Posted by Social media promotion and marketing are the lifeblood for many modern businesses. When done effectively, your promotion efforts can pay off in the form of a steadily increasing customer base and consistent sales. Done wrong, you’ll be left scratching your head, waiting to see results with precious time and effort wasted.
Luckily, there are a few branding tips that can help you on your social media quest. Keep the following tips in mind to better use the time and energy you spend promoting your business. There’s no golden ticket to guaranteed success, but a little focused effort can go a long way.
1. Start Simple
It’s easy to get carried away when you first start a new business or a new promotional campaign. You don’t want to waste time, money, or resources by getting caught up in this excitement. Remember, less is more. Keep things simple when you are first getting started.
You don’t want to spend an entire marketing budget on a campaign idea that you’re not even sure if it’s going to work. Instead, start things off on a smaller scale to see if they are effective. Focus your efforts on a single social media platform rather than all of them and do it well.
If you run a smaller business and haven’t done much marketing or promotion in the past, this is a perfect chance for you to learn the basics of a platform to better navigate it in the future.
Start with a single ad on a single platform, and expand from there. Track and document these efforts to see if it is generating traffic or engagement. Once you see results, you can begin to explore more involved tactics.
2. Stay Consistent
Branding is all about making it easier for customers to recognize your company and the products or services it provides.
With a constant stream of other businesses trying to capture their attention, potential customers can lose focus quickly if they aren’t already in your funnel. You need to stay consistent with your branding to make things more visible.
In the world of social media, this consistency can come down to adopting a very similar visual approach to your branding across different platforms.
Make sure you use the same logo as the main profile image on all of the major channels. Keep the colours or background images the same or very similar as well.
You want customers to feel like they are interacting with your brand, regardless of what social media platform they are using. That’s why keeping your brand image consistent is so important.
The more consistent you can keep things, the better your chances of engagement and conversion. When a potential or recurring customer feels comfortable, they are more likely to choose you.
3. Focus on the Visuals
Visuals sit at the core of social media branding and many other types of modern branding, for that matter. Once you have a consistent theme established through all of the platforms that your business uses, it’s time to go a little deeper along those same lines.
Videos, graphics, and photographs are some of the best tools to catch attention and attract customer engagement. Most social networks are built around these three forms of media.
It’s ok if you’re not a professional designer or don’t have the budget for marketing materials, there are plenty of free tools you can use to edit photos and create beautiful designs to publish on social media.
Tips: Use bright colours and bold fonts to catch attention if that fits your brand image.
You want to try and use the same or similar style images and videos across all platforms to continue to develop that familiarity a customer will be quick to recognize.
You also should keep any fonts or subtitles used in these visuals similar. Think of these words as another layer to your visuals.
For example, if a customer recognizes a video or image but doesn’t have the sound on their phone turned on, out-of-sync subtitles or random fonts can make them keep scrolling without missing a beat.
4. Turn Up the Tone
Another essential branding tip to help promote your business on social media is establishing a tone or personality for your brand. If you are unfamiliar with what this means, you should take some time to refresh because it’s precious and practical when done right.
The tone is another tool that can establish familiarity and comfort. Customers feel like they ‘know’ a brand on a more intimate level when the tone is consistent.
Your business’s voice might already be established, or it might be a work in progress. If you are a smaller organization, put some personality into your posts – just as you would with your personal social media.
This could be humour, facts, mottos, a hashtag campaign, or any other type of approach you deem appropriate. You are trying to break down the walls and get people to engage with you.
Don’t be robotic or boring. Larger companies may want to consider hiring out branding services to help discover a unique compelling tone.
If you get stuck when trying to establish tone, feel free to experiment – just be sure to track results. A silly joke might have gotten a good response, or it might have gotten crickets. A snarky comment may stir up the pot or turn people away. A cited fact might get people interested or questioning your sources.
All of these can be seen as experiments in a tone that helps you dial it in. When you find something that is effective, stick with it and keep developing. It will become more natural as you go.
5. Don’t Wait for Engagement, Create It
Customer engagement is critical for every business. The more you can interact with established or potential customers, the more likely you are to make a sale.
While many of the tips we’ve looked at so far are intended to encourage customers to engage with your brand, it’s equally as important to flip the script and engage with them as well.
Sitting around and waiting for a quality interaction isn’t always as fruitful as going right to the tree and picking it yourself.
Direct engagement with your customers can come in a few different ways. It can be as simple as asking a question, tag a friend on social media and win a free giveaway, etc. It could be something relating to your products or services, or it could be completely random.
I’m sure you’ve seen this done before. However, the trick is actually to interact and respond once the comments start rolling in. Doing this creates a hands-on approach to engagement that can supplement organic efforts.
A light-hearted and fun approach to direct communication with customers on social media is more effective than a heavy-handed approach. They want to feel comfortable and like they are speaking or interacting with an actual person, not just some social media manager prodding for likes or comments.
6. Track the Data
No matter where you focus your energy or how many of the tips found here you choose to explore, it can all be for nought if you don’t track your efforts. You need to see what strategies are producing results, and the data can dictate what works and what doesn’t.
If someday you decide to do a rebranding, make a logo change or finally get all of your social visuals consistent across platforms, keep an eye on sales or followers to see its effect.
Of course, not everything is easy to monitor, especially on the visual end, but creating a simple spreadsheet that notes the dates where any major or minor change was made alongside notes with any increase in sales or traffic is recommended.
Analytic tools can take this a step or two deeper, but regardless of how you choose to go about it, some tracking method is a must.
With Crowdfire, you can find curated content, schedule your posts, engage with your audience, deep-dive into analytics and create custom reports. Now introducing Social listening. Try it for free.
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