4 Steps to Launching Your Brand on Social Media Like a Pro

Launching a new brand on social media can be quite overwhelming, especially when you're up against established competitors in a saturated market and don't have a well-thought-out plan. Without a clear strategy in place, you risk getting lost in the sea of content and failing to connect with your target audience.

This blog post is a comprehensive guide to some most essential steps you need to take to establish your brand successfully, especially if you're starting from scratch:

STEP 1 – Do Your Market Research

The first and most important thing you need to do is conduct thorough market research. Run a simple competitor's analysis on social media and look for gaps in the market, study customer’s responses on these pages and determine how you can serve their pain points better!

It's also really important to know who your ideal customer is. Who do you want to reach? Let's say you’re a women’s jewelry brand. If your answer to this question is just "Women in Canada." then you need to dig deeper.

Consider this: There are now countless sports clothing brands out there, yet Nike always seems to be the first to come to mind. That is because Nike was one of the first brands to niche down to target specifically the sports audience. They tailored their strategy to communicate directly to this group. Niching down creates more tailored and relevant content that resonates with your audience. It can also help position yourself as experts and stand out from the competition.

STEP 2 – Figure Out Your Positioning Strategy

Developing a strong brand on social media also requires a distinctive positioning. Building on these three critical factors will help you get closer to your goal: your message, tone, and brand design.

1 - Sell experience over product. People love stories, and they love them the most when they can relate to them. For instance, if you sell outdoor gear, focus on the adventure, freedom, and excitement that comes with exploring the great outdoors. Use storytelling to convey these emotions and connect with your audience on a deeper level. By doing so, you'll create a stronger brand identity and develop a loyal following.

2- Your brand's tone is also an essential aspect of building connections on social media. Your tone can be humorous, witty, serious, or personal depending on your customer persona. But you also want your brand to sound like you. Remember, you want to be in business for the long term, not just by impressing your customers but also by staying true to your own values. Every brand has a person behind them, so don't shy away from sounding like yourself!

3- The third crucial factor is your design. Your aesthetic and how you present yourself visually play a vital role in attracting and retaining your audience. Create a mood board and select aesthetics that match your messaging, tone, and ideal customer. Utilize design tools such as Canva to decide on a color palette and font, and customize templates based on your mood board.

STEP 3 – Prepare Your Social Media Strategy

Preparing a strategy involves a few steps in itself. This includes developing your content pillars, your scheduling plan and prioritizing the best-suited platforms for your business.

1- Developing content pillars is an essential step in building a successful social media strategy for any product-based brand. It involves identifying key themes or categories of content that your brand will focus on, and then creating content that falls under each of these themes. The four main pillars are product, lifestyle, education, and inspirational. The product pillar showcases your products, their features, and benefits. The lifestyle pillar highlights the values and lifestyle of your brand. The education pillar educates your audience on your products, industry, or related topics. The inspirational pillar motivates and inspires your audience through success stories and uplifting messages.

2- You need to decide on what platforms you want to use to market your brand. Every platform is different and requires different types of content to perform better. In many cases resharing can get you far but not in the long term. In the beginning, you want to focus on one or two platforms. My advice would be Instagram and TikTok, as these are the two platforms that are growing and have a lot of potential for business growth.

3- Scheduling involves planning out your content over days/weeks. Posting frequency of 3-4 times a week is ideal. Experiment with timing in the beginning and once you’ve built a significant following, refer to your insights for when your audience is most active.

STEP 4 – Pay Attention to Your Insights and Evaluate Your Results

The last but the most important step! A key to success on social media is heavily dependent on whether you’re measuring results or not. Some key metrics you must measure are post insights, impressions, reach, engagement, audience growth rate, website visits and audience activity. You can learn more about these metrics in more detail here.

You also want to look at your content performance – What are your top and low-performing posts, what post got the highest and lowest reach/likes/engagement and try to identify what could be the reason behind it. Looking into these metrics can help you understand what you’re doing right and what are some things you can improve moving on.

Summary

Launching a brand on social media can be challenging, but with a well-planned strategy, it can lead to success. However, it's important to remember that building a brand takes time, effort, and patience. Don't be discouraged if you don't see immediate results. Remember to be compassionate towards yourself and your audience. Building a loyal community takes time, but it's worth the effort in the long run.

Book your FREE strategy consult with Velencia Strategies to learn more about taking your digital marketing strategy to the next level!