How to Promote Your Brand With Every Single Post

Over two billion people per day log on to social media. In order to make the most of your presence on sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, you must be able to successfully promote and reinforce your brand with each interaction. By developing best practices that focus on your brand, you can create a consistent social media presence that allows fans and followers to recognize you instantly, while simultaneously enhancing the customer experience.

Create Visual Consistency in Your Profiles

When customers visit your social media profiles, they expect recognize that it’s yours. Using default backgrounds or inconsistent graphic elements will confuse visitors and may lead them to believe they’ve landed on the wrong page.  Be sure that each profile uses the same color pallet, incorporates the same fonts, and showcases your logo. Use cover photos and backgrounds from your existing marketing materials, or develop new images designed especially for social media.  This will create a consistent experience for visitors and reinforce your brand image with each view.

Hashtag With Purpose

Everyone has experienced hashtag overload, and everyone has been put off by too many hashtags in a single post. Hashtags should be used carefully, and with purpose. It can be beneficial to create hashtags that are associated with your products and services. They can be variations of your company tagline, the name of your best selling products, or they can piggyback off of trending hashtags.  When attempting to brand your own hashtags, remember that they probably won’t take off overnight, but they will help create consistency when your fans and followers view your posts.

Watermark Your Images

Images that aren’t watermarked are prime targets for copyright infringement. Watermarking images not only protects your intellectual property, but it also reinforces your brand with each view. Watermark your photos and graphics with your company logo near the corner of the image. Do not cover the image, and always leave a little room at the border so that it looks like the logo belongs in the picture.

Create Image Post Templates

Resizing an image for each social media platform can be extremely time consuming and tedious work.  Create templates for the types of image posts you share on a regular basis. Those templates may be industry tips, newsworthy items, events, contests or product information.  Creating a consistent template for each type of image content will not only save your team time, but it will also reinforce your brand by making those posts instantly recognizable by fans and followers.  They will know just by looking at the format what the post is about.

Retweet and Like With Care

When a brand is new to a social media platform, it can go overboard with retweeting, sharing, liking, and commenting in an effort to attract new followers.  Social media engagement is equally important for networking with influencers in your niche, so companies should always keep a close eye on the content they endorse. Remember that re-sharing and liking is your vote of support, so select only those posts that support your organizational values and mission, and avoid political or hot-button issues.

Provide Strong Customer Service

Ignoring customer service on social media can be the kiss of death for a brand. Customers now expect that their questions, complaints, and suggestions will be acknowledged by brands on social media. Respond to customer service posts with a prompt and polite acknowledgment of the message. Then take the conversation private through Direct Messaging, chat, or asking the customer for their telephone number or email address.  This allows you to manage the issue behind the scenes, while showing the customer (and everyone watching) that your brand responds to customer issues quickly and effectively.

Develop Social Media Best Practices

If more than one person will have access to social media profiles, it will be necessary to create a best practice guide to ensure that your brand message remains consistent with each post. These best practices should include a library of approved logos and fonts, suggested and approved hashtags, maximum posts per day per platform, acceptable terminology, topics to avoid, industry influencers to retweet, etc. In order to promote your brand effectively on social media, you must be able to control your brand messaging effectively.

When developing any marketing strategy, it’s important that each and every component promotes and reinforces your brand.  When you view social media through this lens, it will help you strengthen customer relationships and convert casual followers into loyal fans.

Engage Customers with Effective Content Campaigns

The concept of content campaigns has by now become a popular technique in online marketing. The idea is simple. Instead of copy-pasting advertising formats from traditional platforms like TV, radio, and print into the digital universe – where those formats mostly fall on deaf ears – marketers had to come up with new, more interactive, and more engaging formulas that would capture their customers’ attention.

This has been true and continues to become more important for both customer-facing (B2C) as well as business-serving (B2B) businesses. Entertaining video campaigns, helpful industry eBooks, and informative podcasts – among many other content formats – have increasingly come to replace older, boring formats like display ads (inspired by print) and pre-rolls (inspired by TV).

And four years after Google implemented its Panda Update, which penalizes marketers who spam the Internet with low quality content, it is starting to become more clear what works and what doesn’t. So let’s take a look at how you can engage customers with effective content campaigns.

Effective (Do it!)

• Know Your Audience. It’s easy to put yourself and your needs first, but it won’t help you increase brand exposure or product sales. Resist the temptation of thinking about you (or your company) first and take some time to put on the shoes of your target customer. Then ask yourself, “When do my customers consume content?” “What are they truly interested in and engaged with?” and “How do they consume content? Online? Offline? Desktop? Mobile? Etc.”

• Be Authentic.  Once you understand what your audience is looking for, it’s time to think about ways in which you might satisfy them. It is important, however, not to get carried away with their demands and completely forget who you are and what your brand is all about. The ideal content lies somewhere between your customers’ demands and your company’s needs. Take Panera Bread’s “Clean Ingredients” campaign, for example; they asked regular people on the street to spell the complicated names of artificial ingredients that will no longer be in Panera Bread products. While this resulted in a fun and entertaining series of videos, it also provided some valuable information about nutrition, which is both what their consumers want as well as what their brand is about.

• Tell Stories. We all know this feeling; as soon as you can tell that someone is reading off a script or trying to market to you, your attention goes out the window and you want it all to be over very fast. Well, your potential customers are no different. So instead of boring them with generic marketing messages, use videos, audio, images, graphics and blogs to tell intriguing and unique stories. This can range from company-internal “secrets” to personal anecdotes and experiences. (See also Hootsuite’s example below.)

