Picture Credits : designlobby.co.uk
Social media has taken the world by a storm and it seems a little ignorant to not jump in as well. To improve your brand’s presence, one of the fastest ways to do that is build your company’s online presence. With the internet, everything travels at lightning speed and the best way to put yourself out there is to make sure you share your company with the world, online.
If you want to sell products and make your company known, your customers need to get to know you first. The ability to execute this by your brand’s authority over the market and the best way to do that is to build its brand. According to Hubspot, as quoted in Forbes, 92% of marketers in 2014 claimed that social media marketing was important for their business. This just shows you how important social media marketing is for your company and the growth of your brand.
Why use social media marketing for your business? Because:
- It’s easy to use and we’re the right age group to use it (digital natives)
- It’s fast & measurable (feedback is instant, and ROI is easily managed)
- It’s free (no explanation needed)
If you want to climb the ranks and be known in your industry, here are a few tips from the ThunderQuote e-procurement platform social media team that will fulfil those wants to propel your brand to the top of its clan.
Step 1 : Find Your Market
It’s easy to just throw out everything on all social media sites. However, it would be a lot smarter to sit down and plan out where you think most of your customers frequent. If you do enough research, you will realise that there is no need to maintain a social media presence on all channels. Pick and choose the ones that are right for your brand. Handling a business is hard enough, so we’re not expecting you to spend every minute updating the Facebook statuses or sending out tweets about offers you have for the business. Picking the right outlet is key to ensuring you maintain a great brand presence.
Facebook : Facebook is the best platform for advertising and trying to get your brand out there. It is great because it covers all the types of people you would want to reach. From multiple age groups, men or women and so much more.
Twitter : Twitter is good to share shorter snippets of your brand. Something witty and smart would be great here. Put your best social media marketers in charge of Twitter. However, note that most people who are relatively active on Twitter are the much younger generation. So you should streamline the content here as well.
Instagram : This is great if you are a more visually inclined company. Create great pictures and graphics to be shared here. People on Instagram appreciate great, high quality pictures. The aesthetic value on Instagram is incredibly high so make sure you reach those standard or you’ll get drowned with the other 52 million pictures that gets uploaded on Instagram everyday.
LinkedIn : This is great if you run a big company. It’s essential to keep in contact with other huge companies and the best place to do that is on LinkedIn. By posting content there, you increase your chances of attracting big time investors and also making your brand known on a much larger scale.
Step 2 : Create Great Content
This goes without saying obviously. Great content is the best way to increase your brand presence. If you can break the glass ceiling to become the most searched website in your line of work, you know that you have made it when it comes to content marketing. You want to become a thought leader in your line of work and be the ones people come to when they need advice. The more searches you obtain the stronger your brand presence. The more people you have coming to you, the more the company name spreads and this is how you increase sales.
All the content you decide to put online and share must be good quality. Do not put on content that you think will not generate the type of response you are looking for. Consumers go onto the internet for information and the information you put online needs to be trusted and tested. Try to refrain from exaggerating your content and instead try to make sure it is as helpful as possible.
If you use WordPress for your blogs, make sure you always check the blog traffic you are receiving. Create a spreadsheet of how many clicks you’ve gotten, how many shares and also how many people have actually read your post as well. From there you can gauge what type of content the consumers actually want from you. After that, you can try to tailor-make the content you’re producing to best suit your readers. This increases personalism and the readers will feel extra special because they will start to feel that their voices are being heard as well.
Never be afraid to experiment with visuals. As mentioned above, people like scrolling through pictures. Therefore when you do create posts, do try to include images that will help break apart blocks of text. Not everyone is fond of reading too much text. Pictures and illustrations will help get the point across much faster and has been proven to be a much better way of educating your readers as well.
Picture Credits : venturebeat.com
#3 Be Conversational
Great content is just one piece of the puzzle to creating the bigger picture of increasing your brand presence. Social media thrives on communication and the conversations between users. If you keep producing content but you don’t share the properly or you fail at igniting the posts, your voice will be drowned out sooner or later. There are so many other key players so if you do not make it a point to make your brand heard, it will never be picked up by the masses.
One way to fix this is to ensure that you maintain a good level of conversations between yourself and your consumers. Have someone who is a good customer service representative to man your Twitter accounts. Emails take too long to reply and sift through the junk mail so Twitter has become the best place for consumers to come and look for help. If you have a strong Twitter account, trust us, your brand presence will definitely spike.
Strike up conversation with your followers. Lurk on their profiles and see what you can say to engage in a conversation with them. Another thing you can do is visit hashtags that are related to your business and send them a message about your business. A short and sweet message. Do not be too overbearing because you don’t want to piss them off. But that is what social media is made off. You need to engage with them through social media. The friendlier you are, the higher the increase of your brand presence.
#4 Create Social Media Campaigns
Due to the increase of social media accounts that are flooding the stratosphere, it is best to have a plan to make sure you stand out. A great strategy to prevent that from happening is to create a campaign or a contest that is interesting enough for your followers to get involved in. This is one of the best ways to gain visibility and simultaneously increase your brand presence.
Providing incentive like discounts or free products will drive hordes of customers in. Who doesn’t love free stuff? This is the best way to get people interested, fast. Watch your follower count increase rapidly and once you’ve garnered this audience, you can then change up your content marketing and sell them your product instead. It’s the initial spark that you need to ignite to bring customers in to increase your brand presence.
These are a few ways that you can try to put on your checklist in order to increase your brand’s presence. Many have tried and have achieved success. It will take a lot of work but the end result is amazing.
ThunderQuote is the most comprehensive business services portal in Singapore, Australia and ASEAN , where hundreds of thousands of dollars of procurement contracts are sourced every month by major companies like Singapore Press Holdings, National Trade Union Congress and more.