Consistent investment in digital marketing to grow brand recognition and recall yields credibility, trust, and loyalty. These positives result from a business creating strong emotional or value-based bonds with potential and existing clients, encouraging the clients to choose the business over competitors. Nonetheless, there’s a hitch!

Transitioning a target audience from basic brand recognition to immediate brand recall is becoming a tougher task by the day. Why?

Constant social media and search engine algorithm updates, increased data privacy concerns, Ad fraud, Ad blockers, and short-lived attention.

If these challenges are hindering you from getting natural brand advocacy and repeat business as a result of brand recall, this is for you. This comprehensive guide takes you through a “social media-first” approach for brand awareness. 
Proven to work for both B2B and B2C businesses, this approach or strategy boosts brand awareness effectively by combining the efficacy of social media and other forms of digital marketing. Explore!

Why a “Social Media-First” Approach?

The numbers say it all. Statistics indicate that by 2027, we should have approximately 5.85 billion social media users. Moreover, the numbers say that 90% of social media users follow one or more brands on social media.

Overall, most statistical sources indicate that social media has a greater potential of powering brand awareness.

No doubt about it, other forms of digital marketing including content and Email marketing do help with creating brand awareness. However, social media stands out for combining the following elements into one package:

1. Instant, two-way communication and live engagement 

Popular social media platforms including X, Facebook, and TikTok enable their users to interact through comments, messages, and posts. They also include live features, enabling users to host real-time events like Q&A sessions or competitive quizzing. 

As a brand, the ability to communicate directly with your audience gives you the chance to showcase credibility and authority in your industry. You also get the chance to respond to your audiences’ questions or opinions, creating an interactive experience. 

An interactive experience fosters trust, making your brand approachable and encouraging users to share content about your brand and promote it organically. 

1. Organic growth and viral reach

When you post content on social media, the target audience interacts with it by commenting, liking, or sharing. Therefore, despite having a low following or audience, creating valuable content increases the chances of your audience sharing the content to other networks.

Other than organic content sharing, your content may go viral as a result of a wider audience strongly relating with it. You can also create content on trending topics or hashtags to ride the wave of virality. Either way, going viral amplifies brand awareness, supporting your brand’s natural audience growth. 

1. User-Generated Content (UGC) and influencers

Besides supporting two-way engagement between brands and target consumers, social media serves as a tool for organic brand endorsement through user-generated content and influencers. 

While UGC creators feature brand services or products within their content, influencers promote brands to their established follower base, boosting brand visibility and credibility.

Collaborating with UGC creators and influencers increases the chances of boosting brand awareness compared to the brand’s organic content. Why? Because potential and existing consumers trust and deeply connect with peer-created content compared to brand content which may look like another Ad. 

1. Community building

Regular or consistent engagement with consumers on various social media platforms fosters a sense of connection and belonging. 

As a brand, you consistently post content, respond to comments, and organize live events to keep your target group updated and engaged. The target audience, on the other hand, share their opinions and participate in discussions with your brand and among themselves.

This exchange between your brand and the target audience eventually results in a sense of community, making the target group feel obligated to spread the brand’s message. 

Over time, the target group shares content and keeps participating in discussions, prompting you to build a group or channel on a select platform like Telegram or WhatsApp to facilitate community discussions.

When you have your existing or potential customers in one place (group or channel), it gets easier to obtain feedback, respond to inquiries, and share user-generated content, encouraging the members to organically endorse the brand to those yet to join the community.

1. Rich media support and content diversity

Other than product or service preferences, potential consumers also have content preferences. While some prefer short-form videos, podcasts, or articles, some prefer infographics, animations, and high-quality visuals.

To help you keep various audience groups engaged or entertained, social media platforms support video, text, graphical, and more content formats. Yours is to adapt content into varied formats, post and assess the analytics. The analytics should reveal the content format that’s getting more attention.

