Building a digital brand: Social media advertising
EDIT: This post was written for a Social Media assessment series. The task time was 1 week.
When you think about building your brand online, I can guess two things that may come to your mind. The first being social media and the second being advertising, or more precise… online advertising. So let’s take a savvy step inside the large/broad/extensive world that is social media and focus on how we can best advertise our brand, at a beginners level.
Before we begin, social media advertising is a broad topic and can become very complex. Here we are only focusing on how we can use social media advertising on a small scale, and have it work for our online brand.
Firstly, let’s begin by clarifying our platform. Social media platforms are where advertising your brand will either build your reputation, or demise it (and we all know what option we’d prefer). So let’s discover the right platform for your brand.
Instagram (IG): is the best platform for visually portraying what your brand has to offer.
Facebook (FB): has more opportunity to professionally share information, has a solid reputation, and gives more space for advertising content.
Youtube: is great if we are creatives showcasing our brand. Uploading content on this platform is only necessary if we need video to communicate our brand’s message, and we can therefore share it later on our website or Facebook.
Twitter: let’s not think about this (unless we’re President Donald Trump).
Therefore, it’s either IG of FB, or both, don’t limit yourself.
TIP: make sure to channel your energy into one over the other, or share the same posts on both platforms, this adds consistency to your advert/campaign/brand and therefore we are building trust with our followers.
Getting familiar and personal with one platform communicates to our audience that we value where they put their time when browsing through what our brand has to offer. For example, it’s not best practise for a beauty blogger to focus solely on updating their Facebook status when their followers are wanting to see their latest makeup creation on Instagram.
Now you have your preferred platform, where are we going to put our hard earned money?
Social media is great for low budget, small businesses, because for under $10 you can market your brand to multiple audiences.
It’s a small price to pay.
Keep in mind that investing this money into your social media adverts and promotions will overall leave you better off. If you aren’t getting a physical response from this investment, remember that just because a user isn’t ‘liking’ your advert/post, they may still see it, and this is what we want so remember to keep track of post engagements, and keep at it.
Now is when your inner marketing-guru come out to play.
Advertise the content you want your brand to be known for, chose the images that show a clear message of what your brand has to offer, and adjust the captions to show you are investing time in people reading them.
Here is an example provided by Google:
Happy advertising!
Much love,
Savhanna.
PS. Has social media advertising worked for you as a user/consumer? What made you ‘follow’ or ‘buy’?
Savhanna Fowler 