• Tie In Pop Culture. If you can find a clever, non-cheesy way to tie pop cultural references and trending topics into your content campaign, by all means do it. You would benefit not only from the organic traffic the trending topic is already providing, but if you do it right, you could also score bonus points with that particular fan community (which should, of course, align with your target audience). Hootsuite, a company that provides a social media management tool, did this perfectly with their video titled “A Game of Social Thrones.” Watch it here.

Ineffective (Don’t Do It)

• Care Little About Quality. In the race to getting audience attention, some marketers (they shall remain unnamed) have started creating content just for the sake of having content that reaches an audience. The old saying, “Good, fast, cheap – pick two,” rings true, however, when it comes to content marketing. If you don’t have the means to produce high quality content, you are probably better off not creating any content at all.

• Bombard Customers. Just as important as the quality of your content is its quantity. While you most certainly want to distribute fresh content on a frequent basis, you should avoid overwhelming your audience with too much goodness. Even if it is all of spectacular quality, too much of it can quickly turn into white noise. To keep an eye on audience engagement, try to use free tools like Google Analytics or bit.ly (a link shortener and tracker), or paid services like Hootsuite or Hubspot.

• Produce Something In All Available Content Formats. Even if you had a huge budget and staff, producing all kinds of content in all available formats might still not be a good idea. Instead, you should focus on the ones that make sense for and directly relate to your brand, products, and services. If you run an informative blog, for example, chances are that your readers will also be interested in reading an eBook … a YouTube style Vlogger video targeted at teenagers? Not so much.

• Take Yourself Too Seriously. Customers love it when brands have enough confidence to poke fun at themselves. IKEA, for example, showed the world that it can laugh at itself and its quirky culture with its web-series “Easy to Assemble.” So show a sense of humor and don’t take yourself too seriously.

Whatever you end up doing with your digital content, do it like real human beings would. In general, users of the Internet and social media most respond to brands that show their “real” face rather than their well-polished marketing appearance more appropriate for traditional media platforms.

How to Engage in Social Media Outreach

In the old days, there tended to be a very clear division between marketing and sales, namely that marketing would put out a message into the market that would attract potential customers, and sales would either directly reach out to those potential customers (direct sales) or respond to inquiries about the product they are trying to sell (customer service).

Nowadays, with the integration of social media into the marketing mix, connecting with potential customers directly has become much easier and increasingly part of the marketing team’s responsibility.

What’s Unique About Social Media?

Some traditional outreach techniques included activities like cold calling and door-to-door sales, both of which confronted the sales person with a customer they barely knew anything about.

With social media, you can learn about your customer’s behavior and interests online, which makes it much easier to tailor your marketing slogans and sales outreach to specific target groups and get higher returns.

What’s more, you are now able to analyze your customer’s behavior not only before you reach out to them, but also while and after, as you will continue to see in real-time which conversations they might engage in or what kind of profile updates they carry out.

So how exactly do you engage in social media outreach?

Outreach Techniques

There are many different ways to conduct social media outreach, but at the core of all the techniques listed below is one simple principle: you have to engage in a conversation your potential customer is already involved in rather than contacting them out of the blue with irrelevant sales.

Twitter

• You can “follow” your prospects simply by pushing the “Follow” button on their profile page. Then, they will get a notification saying you followed them, which hopefully entices them to check out what you are offering and then “follow you back.” To be extra efficient, follow them at times when they just had a conversation that directly relates to your product or services.

• Another way to get on people’s radar is to “favorite” their Twitter posts – the ones relevant to your business – by clicking the little star at the bottom of the message window.

• You can also interact with their Twitter posts (aka “Tweets”) by replying to them with a valuable insight or relevant comment. To do so, click the little arrow button below the original Tweet.

• If you have a coupon or promotion, or even a blog on your site that you believe your prospective customer might be interested in, you can “direct message” them and provide them with a link accompanied by a fun, nice, or witty note (depending on what your brand voice is.)

Facebook

• Facebook doesn't have a limit on how many characters you can use in a post, so it tends to provide a much more conversational environment than Twitter. One of the ways to reach out to your target audience is by posting an inspiring or provocative image, for example, and asking Facebook users to express their reactions in the comment section below.

While Facebook allows more characters, it still has many similarities to Twitter when it comes to social media outreach. Here are the Facebook equivalents to the Twitter techniques listed above:

• “Invite” users to “Like” your company Facebook page = “Follow”

• “Like” other people’s posts = “Favorite”

• “Comment” on other people’s posts = “Reply”

• “Direct Message” = “Direct Message”

LinkedIn

• Because of its inherent business nature, LinkedIn is a great place for B2B businesses to do social media outreach. What’s unique about this social network is that you can organize discussion groups around specific topics that directly relate to your company or product. In curating these discussions you will not only be able to establish a certain authority, but also connect with people in a two-way conversation.

Similar to Facebook and Twitter, there are equivalents on LinkedIn as follows:

• “Connect” with users = “Invite” = “Follow”

• “Like” other people’s blog posts = “Like” = “Favorite”

• “Comment” on other people’s blog posts = “Comment” = “Reply”

• “Send InMail” = “Direct Message” = “Direct Message”

Conclusion

Social media provides all the tools to both research qualified leads as well as reach out to potential customers based on their recent activity. As a result, you will not only be able to work more efficiently due to a plethora of valuable data, but also increase overall response rates and ROI.

One last tip: make sure to act like a person, not a company, when reaching out to people. It’s called “social” media after all. For more information on this and other marketing and communications related subjects, check out Ragan’s PR Daily’s content and resources.