Broadly speaking, these five reasons make social media marketing the optimal starting point to develop and enhance brand awareness. However, that does not mean we’ll skip using the other forms of digital marketing. 

Here is a strategic approach to use social media as the primary tool for brand awareness and other digital marketing tactics as secondary tools.

Using Social Media and Digital Marketing for Brand Awareness

1. Reference your brand identity and messaging

Look at a brand like Shopify. Their brand identity is empowerment, simplicity, and entrepreneurship. And, their primary message is mostly around starting, running, and growing a business. 

Shopify’s brand identity and messaging is consistent. From their visual elements to the socials, you can evidently see their purpose, vision, and values shaping how we perceive them. That’s the power of establishing a clear brand identity and messaging. 

1. Pick the ideal social media platform

With your brand’s purpose, vision, core values, and messaging in mind, proceed to find a social media platform aligning with your target audience’s needs and values. 

Note that different social media platforms serve varied demographics better. Your goal is to choose one with the potential of significantly driving brand awareness. For example, if you own a B2B brand, LinkedIn can be your choice to share industry and thought leadership insights.   

1. Craft a content strategy and publish regularly

Understand that a content strategy for developing or boosting brand awareness focuses on taking the target audiences through the stages of brand awareness. That’s from unawareness to aided awareness to unaided awareness, and finally to the coveted top-of-mind awareness. 

You move the target audience from not knowing your brand to eventually making it a priority.

To craft an effective strategy, reference your initial campaigns to select a target audience based on their level of awareness. For instance, if the initial campaigns analytics indicate success in moving the target audience from unawareness to aided awareness, then you may decide to retarget the group.

Overall, the key aspects of an optimal brand awareness content strategy include defining a target audience, setting clear goals, crafting a clear brand message, and defining the content type and format. Once you have all these in place, you define the performance metrics to monitor, create a content calendar and post consistently.

Actively engage with your audience in the comment section or through polls and questions. Note that the primary goal is to foster a bond with the target audience through memorable experiences throughout the journey to top-of-mind awareness. 

1. Tap into paid social media ad strategies

Organic growth takes consistency and patience. Considering that the algorithms of most social media platforms favor personal content over branded content, it may take even longer to see results. To counter this downside, tap into paid social media ad strategies.

Social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok include paid Ads, allowing you to target audiences with precision. You get to target audiences based on current cookies or user data like interests, behaviors, gender, age, and location.

The data is usually readily available, enabling you to create campaigns focused on increasing post engagement, number of followers, or more video views to build awareness. You can also optimize costs by using paid Ads to boost the visibility of well-performing organic posts.  

1. Create and nurture a community

   

The key to lasting brand awareness is community building. As you post content regularly, join in on conversations in the comment section. Consider hosting live events and addressing common consumer concerns. Allow your target audience to ask questions and critique. This directly builds familiarity and trust.

Over time, you’ll have a loyal following or community around your brand. When you get to this point, you can create a group or channel to host your community. Then, you nurture the community progressively, encouraging them to endorse your brand organically. 

As part of nurturing the community, incorporate other forms of digital marketing like content and email marketing. In-depth content like blog posts and eBooks provide more value to the community members, positioning your brand as an expert and building trust. 

Moreover, offering exclusive content or discounts through personalized emails to the most active community members encourages them to share word about the community. You may also partner with community members to create UGC content as part of the process of elevating brand awareness.

Closing Words

Solid brand presence gives your brand a competitive edge, sustains brand equity, eases the introduction of new products, and strengthens brand credibility and authority. However, enjoying these benefits of brand awareness takes strategic decision-making and consistent action.

To help you optimize your spending on developing brand awareness, this blog post takes you through a “social media-first” approach. This approach combines the efficacy of social media and other digital marketing tactics to build extensive brand awareness.

Explore every step of the approach keenly and take action. Monitor analytics to keep improving the approach. Over time, you should have a loyal brand community, translating to repeat customers who feel comfortable and confident purchasing from your brand and endorsing it organically.