What thoughts come to mind when someone hears your company name?
Your community will recognize your unique identity if you create a brand representing your mission, personality, and experience. Social media can be an excellent platform to establish this image with photos, videos, or other visuals revealing aspects of yourself or the business that show its unique identity.
Social media sites like TikTok have become the go-to search engines for Gen Z and Millennial consumers, meaning brands need an effective social presence to retain them. Brand building can only be achieved by creating an identifiable visual brand for your company. Yet, you can increase recognition by pairing that unique look with compelling storytelling and consistent tonality and voice.
Your design, strategy and social teams will determine how well you build your brand across social media. The primary aim is increasing brand awareness - that measures how many people know of your business - which influences business decisions more quickly while growing your company.
Learn ten strategies for increasing brand recognition on social media that companies and brands can implement to differentiate themselves and create greater market dominance.
What is a Brand?
Branding refers to how consumers perceive your company. It involves design and copy that make products or companies memorable for consumers.
Brands consist of color palettes, font choices and logo variations representing your company, including any design elements you incorporate into its website, social media pages or packaging materials. Furthermore, words used and emotions elicited within content make up part of an organization's brand image, and voice and tone are integral parts of its identity as a brand.
Brand identity refers to everything from your company name and look/feel to its mission/values that make you unique, like working hours and work done. Your elevator pitch, which community members would help deliver for you should you ever invest in marketing yourself actively, is also part of it. As people form opinions of businesses regardless of investment in branding efforts, consumer impressions are formed about them regardless of any intentional branding efforts being put forth by the business. Therefore building and managing it strategically and proactively are the best ways of conveying them effectively to ensure your mission/values come across to consumers effectively and your mission/values will come across to them effectively.
Brand presence requires your voice and tone to connect with customers and followers across social media platforms, building loyal audiences that support the business. A successful social media presence often corresponds with increased sales for your product or service.
What is the Importance of Branding?
Establishing a powerful brand can make all the difference when building your company and growing its business. Consistency across platforms will keep consumers aware that you exist - otherwise, they might never buy from you again.
Brand building doesn't only apply to large corporations. Some examples include McDonald's golden arch, Nike's black-and-white swoosh logo, Apple computers with their bite mark logo in a white color scheme and Wendy's silly social media posts as examples of successful brand-building efforts. Shuggie's Pizza in California uses neon and maximalist colors in both online and IRL environments for brand recognition. At the same time, Glossier sets beauty trends with pink, white and muted aesthetics. Duolingo, with its bright green owl logo, playful animations, and engaging social media presence, attracts users in droves.
What Is The Difference Between Branding And Building A Brand?
Brand building involves collaboration among marketing, design and executive teams in order to establish the personality, look and feel of an organization's brand identity and establish its strong presence within its marketplace.
Branding involves creating your own brand identity or applying it to marketing materials and sales material, or using brand guidelines and elements on social media channels in order to help distinguish your business from competitors.
Brand is the visual and verbal representation of an organization or product or service and should be easily recognisable and memorable to customers and potential investors.
What is the Key to a Successful Social Media presence?
Brands that have a strong social media presence are consistent, share compelling stories, speak with a distinct voice and stand out from the rest.
1. Consistency
Brand teams must decide how their brand will be perceived by external audiences and be consistent across designs for your external audiences, with regard to colors, fonts and other design elements used in materials designed by them for your external audience. Your presence on social networks must coincide with marketing objectives and target audiences (this may or may not include profiles across every social platform).
Branding teams create style guides and voice and tone guidelines in order to maintain brand consistency on social media channels, providing examples for how the brand should be applied across different forms of content.
Our Brand Kits allow teams to produce content that embodies their brand. They include fonts, colors and logos - everything needed for successful brand creation.
2. Branding
Telling the tales about your business, its people and impactful work can create an engaging brand for audiences worldwide. Every time your brand posts or sends emails or labels its product packaging or labels out for shipment you have an opportunity to tell its tale and build brand equity among target markets.
Brands can use storytelling techniques to turn their statements into stories with careful consideration. Don't simply say, "We just launched this product." instead show the audience why and who designed it; its development; how it will benefit their lives in daily use; etc. By telling compelling tales you will touch customers emotionally while setting apart your business from its competition.
Start off your brainstorm sessions right with these prompting questions (or use our templates.).
- What is the purpose of your business?
- What can you do to highlight individual employee contributions?
- What impact has your product had on different user types?
- What was the process by which your team developed your latest product?
- What motivates your business founders to stay committed?
- What is the mission statement of your business?
- What product bundles can help the consumer achieve their goal?
3. A Unique Voice
Brand voices come in all forms. Some industries (government, pharmaceuticals and engineering) require formal and authoritative messaging while other fields (food & beverages, beauty & wellness services, technology gaming & sports) often find it more successful to employ playful or even quirky approaches to branding their businesses.
