How to Increase Brand Awareness on Social Media: 5 Steps to Success

77% of small businesses use social media to connect with new and existing customers, but many aren’t seeing the results they’d hoped for.

That’s in large part because social media is saturated with noise. But with a bit of strategic thinking, you can cut through the din and get the attention your business needs to grow.

So, let us show you how to increase brand awareness on social media in five very doable steps. Give them a try, and you’ll leave a memorable impression with the people most important to your business.

Contents

• Identify your audience and pick the right platforms
• Develop a quarterly content plan
• Use influencer partnerships to boost your presence
• Offer exclusive social discounts
• Measure and optimize your awareness campaigns

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1. Identify your audience and pick the right platforms

93% of small and medium-sized organizations struggle with common social media challenges like increasing engagement, gaining new followers, and generating leads.

One reason for the disconnect is that they try to hit multiple social platforms with the same messaging.

It is incredibly tempting to create pages on all major social media platforms and start posting the same content everywhere. That’s not a good strategy because every platform has its own core user base with unique content preferences and engagement patterns. A spray-and-pray strategy usually leads to less-than-stellar results and wasted resources.

The Honey Pot Co is a brand that gets it right. This business focuses its efforts on Instagram, which has amassed an impressive 400,000 followers.

Instagram’s visual platform allows The Honey Pot Company to showcase its products in use, share educational content about feminine health, and build a community around shared values and experiences.

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If you look at the brand’s target audience of adult women looking for natural care products, you’ll see that it matches a typical Instagram user profile.

Before getting too deep into your social media marketing strategy, take a minute to identify your target audience and see which platforms they spend time on.

Try making buyer personas and use Pew Research Center’s data on social media to identify the platform used most by people who fit the persona. Every major social media platform also gives you access to analytics tools to research your audience’s demographics and interests.

Once you have identified one or two platforms on which to focus your social media marketing efforts, it is time to move on to content planning.

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2. Develop a quarterly content plan

A quarterly content plan anchors your social media strategy. With it, you can post regularly, and your occasional posts may have consistent strategic messaging that aligns with business goals.

With a quarterly plan, you’ll optimize resource allocation and have a consistent supply of text, image, and video assets that follow the same strategy.

Here’s how you should go about making a quarterly plan:

• Identify important dates for your business: Think, product launches, seasonal events, or industry-specific observances. Plan posts for these events in advance.
• Develop overarching content themes: Base them on your objectives, audience insights, and key dates, like a ‘Summer Home Makeover’ campaign for your home services business.
• Outline a detailed publication schedule: List what you’ll post and when. This should include a mix of content types (e.g., posts, videos, stories) and consider the best time to post on each social media platform.
• Determine the resources needed: Include budget, tools, and team responsibilities.
• Plan for active engagement: Know who on your team will handle comments, replies, messages, and social listening.

Make sure your content plan includes educational content, customer success stories, live Q&A sessions, and surveys. This variety in content type, plus posting regularly, will give you enough data to analyze at the end of the quarter. You can see what worked, why it worked, and plan the next quarter accordingly.

3. Use influencer partnerships to boost your presence

63% of consumers are likely to buy products recommended by influencers they follow. Besides increased sales, influencer marketing can also help you gain visibility and followers. Partnering with an influencer puts you in front of their followers and immediately boosts your social media presence.

Let’s say you are a retail brand selling men’s clothing. While posting regularly and following a quarterly content plan will help, partnering with an influencer like Aaron Ramirez will immediately increase your reach to hundreds of thousands of viewers.

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What’s interesting about this example is that it’s not just one brand being showcased. The lesson is that you don’t have to go it alone. You can partner with complementary brands for even more reach for your influencer marketing buck.

Here’s what you should do to build influencer partnerships:

• Look for influencers whose audience aligns with your target demographic and whose content, tone, and values resonate with your brand’s identity.
• Analyze the influencer’s engagement rate, content quality, audience demographics, and past partnership successes to ensure they fit your brand well.
• Negotiate terms that outline the scope of work, deliverables, timelines, compensation, and usage rights for the content created.
• Work closely with the influencer to develop content that feels genuine to their style while effectively conveying your brand’s message.
• Encourage influencers to share content across their social networks to maximize reach and impact.
• Track engagement rates, website traffic, and conversion rates from influencer posts to assess the partnership’s effectiveness.

4. Offer exclusive social discounts

67% of brands use social media to offer discounts to their customers. While discounts primarily aim to increase sales, you can also use exclusive social discounts as a brand awareness campaign on your chosen platform.

Chamberlain Coffee uses this strategy to boost sales and engagement alike. The company offers exclusive discounts to its followers, promoting special codes for holidays and events like Black Friday. This strategy helps them increase engagement on special occasions.

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Take a page from Chamberlain Coffee’s book and offer special discounts exclusively to your social media followers. This will encourage loyalty, likes, comments, and shares.

To increase brand awareness using this strategy, take the following steps:

• Design attractive offers: Choose discounts your audience will love and that are sustainable for your business. Exclusive discounts, limited-time promotions, or bundle deals often work well.
• Use eye-catching images or videos: Visual content is more likely to be noticed and shared on social media.
• Include hashtags and keywords: Increase the visibility of your promotion with hashtags relevant to your products, brand, and audience.
• Add a sense of urgency: Use countdowns or highlight the limited availability of your offer to encourage quick action from your audience.
• Ask your followers to share: Leverage the networking power of social media by asking your followers to share the deal with friends who might be interested.

5. Measure and optimize your awareness campaigns

Measuring and optimizing your social media strategy is an ongoing cycle of improvement. By monitoring the performance of your brand awareness campaigns, you can adjust your strategy to gain better results.

Some of the social media metrics you should keep an eye on include:

• Engagement rate: Monitor likes, comments, shares, and other forms of interaction to understand how engaging your content is.
• Reach and impressions: Measure your brand’s visibility by tracking how many people see your content and how often.
• Follower growth: Track the rate at which your social media following increases, indicating brand interest.
• Click-through rate (CTR): Analyze how effectively your content drives traffic to your website or landing pages.
• Conversion rate: Monitor how many interactions lead to desired actions, such as purchases or sign-ups, directly attributing social media efforts to business outcomes.

Data can be found on both social media platforms and third-party tools. Use them to track your progress, listen for mentions of your brand, and monitor social media trends related to your industry.

Learn how to increase brand awareness on social media

Social media is a dynamic ecosystem where listening, engaging, and evolving based on your audience’s feedback can transform your brand from just another voice into a trusted, sought-after source of information. You can elevate your brand above the noise by:

1. Honing in on specific platforms that resonate with your core audience
2. Crafting a content strategy that speaks directly to their needs and interests
3. Using the power of influencer partnerships
4. Enticing your audience with exclusive discounts
5. Continually refining your approach based on data-driven insights