Social media has already become an excellent tool for businesses. Most of the brands have accounts on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and others, as it is really a necessity today. If you want to work with people, you need to communicate with them, and social networks are the best variant for contacting the target audience.
And here appears one more challenge: how to attract customers? What is the best way to show people your products are the solution for people’s problems? How to make your brand outstanding, memorable, and unique on social media? That is the point when social media branding can help you. Your brand identity is that thing that will be able to introduce you to people even before they become your customers.
The Importance of Social Media Branding
Social media branding is a powerful way to connect with consumers on a much more personal level. It is at times one of the first contact points users may have with you, introducing them to what you do and who you are. It’s also a fantastic way to develop long-term relationships with potential users who will in the future become regular customers. But how do you know when it is time to engage? When do you start to create a buzz about your company and your product or service?
The key to successful social media branding is able to create a conversation within the community. This doesn’t mean that your company should be spamming the discussion boards or that you should be shouting into the void. Instead, by being aware of how you look or what words you choose to use, you can help your conversation move beyond the visual means by taking a subtle approach. Of course, there will always be a chance to engage with a visual medium, so it is essential to be aware of this fact.
Business branding involves the process of establishing a company’s unique identity in the marketplace so that consumers recognize your products and services regularly and consistently come back to purchase them. For the smaller business owner or the new entrepreneur, establishing an effective and consistent brand takes time and a significant amount of money. Larger businesses have more resources to spend on branding, but you do not need an Apple-size bank account just to develop an effective branding scheme from scratch. There are many simple things you can do at home to help your company stand out, capture your customers’ interest, and make your company memorable without blowing your budget.
Brand Marketing Strategy
An excellent way to create visual brand awareness is to include clear and concise graphics and icons that tell the user who the brand is and what they can expect from the product or service. Some brands have also found success by including streaming video, rich internet applications, and photo galleries. Using these tools, you can create a higher level of engagement than ever before and provide an opportunity to reach out to and speak directly to the target audience. In addition, by implementing analytics in your strategy, you can ensure that your marketing efforts are being measured and that your results reflect your true ROI.
So what are the main elements of creating an identity you need to include in your brand marketing strategy?
Determine the Idea of Your Brand
People like communicating with other people, other personalities, so it would be best if your brand also had its character. If you just try to sell something to people, they are less likely to be interested in interacting with you and even following you on social media. To make your audience interested, determine the main idea of your business, what it is about, what your position is on questions related to your sphere.
People love stories, as well. So it is also an excellent idea to let your audience know why you have started your business, how you have done it, and why you consider it important. These stories that can form a series of posts (or Highlights, if you are running an Instagram account) can also become a part of your idea and your identity.
Create Your Logo
One thing you can start doing right away is to create a logo or business identity card for your company. This is the face of your company on the world wide web, so it has to be something that people can associate with, like your logo and tagline. Branding helps people to remember who you are as well as what your company does. Creating a logo, developing a slogan, and a tagline help create an effective branding scheme.
Working on your logo, remember that it should express the main idea of your brand and help users understand it. As these are two parts of your identity, they should be in harmony; that is why hiring a professional designer for creating a logo can be a good idea.
Develop Your Style With Colors and Graphics
You should also consider the combination of colors when you select a color scheme to enhance the look of your website and the products and services you offer. This color scheme should include 2-4 colors that you will use in the future for all your visual materials: videos, images, banners, packages and wrappings, etc. That is why you should choose these colors carefully and make sure that they make a good combination.
Another way to create brand recognition is to include graphics, pictures, and images in your posts on social media and the same elements to your website. For example, using clipart, icons, and graphics in your web pages, posts, and product brochures helps people remember your products and services by associating them with images. You should take time to position these images in a way that makes sense within the context of the entire social media account or the website so that people can quickly identify the content on the page when they first see it.
Choose Your Tone of Voice
The tone of voice describes the way in which you communicate with your audience and develop the brand identity of any piece of writing or artwork. In addition, the tone of voice also reflects your brand persona, helps you differentiate yourself from your competitors, and creates an identity for you as a company.
When it comes to speaking to your audience, one of the best ways to do so is to talk to the youth in your target market using youthful tones of speech as social media such as Facebook and Twitter are flooded with younger generation members who can be your best customers. But, at the same time, you need your tone of voice would also be versatile enough to be suitable for an older generation.
The best way is to choose one of the main categories, such as informative, humorous, official, etc., and follow this style, avoiding any specific slang of people of different generations.
Promoting Your Brand Identity
When you consider your brand identity is entirely developed and ready to use, it is time to implement your brand marketing strategy. Here, you will have three main tools to promote your brand: text posts, graphics (such as photos, images, collages, etc.), and videos. All of them will combine visual elements with the tone of voice. Let’s take a closer look at each of these tools.
Posts
As we have already mentioned, it is crucial to speak to your audience like a human, not like a seller. So in text posts, you can entirely express your ideas using the tone of voice you have chosen. In addition, you can tell stories, joke, and engage people to interact with you using direct call-to-action, for example, inviting users to leave their opinions on some questions in the comments.
