Creating and Maintaining a Social Media Branding Strategy

Social media is one of the most potent weapons in a marketer's arsenal when building brand awareness to stand out from the crowd.

If you can do social media branding right, you can connect to your target audience and remain relevant to them even if they aren't planning a purchase.

Nowadays, social media marketing should be an integral part of any successful business's marketing efforts. It involves reaching out to your prospects on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.

To be successful in your social media branding campaign, you'll need to consistently utilize the correct methods of engaging your target audience to boost brand awareness.

Brand strategy services can enable you to build a strong network of loyal customers. These customers will not only be consistently returning to buy more products for you, but they will also be happy to advocate for you in front of their friends and family.

What Should Be the Primary Goals of Your Social Media Campaign?

Any business looking to generate long-term business must work on branding. This aspect of a company's marketing is about defining what your business stands for, thereby attracting like-minded prospects and turning them into long-term customers.

Even well-established companies must continue working on their branding at all times, but it is especially important for up-and-coming businesses. Starting the relationship with your customers on the right foot is crucial.

Social media branding enables you to showcase your products or services to the most relevant audience and lets you give them a reason to care about your business. If you can do this part right, you'll make the rest of the sales process a lot easier for yourself.

With a great social media branding strategy in place, you'll see measurable results not only in brand exposure but customer retention as well, which all leads to stronger customer relationships, more conversions, and higher profits.

4 Critical Aspects of a Successful Social Media Branding Strategy

If you want to improve your social media branding strategy, there are four crucial areas that you need to work on. Let's check them out.

1. Brand Identity

To find success with any kind of marketing, social media branding included, you need to know your business's strengths and weaknesses. You need to understand what defines your brand and what differentiates you from the competition.

What are you seeking to achieve (aside from making a profit)? Who are the people you're trying to attract and impress? What sort of impact would you like to have on your community and the world, and what kind of legacy would you like your company to leave behind?

These are all questions that can help you make your brand identity clear. The more you understand your own goals and ambitions, the easier it will be to broadcast the right message in your marketing efforts.

2. Target Audience

Knowing your target audience like the back of your hand is a huge part of social media branding. It lets you have a tailored approach to your branding efforts rather than shooting blind. Helping your customers is all about trying to figure out their needs, wants and problems.

There are some questions that you should ask yourself to be able to better identify your target demographic. For example:

- What age group does the majority of your prospects belong to?
- What are their interests and hobbies?
- How much disposable income do they have?

3. Content

Social media content will shape your audience's perception of your brand, so it is crucial that you share the right type and quality of content. If anything has the power to make or break your entire social media branding campaign, it is your content.

Sharing social media posts on all platforms should be approached with the same level of focus and effort. For example, if you decide to run a YouTube channel, make sure to post high-quality videos regularly. If you only post one video a year, and its production value is lacking, all your efforts on other social networks might be undermined.

The unfortunate reality of social media growth is that there's a lot of competition. Because social media is so easy to use for marketing purposes, everyone and their brother is trying to promote their products and services this way.

One way to push past this and stand out within a sea of content is to have a specific approach to each social media platform. Hiring a social media marketing specialist should help you get a clearer idea of what type of content to post on each social network.

4. Aesthetic Appeal

The typography, color palette, and overall look of your feed play a considerable role in how your brand is perceived on social media. This is why you can't afford to ignore the connection between your social media branding strategy with your visual identity.

A picture is worth a thousand words, and our brains process visual data up to 60,000 times faster than text. If you want to build brand awareness fast, you need to make your posts look great.

4 Myths About Social Media Branding That You Should Not Buy Into

As a business owner, you obviously want to get the best results from your social media branding efforts. However, to achieve that, you don't only need to understand what to do, but, perhaps even more crucially, what not to do.

You must make sure that you're looking at social media marketing through an objective lens. In other words, you should not give the following four myths too much thought.

Myth #1 -- Social Media Will Bring You Success Overnight

Many social media marketers are focused on the wrong things. They want their content to go viral at any cost and believe that if they can get one post or one video in front of millions of eyeballs, they would never need to work again.

They want their brand to be seen by many people in as little time as possible, believing that this is the secret to success.

There's nothing wrong with becoming a viral sensation, but it is almost impossible to force this type of scenario. You could potentially waste hundreds of hours and lots of resources trying to achieve success like this.

You are much better off trying to build a strong relationship with your target audience over time. Slow and steady wins the race.

Myth #2 -- You Must Use Every Social Media Platform in Existence

Like most things in life, success on social media begins with focus. If you focus on the wrong things, you might end up not reaching the right audience, or you might send the wrong message.

As much as you'd like to be able to reach every person in the world, in reality, you only have a limited amount of time to spend on social media branding. You need to make sure that this time is used wisely if you want to get a return on your investment.

Being active on every social network out there can work against you because, as we mentioned above, each network has a different set of users and requires a different approach.

Direct your brand-building efforts to the right audience, and don't spread yourself too thin.

Myth #3 -- Your Social Media Branding Strategy Isn't Successful if You Don't Have Hundreds of Thousands of Followers

Having a vast social media presence has its perks, but it isn't always necessary. Your social media marketing goals should always focus on leveraging these networks to build a more robust relationship with your prospects and customers.

As we already said, your brand's popularity is unlikely to skyrocket overnight, so there's no use focusing on your follower count and other vanity metrics. Instead, try to create an engaged and dedicated following.

It is much better to have a laser-focused small audience that follows your content religiously than to have millions of followers who don't care about what you have to say.

Myth #4 -- You Can Set and Forget Your Social Media Branding Strategy

Another unfortunate truth about social media marketing is that it is never done. Since your social media activity directly affects people's perception of your brand, you must remain active at all times.

Remember, you want to be known as an authority and an influencer in your niche. If you keep thinking about the changes you could apply to your strategy and keep moving with the times, you're bound to have prospects reacting to your social media posts.

Also, you need to interact with your social media followers. This doesn't take a lot of effort; you only need to respond to a few comments here and there, but it can make a loyal customer's day.

Closing Thoughts

No matter what type of business you're running, your customers are likely interested in your brand's personality almost as much as in your products and services. This is why we often see brand loyalty and people willing to keep buying from the same store even when there are better deals elsewhere.

While you should still definitely try to offer the best deal possible, maintaining a positive relationship with your customers should be high on your list of priorities.

Social media is an excellent tool to take your relationship with your customers to the next level, and it is used by small and big brands the world over, including your competition. So, don't let yourself be left behind, and get to work on your social media branding strategy.

This guest article was written by Tomas McKennie, a digital marketing specialist and a freelance blogger. He is focused on new web tech trends and digital voice distribution across different channels.In his spare time, he writes a lot about new business strategies and digital marketing trends for DigitalStrategyOne.