Social Media
What Steps Can You Take to Increase Awareness of Your Brand on Social Media?
An average of 2 hours a day is spent online with most of the world now owning a page on various social media platforms. This means that your brand has unbridled contact with your target audience. The use of social media is an innovative and inexpensive way to increase the awareness of your brand to the target audiences. It is especially useful for small and medium-sized businesses that cannot spend millions on traditional advertising routes, social media levels the playing field, and below are some key tips in making the most of social media to increase the awareness of your brand.
Focus on the right platform
It is a common mistake to assume that each social platform caters to people based on demographics such as age, sex or even status, but this is not sure, for example, Twitter; is used by a range of people like huge corporations, artists, celebrities etc. However, each platform has a search engine which you can use to search for mentions or conversations about your brand; its services, products. This provides you with knowledge about your customer’s needs, queries, and also gives you access to their personal pages, which you can use to put incentives into action and target advertising campaigns.
Tell your story
Now that you have found a way to connect with your target audience you need to tell your story; the story about your brand, what it does, why it does it. The way in which you express this determines the way your target audience will relate to you. There are few key things that you can do in your storytelling to ensure that people connect with your brand,
- The first being the use of the 5C’s: circumstance, curiosity, characters, conversations and conflict. So when creating your story specifies the circumstances; set the scene and provide context.
- Use curiosity to make the reader want to continue, characters and conversation go hand in hand.
- Ensure that there is some sort of conflict – maybe a story about your failures at the beginning of things that you’ve learnt through making mistakes.
People are not interested in flawless successful beings or brands, they want to know about the failures, the hard times, it is these aspects of your brand that make people relate to you. To add to this by using emotional rhetoric you are able to engage more of the brain, allowing you to create an emotional connection between the target audience and your brand. Use these four elements in your story; the principles of VAKO: Visual, Auditory, Kinaesthetic, and Olfactory, that way you can draw in and lock your audience.
Interact with your target audience
Having various social forums to communicate with your target audience means that you are able to conduct marketing schemes, which are aimed specifically at a certain platform or type of user. The fact that you have 365 24/7 contact with your audience means that you must be cerebral in the content and manner in which you post things; meaning that people are less likely to respond to a page that is constantly used for self–promotion. A user on these websites allow you to really interact with your consumer, prove that you are listening to what they want, for example, a hashtag created by consumers #PS4USEDGAMES; which allows users to play used games on the console, the Sony executives agreed to this and announced at the unveiling.
Also, aim to connect with people that that have already built up an audience of your target buyers – non competing, strike up a deal that benefits both for you; a venture partnership at their most basic level this means an exchange of content, but at their most intricate can encompass commercial deals or affiliate fees. Nonetheless, find people that have a connection with your target audience and begin engaging with them today.
