How to Grow Your Brand & Business with Social Media

In today's digital landscape, social media has revolutionised the way we connect online, engage with customers and conduct business. With almost 4.9 billion users across a wide variety of social media platforms, the potential reach for your brand has never been greater.

For businesses starting this social media journey, the reasons to establish a strong online presence are clear. It offers a huge audience reach at a reasonable cost, fosters customer engagement, helps businesses garner valuable feedback, and drives increased traffic to your website.

However, with so many social platforms and strategies out there, the inevitable question is: How do you start?

This article will dive into the foundational aspects of social media marketing, briefly outline its mechanisms and guide your business in content creation to elevate your brand.

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What is social media marketing

At its core, social media marketing involves leveraging online networking platforms to increase brand awareness whilst simultaneously sharing content to captivate and ultimately connect with your audience. Here, the use of various social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, and TikTok can be used for paid and unpaid advertising campaigns.

How does it work?

Social media marketing is reliant on building relationships between individuals and companies. When users engage with and follow a brand, a connection begins to form. This relationship-building aspect distinguishes social media as a powerful tool for marketers and small business owners. It hinges on the relevance, informativeness, or allure of the content shared.

In the realm of paid advertising, social media platforms employ the personal data collected to precisely target audiences, optimising return on investment (ROI) by delivering your message to the right people.

What are the benefits?

Reach: Social media offers substantive reach when done right. Shares, likes, and comments can significantly enhance brand recognition and awareness within target audiences.

Customer Engagement: Social media platforms enable businesses to nurture and grow relationships with targeted audiences. This can be done by actively interacting with audiences and remaining responsive online.

Cost-Efficiency: Social media marketing can be extremely cost-effective due to its ability to target very specific demographics. This can lead to higher conversion rates attributed to how key messaging is narrowed down towards targeted audiences.

Increased Online Traffic: Using your social media channels as funnels to a businesses’ website or blog can increase website traffic, potentially resulting in higher conversion rates.

Measurable Outcomes: Social media platforms provide a wide variety of analytic tools that help provide insights into a business’s online audience. This provides clear feedback that can highlight strengths and weaknesses in business performance.

Building a brand on social media

Building a brand online on social media begins with a well-defined plan. Avoid spreading yourself too thin across multiple social media platforms, especially if you are just starting out. Instead, start by identifying your target audience and their preferred platforms.

Different platforms will attract different demographics. For example, platforms such as TikTok generally has a younger audience, whilst a platform such as LinkedIn is catered towards professionals.

Be sure to do market research to understand where your customers are positioned and whether you are investing your resources in the correct platform.

Creating social media posts

A quality brand will have quality posts. But how do you actually go about writing something that will appeal to a particular business’ audience?

Developing content pillars can assist in generating content ideas. This refers to recurring themes throughout content that businesses can utilise in their posts, such as "company updates," "case studies," "giveaways," "new products or services," and "sponsorships and charities”. Using these pillars, businesses can categorise content, then consequently plan and develop content around these themes.