No matter which tone and voice works for your business, make it original by including aspects unique to yourself that help differentiate from competitors. When crafting the voice for your brand consider:
- What is the language of your audience?
- Does your product solve a problem that is serious? Bring some excitement and fun into your user's world?
- What would you like your customers to say about your products and company?
Start by outlining a few words to define how you would like your community to interact with your brand, how their experience should feel when engaging with it, as well as examples of when and how this brand voice would be utilized across platforms and channels.
4. A Unique Look
Color schemes and fonts for your brand should stand out, especially in an unusual industry. Take inspiration from competitors' brands to design something altogether unique and bolder; for instance if competitors' websites tend to primarily consist of grays, blues, or black and white pages try something more vibrant like purple; otherwise opt for minimalism if your industry uses vibrant hues with quirky fonts; this applies for fonts as well.
Be certain to abide by web accessibility standards when designing content on the internet, for instance ensuring fonts and backgrounds contrast sufficiently.
What Are The Best Ways To Build Your Brand On Social Media?
Four main steps are involved in creating an effective brand: identify your mission, story and visuals; design an identity with voice and images for voice-and-image use; create templates to manage and implement your brand; implement across all materials used.
Our collaboration tools enable multiple people to come together on making the optimal brand decision, live updates being displayed immediately without needing to keep going back for versions or updates.
Brand Building: The Four Steps
How to build a brand in just four easy steps
1. To Tell The Story Of Your Brand, Align Your Mission, Values, Vision And Purpose With Those Of Your Audience
Before communicating who you really are to others, it's necessary to develop an awareness of who you really are as an organization. Your written materials should reflect your mission, values and vision for the business.
Your company's purpose should reflect what its "why" is; in other words, why you started and expanded it in the first place. What problems or goals does your business aim to solve and how will its goals manifest themselves once accomplished?
Your vision for your business represents its desired destination over a given time period - be that one year, five or ten. Company values describe how you conduct yourself as an organization while encouraging employees to strive towards reaching its goals.
Once you've accomplished these things, put them through their paces with your community by testing on social media or holding focus-group sessions. Get feedback and modify as necessary based on community input; then live it.
2. Create Your Brand With Visual Elements, A Consistent Tone Of Voice And Brand Elements
Understanding your company values and stories that you wish to convey are vitally important, followed by choosing how your brand will be presented.
Your brand requires three key visual components to distinguish itself: colors, fonts and logo. We make selecting a color palette much simpler. Browse thousands of variations until finding one you find suitable to you.
Brands typically opt for distinctive fonts when designing logos, headings and subheadings; then combine this distinctive font with more basic fonts for body text and subheadings. Below is a selection of font combinations you may try when testing out different combinations.
Once your colors and fonts have been determined, the next step in designing your logo should be creating it. We make this task easy by offering millions of images, graphics and vectors - or select from over 40,000 logo templates available.
Your copywriter can create a guide of voice and tone so that everyone writing anything about your business knows precisely how it sounds.
3. Use Templates To Create A Style Guide And Digital Strategy For Brand Management
Design and marketing teams must establish guidelines to which all organization employees adhere. This means creating a style guide that anyone in their design department may refer back to when creating anything from product packaging and social media posts to presentation decks.
Design teams can achieve strategic brand management goals by developing templates branded and tailored specifically to every piece of content produced at their company. All their colleagues can then clone or modify these templates without receiving too many requests; brand compliance across content types will then be ensured without incurring too many extra requests; teammates with no design background can save hours trying to perfect presentations themselves.
Below are examples for creating company-wide branding templates:
- Templates for presentations (for internal and external use, including sales, marketing)
- Templates for social media posts
- Story templates for social media
- Templates for prototyping
- Templates for Out-of-Home (OOH), or outdoor advertising
- Templates for whitepapers and reports
Your company brand will be developed within months using your style guide and templates. Achieve uniform brand design by creating templates with locked-in elements.
Over time, certain teams can develop their own designs without consulting their design team first; such as social media teams. Be sure to keep your Brand Kit updated so your team always follows the guidelines set by its creators.
Brand Kits contain all of your brand parameters - fonts, colors, images and approved logos - in one convenient place so anyone can design them simply by clicking. Create one today to save hours in design time.
4. Integrate Your Brand In Marketing, Sales And Visual Communication Design
Your brand should be evident everywhere you do - from sales presentations and email signatures, to internal Zoom backgrounds and newsletters. Brands become stronger when their presence can be found in both internal and external content; employees will recognize your logos, colors and fonts and easily use them themselves without difficulty.
