Growing your brand is just as important as growing your business. Your brand & business work hand in hand, but the way you grow each is different.
Growing your business is more than likely to increase your income, while building your brand should be focused on growing the community your business connects with. That doesn’t mean your brand community won’t lead to sales and income. That might well be the case too.
When growing your brand, you are not focusing on what products you sell or the income and revenue gained, instead you’re concentrating on the level of engagement, reach & exposure.
Brand is Bigger
When it comes to your brand, public perception and respect is key. Instead of the message being about pushing products and driving sales, the focus of the engagement is more about how you make people feel. Giving inspiration when inspiration is needed, cheering someone up on a bad day, encouraging a “thanks for this” or “you’ve made my day”, this type of engagement is worth more than any product you sell. It encourages emotive association with your brand which in turn encourages people to ‘remember’ how your brand made them feel.
Using Social Media
Despite a divide in opinion when it comes to personal accounts, social media for your brand / business is one of the most useful tools you can use. For one, it’s basically free advertising and the quickest way to reach thousands of users just by post sharing.
But to fully optimise the exposure of your brand & business on social media here are some tips:
Brand Identity
Have you got colour, a design, a logo, that identifies and distinguishes the brand in your customers minds? The design and logo should be used for your profile pictures, banners and placed on artwork you post.
Links On Your Website
To boost traffic to your social media, links should be placed on your website clearly labelled. Then to help boost traffic to your website throughout social media, share links should be placed within your social media posts.
Using social media mark-up can also help to make your share posts appear more professional, with custom artwork, titles and descriptions.
Posting Times & Frequency
Because you are active on social media, it doesn’t mean all your followers are!
An example. Posting between 9 – 11am on a weekday will likely limit your exposure. People are in employment, or getting their household tasks done, or nipping to the shops. During these times, many people are not sat scrolling on social media. When people are busy, your posts are missed and not interacted with. It wastes your time and creates a poor emotive association with your brand.
Scheduling your posts at key times in the day is paramount for your post exposure.
The times to consider posting are in the morning before 9am, lunch breaks and in the evenings when people have returned home. If you cannot be active during these times, use your time wisely to research and schedule your posts.
There is no rule that says you should or shouldn’t post every hour! If you don’t have anything to say, don’t force it.
Mix Up Your Content
To create successful engagement, have a look at what others do. You will probably find the one thing they do most often is have a variety of content that they post, such as:
- • Effective imagery
- • Videos
- • Polls
- • Links to articles / blogs
- • Competitions
- • Links to website(s)
You MUST be consistent with your branding, colours and design. Pick colours that are easy on the eye and don’t interfere with your logo.
The more difficult your post is to read, the quicker it will be disregarded!
They key thing to remember is…DON’T annoy your followers and DON’T fill up their feed!
Spreading your positive messages, backed with good content, at the right time will help your brand gain respect as well as gaining sale leads for your business.
From everyone here at CM Web Solutions, we hope you’re well and thanks for reading.