Social media platforms have changed the way people meet, interact, access information, receive news, and share their messages. Platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even TikTok have helped companies get their brand out into the world.
Managing a successful social media account is not an easy task – there is a lot of time, energy, and strategy that goes into it – but allocating the proper resources to do so can benefit your organization greatly. While social media isn’t the only solution, it is one of the many assets a company can utilize to meet its goals. At JDPR we have applied our 30+ years of experience in strategic communication and marketing to help our clients run successful social media campaigns to meet many business goals including building brand awareness, engaging with their audiences and building their online reputation.
1. Building Brand Awareness: Brand awareness, or how familiar people are with a brand, is the first step on the customer’s path to brand loyalty. Utilizing social media is often a cost-efficient way to grow brand awareness because of social media’s rich reservoir of potential customers. More than 50% of the entire world population* uses some form of social media. The opportunities for content and collaboration are nearly endless and a strong social media presence can help you accomplish loyalty between your customers and your brand.
Committing to building and nurturing your social presence can be a significant stepping stone toward reaching the broader goal of knowing and growing your audience.
2. Engaging with your Audience: While building brand awareness is the first step in the customer journey, the next step – driving engagement – is one way a brand can convert followers into customers through sales conversion. Conversions can take the form of e-commerce sales or inquiries into your website. Though the large number of social platform users is enticing, it’s important to cater your message for your target audience(s). Chances are, you already have some idea about who your target audience is. Utilizing social media’s advanced audience demographic data can help you better understand who your actual audience is, how to target them, what their interests are and deepen discoveries of similar audience segments.
Once you have a better understanding of who is engaging with your page(s), you can begin creating targeted content and positioning your brand to fit their wants and needs. While creating content that resonates is not an easy task, most social media platforms provide analytics that can help determine what types of content yield the best results within specific audience segments.
Apart from creating content that encourages engagement from your customers, an active presence on social media by which you engage with your customers can also help you build, maintain or improve your overall online reputation.
3. Building your Online Reputation: Often the first, and sometimes only, engagement a customer has with your brand is online. Having a clear and succinct message through all platforms is a great first step in building your online reputation. This develops credibility and trust and adds to your overall brand equity.
You can utilize social media to build and manage your online reputation. Though time-consuming, this can be as simple as responding to messages and comments in a timely manner as well as replying to posts in which users tag your brand. Social media provides companies with a unique, direct link to their customers.
So, while not every business needs an active social media presence to achieve its goals, social media is an increasingly effective tool for building brand awareness, knowing, growing and engaging with your audience, and building your online reputation. To learn more about how social media can help your business, reach out to us at jdpr.com or give us a call at (864) 233-3776.
*According to research reported in July 2022 by We Are Social and Hootsuite.