Brand Communities And Social Media: The Power Of Brand Communities
Businesses willing to dedicate the necessary effort and attention into creating an engaged social media strategy and increasing engagement will quickly build brand communities online.
TikTok communities have been carefully tailored around specific topics and subgroups. By 2023 more than one billion Facebook users will post regularly in groups; TikTok stands out among social media platforms for having created such strong communities as evidenced by Report for 2023 which predicts social media groups and brands tapping into online communities will continue their expansion.
Social media communities that function effectively will keep followers coming back because of what you are sharing on them. When audiences discover new brands recommended by creators they admire, their loyalty often precedes them; hence the power of engagement on this social network to help companies.
- Lead generation and new leads to reach out to potential customers
- Upsell and create new business opportunities
- We can help you resolve any technical or shipping problems without drama
- Brand affinity is the ability to make your customers like you.
Social media can help you build a community, and establish your brand among the best.
Social Media Marketing: 10 Tips To Help You Build Your Brand
1. Create A Community, And Offer Free Educational Materials
Social media engagement can be challenging for consumers. They have multiple products from which to select when making purchasing decisions; what can you do to keep followers engaged while drawing in new ones? By posting useful and actionable content that delights audiences.
Resources relevant to your field like guides, checklists, templates and tips and tricks are invaluable tools. We can make them simple by aligning their design with the visual story of your brand Kit.
2. Brand Ambassadors Can Create And Share Content That Is Approved By The Brand
Your brand ambassadors should be your most satisfied customers; those who write glowing reviews about your business and spend time connecting with you. Offer discounts or incentives in return for them posting to social media; for instance, an enthusiastic bookshop owner might film and upload videos documenting his day with the staff scheduler they use to film an online diary of it all.
Establish brand compliance and success when setting up collaborations: provide limited access to us so they can use templates, Brand Kits and platforms while remaining on brand. They'll have more freedom in their expression while remaining within bounds of your branding guidelines.
3. Use Multimedia Content To Reach Out To Both Existing And New Social Media Users
Test various platforms to see what works best, from Instagram photos outperforming Facebook posts or LinkedIn infographics, or sharing behind-the-scenes videos and product primers via TikTok versus Snapchat stories, for instance. Compare performance of various social media templates.
Test out new platforms, keeping them in mind as they develop further and become increasingly prominent.
4. Embrace Short-Form Video Content
Videos can be an effective way to showcase both your products and personality, according to Marketing Report 2023. Marketers invest most of their resources towards short-form videos as a form of promotion.
Video can be an incredible tool in so many different contexts - you could highlight employees or film behind-the-scenes of production videos; capitalize on viral trends; or simply utilize its flexibility as an easy video editor with just your smartphone. With both of these available to you, there is so much you can accomplish with this medium.
5. Share The Brand-Building Process Behind The Scenes With Your Audience
As consumer preferences and tastes shift over time, brands must keep an eye on KPIs, competition, and their own brand image to detect any sign that results might not meet expectations and begin the process of adapting or revamping their identity if results falter.
Engage with your social media followers during the rebranding process by soliciting feedback, testing out different looks, and gathering opinions about what customers think of your new brand identity. Allow customers to give input.
6. You Can Learn More About The Audience By Using Audience Questions And Polls
The audience polls are an effective tool. You can use these groups as focus groups or to learn more about your community's values and interests.
7. Repurpose High-Performing Content For Different Mediums
Repurpose a popular blog post. Make a video of yourself reading out the key takeaways or an article or feed that features the most important quotes.
8. Include Your Brand Name In All Feeds And Stories
When building a brand, consistency is essential. Your followers should know that your posts come from your brand before they see your username. You can increase your company's brand recognition by using your logo and brand colors, as well as maintaining your voice and tone.
Create simple, branded templates for feed posts and stories to get your social media team off on the right track.
9. Create Partnerships With Other Brands And Creators In Your Niche
Search out businesses whose mission and values align with yours; discuss if both platforms could work well together for mutual advantage.
If you can't find an ideal partner, take note of what other products your customers use with yours - candles? Reach out to bubble bath companies; moving companies could approach interior design companies; takeover social media with co-branded posts or shout-outs or mutual mentions as possible strategies; add them into roundups of industry.
10. High Quality Content Is Essential For Posting
Keep your core values front of mind with every social media post you make - be it text, photo, TikTok or webinar- related. Make sure every piece of social media content that reaches out is worthwhile to its target audience.
Showcase your local community, employees and customers. Informing audiences on your field demonstrates to them that you are an established brand who knows its stuff.
Bottom Line
To effectively increase exposure and produce more leads, many large businesses utilize a variety of social media methods, including social media campaigns and contests. Give your audience significant incentives to get them excited about participating in your campaigns and competitions in order to maximize this impact.
