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Brand Awareness with Social Media – The most important in a nutshell |
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Brand awareness is considered the be-all and end-all of building a successful brand and achieving corporate goals. But how do you generate attention and brand awareness in an increasingly difficult competitive environment characterized by growing competition? The way to achieve this is often through social media. We show you how to strengthen your brand awareness with social media.
Generating brand awareness sounds simple at first. But in times of growing competition, the battle for the attention of potential customers is greater than ever. Every day, they are confronted with a wealth of information, content in a wide variety of formats, new products and numerous advertising measures. Because it’s easy to get lost in all this, it’s particularly difficult for brands today to stand out and be remembered.
Brand awareness is the first step in the conversion funnel. This describes the path of an Internet user from the moment he becomes aware of a product or service to the final purchase. Brand awareness is therefore about making as many users as possible aware of the company. The more users remember or recognize your brand, the higher your brand awareness. In the next funnel step – consideration – the user’s interest should finally be gained. At best, this step leads to a conversion, for example a purchase, as the last part of the marketing funnel.
Steps in the conversion funnel
Consequently, generating brand awareness forms the basis on the path to success. Social media platforms such as Instagram, Linkedin or Facebook have emerged as one of the most effective ways to do this. For many companies, social media marketing is essential these days. This is evident simply from the enormous number of active users and thus the size of the potential audience. Facebook, for example, recorded 2.91 billion monthly active users in the fourth quarter of 2021 (Statista Research Department). Social media marketing is one thing above all: cost-efficient. Sharing content is free to begin with. Paid advertising measures are comparatively inexpensive and can be used flexibly depending on the budget.
The fact is: social media platforms hold great potential for brand awareness. However, simply sharing posts with references to your own offering will not get you there. For optimal results, you should consider a number of tools, set screws and to-dos:
In order to increase brand awareness with social media, it is important to know your own target group precisely. Who do you want to reach? What makes up this group of people? What interests and moves them? Surveys, analyses or e-mail contacts are ideal for this. The optimal target group is made up of those people who need your product or service the most.
Once you know the target audience, you should do further research. Which social media platforms does your target audience use most often? This can often be determined by the type of product being sold. For example, if you sell software for businesses, LinkedIn is a good choice. If your product range consists of clothing and accessories, you are better off on Instagram to generate brand awareness with social media. It’s also a good idea to find out when your target audience is most active. This is the time you should post.
One of the most important factors in increasing brand awareness with social media is setting goals. The overarching goal here is to create brand awareness, but this can also be broken down more finely. For example, do you primarily want to generate high engagement through your posts or is it more important to you to grow the follower count of your channels? You should also continuously monitor the performance of your content to check if you have reached your goals. For this, almost all social media platforms nowadays offer tools for analysis.
The most important element of a brand awareness strategy is content. Post regularly, develop a content plan and come up with a story behind your brand. The content should encourage users to interact with it. This can be achieved, for example, with “real” photos rather than stock photos, storytelling approaches and graphic elements. It is also advisable to use different formats and hashtags – ideally in conjunction with current trends.
A common mistake in strengthening brand awareness with social media is limiting content distribution to one channel. To achieve optimal results, companies should play on multiple platforms. It is important not to duplicate content across channels, but to adapt it accordingly, because users interact with content in different ways depending on the platform. For example, Instagram focuses on visual stimuli and short text posts, while Linkedin focuses on informative text posts accompanied by images.
Let’s face it, people love it when there’s something for free! That’s why hosting sweepstakes and contests is the perfect driver for attention on your social media channels and thus for your products, services and services. You should be strategic about this and ask for something in return for the potential prize in the form of likes, shares and/or comments. But be careful: if this tool is used too often, the actions will lose their appeal and you may damage your image.
Influencers have a wide reach and often bring an engaged community. Therefore, it can make sense to engage their services to increase brand awareness with social media. Collaborations with other companies can also provide additional brand awareness. However, for the sake of authenticity, only engage influencers who fit the industry or niche. When partnering with other brands, you should take care not to cooperate with direct competitors. Suitable cooperation partners are, for example, companies that offer products that complement your own.
It’s called social media for a reason. Awareness of your brand is promoted when you interact with your followers socially, ask questions, respond to questions, and have a presence in the comments column. This communicates to potential customers that you care about their needs. Especially important here: show personality! Prefabricated, identical answers and bot-like comments have a deterrent effect.
The points mentioned so far are organic ways to generate brand awareness with social media. In addition, there are various ways to increase their brand awareness with the help of paid ads. Depending on your budget and target audience, you can make different settings for their paid ads – the social media platforms will take care of the rest! Organic content that has already been created can also be given an additional push in this way.
Admittedly: Generating brand awareness with social media strategy is time-consuming and requires extensive (human) resources. However, you should always keep in mind that it’s worth it: high brand awareness can lead to more conversions and thus higher sales. Our tips will help you to optimally implement this part of the conversion funnel. We wish you every success!