Branding allows you to be more than just an ordinary social media account and connect with your audience on a deeper level. We all have been there: You are scrolling through your Instagram feed and most of the time you know which accounts’ quotes you are viewing. The content you create and share can play a huge impact on how your audience perceives your company even if they haven’t directly interacted with your website or used any of your services.
Effectively building up a branding strategy can be key to stacking up customer loyalty and trust Here’s a complete guide on how you can build branding for social media marketing.
What is Social Media Branding?
If you think Social Media Marketing is only for promoting your latest promotions and products, think again. In simple words, branding is about showing consistency with your words. Where many people believe that branding only translates to visual graphics of your brand, it actually refers to a myriad of factors that make up the whole “Branding Umbrella”.
By keeping up with your branding, you run the power of actually building a fan base and enticing them to purchase from you. This makes it effortless to let your audience slide down the funnel and build a robust network around your brand.
How Important is Social Media Branding?
If I had to wrap the whole idea and importance of social branding in an example, it would have been the original branding of the two well-known companies, Apple and Microsoft. What comes to your mind when you think about Microsoft? Their branding is mainly based around a middle-aged dude with well-kept hair and an office button-down shirt explaining to you how Microsoft works.
Now think about Apple. You are likely to see a cool guy, wearing a casual white t-shirt, cracking a few jokes and explaining the most complex specification in the most effortless way possible. Now divert your attention towards their audience. None of them is wrong but both of them perfectly resonate with their audience. Microsoft has a more professional and straightforward audience than Apple, which has rather laid-back customers.
These minor details in your Social media profiles and ad campaigns can be key to building a personality for your brand and attracting like-minded people. This way, you wouldn’t have to depend on frequent discounts and promotions to build loyal customers.
So if you are planning to delve into the world of branding and exploring your audience, here are the top 7 best ways you can do branding for social media marketing.
1. Know your Target Audience
It’s always a great idea to start with your audience and build a brand strategy from there. After you have completed the initial stage of figuring out the ideal audience for your brand, start to dive deep into:
- Their age
- What platforms are they likely to be on?
- Gender
- What are their interests
- Income level
- What else do they care about besides your product or service?
2. Establish Your Identity
Before conveying it to others, you first need to not only create a personality of your brand yourself but also ensure your employees stand by that too. This will help you craft the right message and resonate with the product or service of your brand.
Here, everything starts from within. Make sure all your employees are aware of the mage your brand is trying to convey, stick posters, and carry out regular meetings to keep everyone on track. Once that’s settled, create a uniform social media profile across all the social media platforms and stay consistent with your efforts.
3. Use Your Brand Logo & Slogan Everywhere
The logo of your brand is the key to making it work. Regardless of whatever you are posting or printing, make sure your logo is the first and last thing the audience is going to have at the top of their minds. You can also try using the slogan in action and create campaigns that will convey the same idea.
4. Brand Voice And Tone for Social Media Branding
Creating moral guidelines and portraying that to your users or customers can ensure to reduce any poor customer experience and give a level of trust over your customers. This is especially important if you are a new player in the market and want to stand out from the crowd.
Here you can decide to go for a friendly, casual and funny voice that will blend well with the rest of the audience, or a more professional one if you are working B2B. Regardless of any voice, you may want to go for it, make sure it stays consistent with all your efforts and you are honest and natural throughout every text or word you decide to speak on behalf of your brand.
5. Strategise And Optimize Content
Now that your fundamentals are set, it’s time we get into implying it to your regular social media content. Remember, everything you share on social media has the power to make or break your brand. Start by using similar coloured posts, fonts, tone and templates for everything you pump out on your website and social media.
6. Editorial Calendar for Social Branding
Want a foolproof recipe for social media success? Stick to your editorial calendar without fail. There are numerous social media management apps that can let you create editorial calendars and schedules to help you stay on top with not just your content but with consistency too. You can either go for conventional tools like Google Calendar or Spreadsheets or more advanced like Hootsuite
It saves time and ensures you never run out of ideas. With branding, you need to be a part of your audience’s daily schedule. If you post at 2 PM, make sure to stick to that routine. This will help your audience expect a post from you at these specific times and will ensure to keep coming back for more content.
7. Build Relationships
As a general rule of thumb, having fewer highly engaged followers is always better than having millions of followers and no interaction whatsoever. That’s where branding comes in. you can make use of the fundamental branding strategies by @Mention people on your posts, directly reply to the comment, start a conversation and retweet or reshare every time anyone mentions your brand.