In marketing, we talk about the importance of developing your brand and building a brand identity, but what does that actually mean? The following are all questions that we should be asking ourselves when we speak about branding and the importance of using social media to purposefully connect our brand to our customers:
- What are the core qualities and values of your brand?
- How are you using the power, influence, and personability of your brand to connect with your customers?
- How are you leveraging your social media channels to connect with your customers sincerely, and consistently?
Brand Purpose and Core Objectives
Before you start engaging with your fans and quilting together random posts and videos for your social media channels, you need to define the purpose of your brand. Here are a few questions that you may want to ask when analyzing the purpose and core objective of your brand.
- What is the overarching goal that your brand is trying to accomplish?
- What fuels your brand’s purpose?
- How do you envision your brand engaging with your audience, and how do you plan to execute that vision both consistently and sincerely?
Let’s take a look at some valuable ways that you can you can put together a social media strategy, and use real digital marketing to build customer relationships with your brand.
Where Do Your Customers Hang Out?
- Who is your core audience and fan base?
- Where do they hang out online and what social media platforms do they use?
Those are the first questions that you need to be asking yourself when you are putting together your brand’s social media marketing. You could have the best social media marketing strategy, brand logo, and beautiful content, but if your efforts are stretched over a dozen different platforms and you don’t know where your audience is spending most of their time, you may be spinning your wheels for nothing.
We’ve heard this a thousand times before, but it bears repeating: you don’t have to be omnipresent across all social media platforms to have a powerful brand identity. Some of the biggest influencers in your market will typically focus on only creating content and building customer relationships on one or two platforms.
To identify the platforms where your customers or potential customers are most active, analyze 4-6 of the top influencers in your market and what platforms they are most active on. Take note on how often they are posting content, and what kind of the engagement they are getting on their posts, pictures, and video. That will give you a better idea of where it is important to have your presence online.
What Type of Content Suits Your Brand Best?
This is another key question that you should be asking your team when you are putting together your brand’s content marketing strategy. The type of content that conveys your brand the best, and where your customers and potential customers are most participatory, will often lead you to the social platforms that you need to be most engaging on.
- How’s your brand’s image best conveyed?
- What is the best way to represent your brand’s image, products, services, etc.?
- What type of content is the easiest and most enjoyable for you and your team to create?
Whether you decide your brand is best represented through pictures, video, extensive blog posts, short articles, strings of Tweets, live video on Facebook or Instagram, or boards on Pinterest, select the platforms that are most conducive to conveying your brand’s image best.
Putting Together a Strategy
Now that you have identified what platforms your customers enjoy spending most of their time on and what mediums and platforms best represent your brand, it’s time to start putting together your content calendar.
Here are some different posting schedule templates that you can use, keep in mind that these are just general rules of thumb for posting according to platforms. Your brand may allow for more or less depending on the character of your brand.
- Twitter: 5+ tweets daily
- Instagram: 1-3 posts per day. Remember to post your story for what your brand is up to between posts.
- Facebook: One post daily
- Youtube: 1-2 new videos per week. Make sure to have a high-quality thumbnail and optimize your video description for Youtube SEO. Post on the same days each week so your fans know when to expect new videos.
- Pinterest: At least one new pin per day. Some sources say that brands will pin and repin upwards of 50 times per day.
- WordPress and other blogging platforms: 1-5 times per week
Take the one or two platforms that you are going to be using and start laying out a social media schedule in a spreadsheet.
You are All Set!
Now, you are ready to start engaging your fans and marketing your brand on social media. Remember that being consistent is the key to success. That means that you need to be mindful of:
- Your brand image, logo, signage, filters, etc.
- Being consistent with the type of content you create, when you post, and how often you are posting
- The language, diction, and vocabulary that you use in every post
- How you are interacting with your audience
Having a system in place for these components of your brand are the keys to success in content marketing, digital strategy, and connecting with your customers.