By M. Isi Eromosele

The ultimate goal of most businesses is to increase sales and income. Ideally, you want to attract new customers to your products and encourage repeat purchases. Brand awareness refers to how aware customers and potential customers are of your business and its products.

Ultimately, achieving successful brand awareness means that your brand is well known and is easily recognizable. Brand awareness is crucial to differentiating your product from other similar products and competitors.

Targeting the right audience is crucial to your success. There is no better platform to do this than using the multi-faceted social media platforms. Of similar importance is understanding that a customized social media plan need to be created along with specific actions that could increase awareness of your brand among your consumers.

The following are 4 ways to increase your brand awareness through social media:

Bring Your Brand to Your Customers

The best social media strategies do not rely on your customers finding you, but rather, on you bringing your brand to the places they congregate at. While social media can increase search engine rankings for your online media channels and allow people to access your information without much effort, the biggest gains come when you seek out the type of conversations you want to have.

Millions of people gather on Twitter, Facebook, Linked In and YouTube, all of which are free tools. If your customers, prospects, and influencers are there, you should be too. Just make sure you are participating and not broadcasting. Listening should be your most important tool.

As you progressively and consistently engage your customers in social media, you gradually integrate your brand into the conversations they are having. In the natural course of these conversations, your brand will be brought back up again and again, gaining exposure and awareness with previously untapped-groups.

Generate Quality Content

Quality content should be the heart of your social media program. Nothing draws attention and gets passed through networks more than quality content, which includes writing posts on your own blog, writing guest posts on influential blogs within your industry or writing articles to be syndicated across the web.

Quality content informs and educates your readers, helping you build trust with them, as well as building your own reputation as a knowledgeable expert source within your industry.

Quality content is also passed on from an original source through a readers’ network to other people who they think can benefit from your expertise. The reach of a well-written article can be unlimited.

A blogging platform or online content library can keep your brand fresh for an indefinite period. Potential customers will have a reason to continue coming back to your site. Once you have established a consistent publishing routine, your communities will start to gather automatically, adding content about your brand on top of what you produce.

Connect Customers And Contacts

Connecting your customers to each other, whether on your site or on social media platform sites such as Facebook, allows them to have more-vibrant conversations about your product.

Among other topics, they may suggest improvements to your brand, highlight a new need in your market or most importantly, speak loudly enough to be heard in other circles, thus spreading your brand without your direct input.

Connecting your network contacts to one another, through a social platform like Linked In, for example, allows you to build trust within your communities. When contacts gain from a connection you’ve made between them, the favor will often get returned.

And when two people you connected meet to talk, they will spend at least part of the time talking about you. Forming connections and fostering them among your communities fit the camaraderie spirit social media is expected to generate.

By plugging your network pieces together, and plugging into the exponential growth principle of social media, you allow other people to build your brand awareness for you.

Make Yourself Available

Being successful in social media campaigns require engagement and availability, which in turn requires time. You can reduce that time through planning, development of specific strategies and directed activities.

The activities within social media are often varied and circular. Being overly selective will result in loosing out on opportunities within your industry. This is because you may not know which point of interaction could lead to valuable brand building opportunities.

These type of opportunities are only made possible by engagement and sincere availability. People respond to genuine effort and building brand awareness is infinitely easier when targeting a willing audience.

M. Isi Eromosele is the President | Chief Executive Officer | Executive Creative Director of Oseme Group - Oseme Creative | Oseme Consulting | Oseme Finance

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