Building your brand is essential for any business. A strong brand is a primary driver in being able to charge more for your products or services; who wouldn’t want that!
Granted, for start-ups leads and sales are the primary objective, but it always pays to have one eye on the future, especially when you consider the positive impact even small price increases can have on your bottom line.
As your business grows, the value of your brand becomes more important. Brand building is all about building awareness, being instantly recognisable, and having a clear position on what your offering is. If you become one the top brands in your category, you can charge a premium, attract the best talent, and benefit from a whole range of benefits (check out the book How Brands Grow for more on this).
Some of the best ways to build your brand are through mass media channels like TV, radio and print. For small businesses, these channels aren’t always accessible.
Here’s where social media comes in. With algorithms focusing more and more on content distribution and discoverability, social media platforms are a great way to get your name out there and to start building associations with your business.
In this post, we give a quick start guide to building your brand on social media platforms.
We’re working on the assumption that you already have a clear idea of the following:
- Your market and know who you are targeting.
- How you are positioning your brand to your target audience.
- You have defined SMART objectives that support brand growth. Achieving one of your objectives involves building your brand on social media.
So with that said, let’s get stuck into our 7 top tips for successful brand building on social media.
1. Paid social media ads for brand building
To build your brand on social platforms, you want to reach as many new potential customers as possible. The obvious place to start is with posting organic content. A vibrant channel with regular updates is essential. And you can probably post more than you think here.
Social media is moving more and more towards attention and discoverability over community and followers. Just think how you scroll through videos on your favourite platform.
Additionally, most buyers of your products will be infrequent or “light” buyers.
These aren’t the people who will follow your pages and potentially see your organic content.
So with a good cadence of organic content being published to your key platforms, what’s next to help grow your brand on social media?
The answer here is paid adverts.
If you’re organic social is the fire, paid ads are the fuel for this. The best approach here is to take your top-performing organic content and use this for your paid social. It’s proven creative, and you know the message witll resonate, so you;re not wasting money on the testing stage of ads.
Budget needed to advertise on social media will be led by your objectives. However, even SME’s with comparatively small budgets can get excellent brand-building success by advertising on social media. Think a couple of hundred pounds a month; especially if you’re starting with your top-performing organic content.
2. Don’t target too precisely
With so many options and criteria for targeting within each social media platform, it’s tempting to get too granular. However, when looking to build brand awareness, you want to get your ad in front of as many people as possible.
Your ad targeting will be led by your overarching marketing strategy.
We recommend you apply just enough targeting filters to match the segment you are targeting and go no further.
When it comes to brand building, spillover (reaching people outside of your target segment) is a good thing.
Budget permitting, you could also just set your criteria to match the whole market you sell to.
The time to get more granular with your targeting is when you are running direct response ads that are focused on getting as many sales as possible.
An ideal campaign will have broad awareness ads running the same time as targeted direct-response ads.
3. Bold creative builds brands
When it comes to brand building, you want to aim for big bold ideas that are going to capture people’s attention. And hopefully elicit some form of emotional response.
This is where your positioning comes into play.
Your positioning will outline the things you want to be famous for in the minds of your customers.
Your ads are the vehicle for delivering this.
4. Start with video
Video always performs well on social media.
It’s also an excellent media choice for social media brand building advertising.
Creating one strongly branded 30-second video ad gives you a myriad of related ad content you can use to expand your campaign.
Things like:
- shorter video edits
- image ads using still from the main video
- related gifs and animations.
5. Align social media messaging with other channels
While it is possible to build your brand on social media alone.
There’s going to come a time when you need to scale your efforts.
As the chart below shows, social media benefits greatly from the use of other channels. Especially TV and out of home.
Source: https://www.thinkbox.tv/research/thinkbox-research/demand-generation/
The more channels you can use to grow your brand the better.
This means you need to ensure your positioning and subsequent ad creative is consistent across all channels.
And if you’ve followed our previous point and based your campaign around a leading 30 second video ad, you’re already a long way down the line to bringing in online video, VOD, and online display with relative ease.
6. One clear message per social post or advert
Source: Millward Brown
This chart says everything we need to say on this point really.
Keep it simple.
7. Test and learn
The great thing about brand advertising on social media is you can set-up multiple variations of ads with ease.
This allows you to test and optimise your work at a low cost.
While most brand advertising won’t need to be super optimised, like you would with direct-response ads. Being able to refine your messaging is still a big plus point.
You can even use social channels to test ad creative before running it on more expensive channels that are harder to measure and test.
Bonus tip for growing your brand on social media
Content creators and influencers are an excellent way of getting your brand in front of the right people and showcasing a genuine reaction to your offering.
The best way to do this is by sending our product samples and inviting people to use your services in exchange for honest feedback and social media content. Oftentimes, you will also need to pay fees, depending on who you work with and the scale of their operation. It’s also worth noting that if they do create more promotional content, they need to mark this as advertising in their content.
I’m a marketer based in Wales, UK. I love working with ambitious small businesses and helping them unlock the full potential of proper marketing. I created Brandspace as the starting point for doing this, and while we focus on websites and search, I can provide full strategic marketing support for your business.