Effective Ways to Communicate Your Brand With Social Media

We talk a lot about how social media is a great tool for marketing your products online, but the simple truth is that product marketing is only a small part of any marketing strategy. Communicating your brand—now that’s the hard part!

Social media marketers make the whole thing sound so easy, as if you simply need to come up with an alluring brand name and logo, create a website, and post a few cool pictures to get customers on board. But in reality, effective social media marketing is much easier said than done. It takes time and persistent hard work to get customers to trust your brand. On top of that, you need to be able to prove your credibility and make customers see the value in what you are offering.

And that’s just the beginning! To finally get customers to buy into your products and make a purchase, it takes even more. If your biggest challenge is finding ways to build brand awareness, we’ve narrowed the process down to a few tips that will help you effectively communicate your brand through social media to attract and retain customers.

Let’s get started!

Develop Your Voice

Once you’ve set up your business, you need to establish and develop brand your voice. You want to make sure that your company’s personality comes out in every tweet and every post so that your customers don’t confuse you for your competition. With that said, it takes a bit of time to find your voice and settle into it. On the positive side, once you find your voice, you’ll find it much easier to engage with your customers. When trying to find your voice, consider these three elements:

Your audience

When developing your social media marketing strategy, identifying the audience you are speaking to is at the top of the list. Whereas traditional marketing once meant appealing to a broad audience, social media has made it easier than ever to speak directly to your target market. To effectively communicate to your target demographic, you need to find a voice that best resonates with said audience, or you’ll lose them forever.

Authenticity

With the rise of social media, consumers have come to expect a certain measure of authenticity online—including from brands. This means that customers will only trust your brand if you are consistent and authentic. You should always ensure that you don’t try to sound like another brand. Copycat techniques will result in you coming across as untrustworthy.

Your Company Culture

What is your company all about? What principles and values do you stand for? These are integral to the messaging you put forth through social media. For example, if your company culture includes honesty and integrity, then your brand voice should reflect the same.  It may seem simple, but it is so vital to your success.

Utilize Visual Branding

One of the best ways to communicate your brand is by using visual content, specifically incorporating images to your content. There’s a major misconception that all you need to do to sell your brand is to slap a few good blog posts together, and that’s it—but words alone won’t cut it.

Want proof?

First, according to numerous studies, people tend to respond more to content that has at least one image than to content without any image at all. Not only does this mean more people will pay attention to your posts, but more people are likely to share it, helping to increase engagement. Second, according to a survey done by Adobe and Software Advice, the use of images is one of the best social media optimization tactics for businesses. Not to mention the fact that our brains tend to process visuals 60,000 times faster than text.

From the stats, it’s clear: visual content is the best currency for sharing information on social media sites.  Capitalizing on visual content helps you attract more people, and the more people that get to see your brand the more engagement you can expect.

Post Regularly

Some people say that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but that is not the case in social media marketing and branding. Consumers tend to quickly forget you if they don’t see you as much—out of sight out of mind. There are way too many brands out there preying on your laxity. So, if you don’t post regularly, even your loyal fans will slowly slip off into your competitor’s hands. As a rule of the thumb, you need to frequently post content to ensure that you keep your fans engaged.

However, how and when you should be posting depends on which platform you’re using.  As each social media platform has a different algorithm, each has a different peak time for posting. These can also change depending on where your audience is—for instance, if you are in the U.S. but have a large following in Australia you shouldn’t neglect that audience by posting only according to your time zone. To ensure you’re getting the most out of your posting schedule, you not only have to be consistent, but you have to consistently be monitoring your engagement data and analytics to capitalize on optimal posting times.

Build Relationships With Industry Top Players

Another sure-fire way to effectively communicate your brand is by building relationships with top players in the industry and in your niche. When established brands post something on social media, their post gets attention from millions of people. If you are relatively new to the scene, however, you might not get as much engagement because you probably only have a handful of followers giving attention to your content. By building relationships with these established brands, you get an opportunity to piggyback off their audience and achieve faster results since they have already established trust.

Social media influencers are also a huge opportunity for you to increase brand awareness and improve conversion rates. Influencers are valuable to marketers because, like brands, they have already built a strong relationship with their audience. Followers rely on them for advice and trust their recommendations. In fact, 49% of consumers say they depend on influencers for recommendations. Marketers see the benefit as well, saying that influencer marketing that focuses on branding or engagement can generate up to 8x ROI. The key to influencer marketing is finding a brand or personality whose audience overlaps with yours.

Engage

While consistent posting is important, merely publishing items on a schedule is no guarantee that you will get the kind of audience you need for your business to grow. Plus, there is no guarantee that your posts will even build the brand awareness you are hoping for. Because of this, it helps to interact with other users on social media sites. Comment on posts on Instagram and Facebook, reply to tweets and start up conversations that stir reactions to keep your brand on the audience’s radar.

Engaging with your followers helps increase trust and builds loyalty. To take your social marketing to the next level, encourage your followers to reciprocate the interaction through user-generated content. As hard as you work to portray authenticity, consumers will always look to other consumers over a brand when researching a purchase. Use this to your advantage by running contests, creating a hashtag, and building a community around your brand that prospective customers will see and trust.

Wrapping It Up

While the idea of communicating your brand might seem intimidating, these tips will help you get started. You might not get the response you are hoping for in an instant, but that’s to be expected with every first attempt.

Aim to be in your audience’s scope constantly, and pay attention to your analytics data to tweak and refine your strategy. The more you put your brand on your audience’s radar, the more followers you will get. And once you have lured enough people, you can start working towards retaining your fans and building a larger and more established brand.