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A lack of strategy can result in a potential tragedy.
We know that building a brand on social media requires a solid strategy – and so do our experts.
We’ve asked a few of them to identify some key elements of creating a reliable and loved social media brand, and it comes as no surprise that many of them highlighted the importance of having a strategy.
Strategy is another part of our ACES – four pillars for growing your brand online.
The other pillars are Authenticity, Content and Engagement, which we encourage you to check out too.
Before you do that though, let’s dive straight into what our experts had to say when it comes to strategy and its importance for building a brand on social media.
Work on visuals, messaging and consistency
Dan Kelsall | Creative Director @ Offended.marketing
Social media is obviously a huge part of the brand-building strategy because that’s where many customers prefer to follow businesses. There are a few critical things to take care of here: visuals, messaging, and consistency.
First, you need appealing, eye-catching visuals to attract attention of your followers. Having a distinguished UX design and branding style (color palette, logo, graphics) can make all the difference.
Secondly, your messaging across all social media platforms should be aligned with your brand’s mission, values, and goals. If it’s not, chances are that many people simply won’t recognize your brand. You can do it in different ways – by using emojis and humour, or sharing very detailed, data-backed content. Whatever suits your company best.
Lastly, the glue that holds it all together is the consistency of your effort, both in terms of content publication but brand voice and style.
Look at yourself, but also at your competitors
Téa Liarokapi | Digital Marketer @ Moosend
The first thing to keep in mind is the crowd with which you want your brand to interact. This is what will set the brand tone, the frequency with which you’re going to post on social media, your content and the products you’re going to be promoting.
Secondly, you’ll need to do thorough research on your competitors, find their pain points and what kind of complaints your prospects may or may not have, when it comes to them, and give them exactly what your competitors can’t.
Define goals
Vincent Bucchachio | Founder @ SociallyInfused
You may have been active on social media for some time, but, like many companies, things are not going the way you had anticipated. If you’re feeling stuck and unsure why your campaign isn’t flourishing, circle back to the beginning and ask yourself, “Why did we begin to engage on social media in the first place?” If your answer is “Umm…” or “Everyone else is doing it,” you might have found your problem.
Brands need to define specific, quantifiable, and realistic goals with purpose, or you risk falling into the trap of posting aimlessly. An example of an achievable goal for social media marketing might be something like, “Let’s improve our Instagram engagement rate by 15% before the end of the first quarter.” Now you can write with that objective in mind and with purpose!
Choose the platform and approach
Nikola Baldikov | Digital Marketer @ Brosix
The first step is choosing the right social media platform for your particular business. If you’re a small business it may not be realistic to try to engage people across all social media. Do some research to see where your current customer base spends most of its time and focus on the 2 or 3 platforms that are the most popular.
Next, decide together with your team exactly what you’ll stand for. Will you be a brand focused on customer engagement? Will you try to use humor to build your brand? There are many ways to approach building your brand on social media, so choose the one that best aligns with your mission and values.
It’s also important to make sure that your employees are representing your brand in all of their engagements with social media. In the end, your employees are your best brand ambassadors and have the power to either reinforce your efforts, or, alternatively, do significant damage. Create clear social media guidelines for your team that are easy to follow and encourage them to use their common sense.
Test new things
Tom Mortimer | Content Manager @Adzooma
You should not be afraid of testing some new things out. In such a dynamic world of social media, it is often better to be an early adopter and fail than to test some things that your competitors already implemented a few weeks before. To stand out from the competition and build a solid brand on social media, you need to stay up-to-date and be a kind of “brand trendsetter”. While you cannot possibly create every single social media trend, you can be one of the first to try them out.
Start building a brand on social media outside social media
Daniel Kotlinski | Marketing Manager @ Social Tigers
Building a strong brand in social media begins… outside of social media. I believe that as experts, we succumb too much to the magic of fast, tactical solutions, instead of looking for the real “growth factors” in a systematic way, experimenting and scaling those that work.
Building a strong brand in social media begins in the minds of your recipients. This is where you should reach for inspiration.
Start by recreating the customer journey – understanding it will allow you to discover the challenges that consumers are facing from the unconscious to buying a product. Initially, this process consists of four stages: attraction, interest, desire, action (AIDA). At every stage, the consumer has different problems and is looking for a different type of wisdom, and your brand should provide it to him. Remember that depending on the product, the path may contain more or less stages (usually more), and they will vary in length between them. The allocation of your budgets and other resources should depend on it.
Only now move on to creating a channel strategy. Think about what one main goal of the AIDA model should accomplish each channel – and then plan the content and formats in such a way that they bring you closer to achieving this specific goal. For example, if a Facebook group is designed to build awareness of a problem or context, don’t post sales or brand content there. And vice versa – if the goal of the FB group is to arouse the desire to cooperate with you, focus there on typical brand content and overcoming potential objections, and do not waste this space for education (which should then take place in another channel).
Finally, set KPIs for each channel – remember that not all channels achieve sales goals, so not all channels should be accounted for. KPI should be consistent with the stage of the shopping path (e.g. for A this will be the range, for I – the number of visits to the site, D – interactivity index under your content, A – the number of leads). Measure the implementation of results in constant cycles and monitor all your marketing activities. Your goal is to understand what works – and to scale it and what doesn’t – and kill it.
In everyday communication, you must remember that the customer is the hero of his story – the brand only appears as a guide. Social media is a dialogue, a story – and those brands that understand it win.
Choose the right direction of your social media identity
Aleksandar Radosevic | Tech copywriter & creative storyteller. Content writer @ Nifty
Building a strong brand on social media is a process that requires a ton of information and dedicated work. But how to choose the right direction of your social media identity?
Use the experience of highly successful brands and use other people’s mistakes to avoid potential slopes. These words of wisdom from entrepreneurs, business people, and creative individuals can transform your point of view. It will give you a unique perspective on how to brand your business on social media.
Here are a few highly practical quotes on how to build a strong brand on social media.
First and most important:
“Your brand is not what you sell.”
John Iwata
“A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories, and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.”
Seth Godin
“A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn a reputation by trying to do hard things well.”
Jeff Bezos
And in the end, don’t forget that design is crucial for the visual identity of your brand!
“Design is the silent ambassador of your brand.”
Paul Rand
Social media is a great place to position the brand, not just to equate it with the competition, but to be noticed by the consumer.
Why are you on social media, actually?
Kacper Kapsa | Social Media Team Leader @ x-kom
Building a strong brand in social media must start with the answer to the question of what is its purpose. If we want to sell, we can’t expect a lot of commitment. If we want to build an image, we will not be able to meet this condition without commitment. Whenever I can, I recommend this second path. In both cases, however, credibility is important. Overnight, tights cannot become a political oracle. A law firm’s fanpage is where you can publish memes. Getting to know your audience and a well-balanced strategy is something to start with. Creativity is another element that makes the brand stand out from the rest. It is not an art to use the same patterns, you have to do everything to become an example to others. Importantly, creativity allows you to bypass budget constraints. A good idea will be remembered longer than a meager but heavily financed production. However, it is known that everything is a process, and every process requires patience. Drawing conclusions must be connected with consistency and also reacting to what is happening around. There is probably no more dynamically changing place in contemporary marketing.
To wrap up
It goes without saying that a well-thought-out strategy is a good base for a solid brand presence online.
With the right set of tactics, you can take your brand to the next level. We hope that the insights delivered by our experts will come in handy for implementing your own strategies.
Good luck with building your brand on social media!
