Raising Your B2B Brand Awareness

Welcome to our 3rd step to social media success - ‘Awareness’

You’ve read our previous blogs about listening and researching as the starting points on your quest to social media success, right?

If not, feel free to click the links to see what you’ve been missing...

• Are you Listening?
• Research your market!

Otherwise, lets get started...

Awareness - let’s give your B2B brand awareness a lift

The next step for your B2B social media success is to create brand awareness. Yes you’ve done some research and you’ve listened to your potential audience, but how do you encourage your target audience to listen to you and pay attention to your brand? The power of social networking as a branding tool should not be underestimated. Social engagement, while it doesn’t have the power to build a brand by itself, is a very powerful element of marketing strategy in today’s world. It can strengthen the relationship between you and your customers and can help to give a human face to your brand. Be careful though, putting your company on a social platform and not being responsive can damage your reputation, although, we’ll get to that in a later blog...

Content Marketing is still king

Have you got your content strategy for your chosen social media outlined? If not, you will need to clearly decide how you want to communicate online and stick to it. Some questions to ask yourself are; How often will I post? What will I post about? Will I use imagery and videos? Will I go down the personal route and mention my staff and clients? Have a look at what your competitors are doing online and take inspiration from them. You may have heard people evangelize about content marketing or state that content is king. Well it is! The best way to get your brand noticed is to develop killer content for your relevant target audience. You will have already clarified who the target audience is during your research stage, if not, click here to find out more about researching your audience before embarking on a successful social media campaign.

Once you have your content strategy developed, start with building the platform with this information. Relevant and interesting content about your company and your area of business is what your listeners want to read about. The general idea is to use social networks to give a more casual slant to your online presence whilst still maintaining your corporate integrity.

You’ve built it - now let them know it’s there

Prior to going on a liking or following spree why not consider a social media launch? Start with your own business, your clients and your website. Why not make all associated colleagues and consumers aware of your new presence on social media and encourage them to like the brand’s page to get the ball rolling? If the page has created some interest and has a number of fans already, it will be easier to encourage other potential audience members to like your page. They’ll want to see what all the fuss is about! Consider adding linked social media logos to your site to make it easier for web visitors to find your social profiles. These web visitors are already on your website and they’re interested in the company so these people count - make it easy for them! Offline marketing materials should be given some thought as well such as business cards and letter heads.

Don’t forget that your offline marketing can help your online efforts

After the launch, you must stick at it and continue to promote your social presence. Adding logos to your website and business cards is one strategy, but what about letting customers know face to face about your social media presence? This is especially key to audience building. The above piece of advice about online promotion is potentially great if your customer is visiting you virtually, but what about the customers that physically visit your business? Depending on your trade, if the customer is on your premises you could offer an incentive to like your social media page; ‘Check in with us on Facebook and receive a complimentary website audit, a report on trends in your industry, a jazzy info-graphic, a free consultation...’, you get the picture. It’s these clever giveaways when coupled with your content strategy that will become the nucleus of your successful digital strategy. Offline incentives are probably more worthwhile as the customer has already gone to the trouble of visiting your business and interacting with you, so why not ask them to engage on social media as well?

Engagement through relevant and interesting content is a key factor in establishing a long-term relationship with your audience. The more interactive your posts are the more likely your customers will participate and this involvement is what drives traffic to your social media platforms. We will discuss engagement in more detail on our next blog.

Getting the balance right

Raising a brand’s awareness organically, via a social media platform can take time, but it really is the most worthwhile way to engage and maintain your listeners. The audience likes your page because they want to find out more about you and your company’s products or services. This is your most relevant audience! There is also the option of paid for advertising to create brand awareness in certain locations allowing you to target key influencers via display advertising or sponsored links. We’ll talk more about this in a future blog.

Whilst ‘Pay Per Click’ ads can help to raise your awareness relatively quickly, do bear in mind that some people don’t like being forced to like your profile. Like anything good in life, it’s all about finding the right mix of tools that suit your audience.

Summarising brand awareness via social media

Your approach to raising B2B brand awareness through your social media platforms (and assuming you have already listened to and researched your target audience) we are passionate about developing killer content and creating the reason why someone would want to engage with you. Simple platitudes will get you so far, after that you need substance as this will definitely resonate with your chosen audience. After this it’s a case of being organised and developing a process that allows you the opportunity to use social media to increase your brand awareness.

We’ve mentioned several ideas above to help you do this and hope this has sparked a few ideas. Why not drop us a line or leave us a comment below to let us know if you’ve found this worthwhile?

Good luck on your quest to drive awareness for your brand but no matter what you do, take time out and develop your social media plan first. This will help to give you a purpose and also save you from going mad during the dark days when you can’t see the wood from the trees.

Until next time, when we will be looking at how you can drive engagement through your social media activities.

photo credit: h.koppdelaney via photopin cc