5 Ways to Leverage Social Media for Brand Awareness
One of the most effective uses of B2B social media marketing in today’s social landscape is creating brand awareness. Let’s take a few minutes to review some of the basics of brand awareness, discuss the benefits for your clients, and then look at how social media can help you solidify brand awareness for your clients like no other medium.
The Basics of Brand Awareness
Just in case it’s been a while for you and your team, let’s revisit brand awareness. According to the dictionary, brand awareness is “The extent to which consumers are familiar with the distinctive qualities or image of a particular brand of goods or services.” For smaller brands and organizations (read: most of your clients), it’s much more imperative that brand awareness exists within the niche(s) you are serving. That means your clients’ target markets need peak awareness, and you don’t have to worry about it being a global situation.
Brand awareness comes with sweet benefits such as:
- Increased market share
- Optimized customer perception
- Demonstration of brand authority in your target market
- Peak talent acquisition
- Top-of-mind awareness
Unique Opportunities for Brand Awareness on Social Media
Social media is one of the most effective tools for brand awareness in B2B marketing, especially if you use it strategically. While algorithms of typical B2B platforms typically don’t support what we might call fast growth, there is opportunity for slow, steady growth, maintaining an outstanding space for research for prospective clients and employees and further establishing your voice as a brand.
Here are 5 ways to leverage social media for increased brand awareness:
1. Lock That Messaging Down
One of the easiest ways to increase brand awareness on social media is reinforcing client messaging like crazy. This means core values, mission statements, key words and phrases that mirror your clients’ customers’ language. The more you reinforce the messaging of your target market, the more your clients and their customers can connect on what matters to them.
2. Grow Your Clients’ Audience
Full disclosure: organic social media growth is slowwwww. You can typically expect to see 1-3% per month. But that’s an additional 1-3% of exposure that you wouldn’t have had without it. So paid social will get there faster, but there’s something to be said for slow, consistent and steady growth.
3. Showcase Your Clients’ Core Values
Transparency for culture and values is very important to consumers today, even in the B2B space. So leverage social media to tell (and show) prospective employees and clients who they’re dealing with. Tell by explicitly stating who your clients are, and show via case studies, photos, company events, and testimonials.
4. Identify and Target Dream Clients
Again, this is a faster process with paid social, but it’s very expensive for B2B clients, and it’s not as effective as consumer-driven channels. So that’s the bad news. The good news is that you can still target your dream clients with organic social. It’s a little thing I like to call self selection. It involves addressing pain points and benefits of your clients’ target markets with your content and assets, and it takes longer but is very effective.
5. Creating a Unique Presence
It’s not enough to show the target markets how your clients solve their problems. It’s about how they do it better. So you’ll want to share testimonials, case studies, and data that back up your claims about the unique selling points of your customers.
There you go!
These are my favorite ways of establishing outstanding brand awareness with organic social media. If this sounds amazing, but you just literally cannot, that’s cool. My team is here to help!