Though text plays the central role here, you also need to attach a picture or a video to your post as people are more likely to read the text if it is complemented with a colorful visual element. That is where you need to make sure that your visual style and tone of voice suit each other: a post should be smooth and should not make an impression of two completely different parts put together.
Videos
Videos are the most popular content type today; that is why they are definitely worth using in your brand strategy. You can shoot videos about your products, do interviews with your staff, create slideshows and video presentations, and much more – it’s up to your creativity. Producing videos, you should use all the visual elements that are parts of your brand: a video should be made in your brand colors, include your logo, and contain your brand graphics.
The tone of voice also plays an important role here: whether you are speaking in front of a camera, recording a voiceover for a video presentation, or making titles for a slideshow, all the text should be of one style. Remember about the tone of your brand even while writing scenarios for videos.
Photos and Images
Such graphics as pictures or photos are necessary as illustrations or as separate posts. Probably, images are one of the strongest tools for creating brand awareness as they are also used in static advertisements, banners, as a background for text, etc. So while creating an image or editing a photo – by background removal for example – to post on your social media, consider using colors of your brand, add graphic elements that highlight your identity, and add your logo on the image.
If this is going to be a kind of collage with the text, take into account your tone of voice. Even if you want to add a short description to a picture, you should make sure this description matches your style and tone.
Tools and Services
To bring your brand marketing strategy to life, you can hire professionals such as designers, copywriters, and videographers. However, if you aim to save money, you can choose from the tools listed below to make videos and images by yourself and publish them on different resources.
Joturl
If you want to reach great results, you need to use great tools – and Joturl is one of such tools as it lets you work on your projects carefully with the help of professional instruments. Monitoring activities and analyzing data are essential when you are working on branding on social media. Joturl is an all-in-one suite for working with your projects and campaigns, creating branded links, tracking and monitoring links, and much more. This tool provides numerous opportunities for analyzing various statistics and trends, views and clicks tracking, conversions tracking, and more. Joturl also supports team working and different integrations and offers advanced security options. If you were looking for one tool to work with multiple social media accounts, Joturl will probably be the best variant. It suits perfectly for improving the visibility of your brand on social media and maintaining popularity of your company.
Fastreel Video Editor
Fastreel is an online service that can help you create videos for your brand. There are two modes: tools and templates, and both of them can be helpful. More than 20 various tools can help you edit your footage in detail; you can cut, crop, mute, reverse your video, and much more. It is also possible to create slideshows in this mode. In the templates mode, you can choose one of the ready-made templates that already include effects, add your media files and text – and a simple, colorful video is ready.
Canva
Canva is a service for creating various graphic elements. You can use it for editing images and applying effects to them. Also, there are numerous presets for different kinds of publications: Instagram posts and stories, logo, collage, presentation, invitation, flyer, and much more. Moreover, there are dozens of colorful templates for each of the presets. So you can choose one, upload your image or images, make minimum changes and get a professional-looking design in a few minutes, even if you are a novice in creating graphics.
Sprout
SproutSocial is an all-in-one management tool for multiple social media accounts. Using this tool, you can publish content on different platforms from one window. It is also possible to create a content strategy and make a content plan, schedule publications, set timers, and more. Moreover, this service also provides analytics for your publications. Therefore, the tool can be highly convenient for one user and for a team as everyone will be able to see the content plan, so it will be much easier to keep your team aware of your content strategy.
People First Content
It can appear that you can make everything by yourself, except texts. In this case, you can save your time and energy and contact People First Content. It is a team of professional researchers, writers, editors, and designers; they can help you with creating texts of any complexity from scratch. Contacting this team, you can be sure you will get a high-quality illustrated text you only need to post on your social media.
Social Media Branding Tips
We have already overviewed all the critical points of branding your business. And here are a few tips for you to feel more confident (even if a brand marketing strategy is a new field for you) and make your brand identity brilliant.
Use Certain Fonts
Along with the logo and the color scheme, fonts are an essential part of your visual style. Therefore, it would be best to choose one or two fonts that would fit your graphics and use them in your videos and images on your website.
You can use such resources as Google Fonts or Font Squirrel to look for additional free fonts.
Choose a Brand Hashtag
A brand hashtag can work perfectly, not only for Instagram posts. You can turn it into an element of your visual style, adding it onto pictures and photos together with your logo. Thus, this hashtag can become recognizable on all platforms you use, and if your audience wants to join you on Instagram, they can search this hashtag and find your account even if they don’t know its title.
Look for Inspiration
If you are at the beginning of creating your brand identity, this advice can be one of the most important for you. Do not hesitate to look at others; you can notice details that can inspire you to develop your brand in a way you did not imagine before. Or you can take several different ideas and create something completely new.
There are many brands with a very strong brand identity that can be excellent examples. Some of these brands are known worldwide, like Apple or Starbucks. But there are also less known small companies whose identity is also worth attention, for example, Bird and Turo.
Conclusion
Now you know everything you need to know to build a brand identity and create brand awareness on social media. So let your creativity flow, develop your strategy, use tools to make amazing videos and pictures – and probably one day, your brand will also become famous worldwide.
Author bio
Victoria is a content manager at Movavi . She specializes in writing user-friendly content and researching complex topics of marketing, social media and blogging to make them easy to understand for other people.
