person businesses the kind of consumer access that was once the preserve of businesses with vast marketing budgets.
Here are some examples of UK businesses who have got their social media right:
- Bloom & Wild Bloom & Wild the postal flower service has developed a strong social media presence through customer interaction, competitions, content sharing and seasonal content. And there’s nothing more seasonal and colourful than flowers.
- Not On The High Street Not On The High Street has gone from being an ambitious UK start-up to one of the UK’s leading online businesses. Social media has played a large part in their success. It has worked intelligently with its partners to share engaging customer reviews, has provided content that meets current online trends and has added a personal touch to everything it does.
- Com Tails.Com are a bespoke dog food delivery service that has taken something that might once have been considered niche and turned it into a successful growing business. It’s done this by using different social media platforms for different purposes and has produced lots of engaging content.
Why is social media great for brand awareness?
As the three examples above illustrate, social media can be a great way to create and support brand awareness. It’s unlikely that the people behind the social media strategies of those brands had a complete blueprint for success from the off. It’s more likely that they had some key goals, with the details of the strategy evolving over time.
It’s that ability to adapt and shape your approach through direct interaction with your consumers and through the information available from analytical tools that makes the difference.
Which social media platforms should you use?
Different social media platforms have different strengths and often attract contrasting audiences. Facebook has a slightly older audience than on other platforms which reflects the scale of its reach and versatility. Facebook is good for sharing video, written and photographic content all in one place. That doesn’t mean you should neglect some of the alternatives, particularly Twitter and Instagram, which both have their advantages. Twitter can be a great way to promote content and to answer questions. Instagram is great for when you want to humanise your business.
How to increase your brand awareness with social media
There’s no quick fix or single solution when it comes to getting the most out of your social media presence. That said, consistency is a crucial factor, as too is producing high-quality content. Ads and paid campaigns can all help you gain new followers and flag up what you’re doing, but perhaps more important is engagement. People like brands that talk to them and are accessible. While automation can fill in the gaps, brand awareness is best built via real human interaction across your platforms.
Dawn Creative can help you build brand awareness across social media. We know how to get the most out of different platforms and can tailor your approach to meet your goals.
Want to find out more? Call 0161 711 0910 or email wakeup@dawncreative.co.uk to get started.
