Anyone can sell. But not everyone can create an awesome brand that people actually respond to for years and years.
Nike sells — but what’s kept them at the top of their game all these years is their brand. Being a brand means making a proper, long-term connection with people to the point where they trust you. In 2018 and beyond, one of the most cost-effective and authentic ways to raise awareness of your brand is via social media. It’s where your customers are, after all, and it’s much cheaper than hiring a brand agency.
Social media can be dicey, however. People go there to be social. They don’t want to be sold to. If you market your brand incorrectly, you could turn them away.
So how do you skyrocket your startup’s brand awareness using social media without putting people off?
In this article, we walk you through 6 steps you need to take.
1. Find Your Voice
In life, we get nowhere until we find out voice or feet. Until we answer the question, “who are we and what are our values?” we’ll keep making the wrong decisions.
It’s the same when it comes to your brand on social media. Until you find your voice, your message won’t hit the spot with your intended audience.
To help you define your voice, you need to look at your values. What does your brand stand for? Are you edgy and confrontational? Or are you family-oriented?
Take a look at your target audience, too. What’s their voice and would voice would they respond to?
Your voice will impact how you create all your messages on social media. It will give you consistency, and it will resonate with your audience better.
2. Be Friendly and Be a Part of the Conversation
Remember that people use social media to be social. This is basic stuff, and if you overlook it you’ll find it hard to make that all-important connection with people.
For now, forget about selling. Forget about the CTAs and the links to your landing page. Instead, focus on making a connection with people by being like them.
To that end, make your messages friendly, conversational, and positive. Engage people with questions, show empathy and — where possible — entertain them.
Keep things light, avoid too many promotional messages and refrain at all times from corporate language.
Don’t shy away from humour or slang. Just be natural and focused on building relationships.
3. Make Your Profiles Easy to Read and Understand
Who are you and what does your startup do?
Moreover, where can we go to find out more?
These are basic questions that you should answer in 2-3 sentences in your social media profiles.
When people click on your profiles, these 3 questions are the first ones they want answering. By answering them, you’re educating your audience about who you are and what you do, and you’re also giving them something to do by including link to your website.
Your profiles should be informative and educational, and you should also include a relevant profile picture.
4. Know What To Post and Where To Post It
There are several social media platforms you can use, from Facebook to LinkedIn. Not every single startup needs to be on each platform, and it’s also important that you know exactly what type of content audiences on specific platforms react to.
For example, the content you post on Facebook will be different to the content you post on Twitter. Facebook is a great place to post videos and content that solves your audiences problems, while Twitter is great for posting statistics and data, as well as infographics. It’s also a great place to engage with customers one-on-one, answering their queries.
The better you are at optimizing content for each social media platform, the easier it will be to skyrocket your startup brand’s awareness.
5. Create Value
People respond to valuable content. Research has shown that long-form content is shared more times than short-form content. Long-form content is defined as content that contains more than 1,200 words, and which offers in-depth answers to a specific problem.
The reason it’s shared so much? Simply because it offers value.
Forget going in for the sale for the moment and focus on providing as much value as you can to your social media audiences. What problems can you solve for them today? How are you going to solve them?
Don’t expect anything in return from this — just give and give. The more you give, the more receptive people will be to your brand. Over time, they will learn to trust you, and they’ll see you as the go-to expert in your niche.
6. Skyrocket Your Brand Awareness With Videos
1/3 Instagram users watch videos on Instagram Stories each day, while the social media platform also recently launched IGTV. This allows you to post content to your own channel.
Meanwhile, we consume over 100,000,000 hours of videos on Facebook each day.
One of the best ways to use videos to raise awareness of your brand is to live stream. This might be an interview with an expert, or it could be a Q&A session that you hold on the fly. Live stream works because it’s interactive (people can leave comments that you react to), it’s engaging, and it shows that your brand is authentic. You are live and in the flesh — you’re the real deal.
Conclusions
These are 6 ways to skyrocket your startup’s brand awareness using social media.
Once you’ve found your voice and understood what your audience wants to see, it’s then a case of creating as much value as possible while engaging and connecting with your audience.
Forget the sale for now and focus on building relationships.
If you do this, your brand will grow so much that prospects are more likely to turn into loyal, long-term customers.
