In 2021, there’s no better way to grow your brand than through a social media branding campaign — especially when you include video marketing.
Strong branding uses shapes and colors to evoke certain feelings, but really, a brand is so much more than that. It’s the words you use, how you treat your customers, and how you’re portrayed on social media.
Using videos in your social media branding campaign, you can create content that shares your brand story, speaks to your audience, and drives revenue, all in one entertaining package.
In this article, you’ll learn:
A social media campaign is a strategic marketing effort designed to help a company reach its business goals.
Social media branding campaigns are a specific subset of social media campaigns designed to increase a brand’s awareness, authority, and community.
An example of a great social media branding campaign is Apple’s “Shot on iPhone” campaign. You’ve likely seen the commercials and ads for this campaign online, which features consumer-generated content shot on the iPhone. Apple’s hashtag for the campaign, #shotoniphone, has garnered over 20,000,000 posts.
Consistency is key to building a solid social media . If you don’t have brand guidelines for your company, establish them before starting your campaign and keep them organized using a digital asset management strategy. Your policies should include a color palette, logo, styling options, tone of voice guidelines, hashtags, and social media platform bios.
Each social media campaign should have one singular goal. You may want to sell a specific product, grow your email subscriber list, reach a certain engagement level, gain online followers, or collect a particular amount of leads in a given time. Your social media marketing campaign goals should be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-based.
Review industry data or competitor data to see which social platforms are most effective for your audience and industry. If you’re already active on multiple social media platforms, audit your posts to see which platforms are garnering the highest-quality results, engagement, and leads, and focus on those.
The type of brand video you create will depend on your campaign goals, the platform you’re posting on, and your audience. You’ll want to target users at a specific stage of their buying journey: awareness, consideration, conversion, loyalty, or advocacy. Once you know where your buyer is in their journey, create the type of brand video that speaks to their needs and wants:
How-to videos and tutorials are great for building brand awareness and teaching your audience about your product, service, or industry.
Whether you’re a one-person operation with a shoestring marketing budget or you have a large marketing team behind you, you can create amazing social media content. Here’s how:
Write some copy to accompany your brand video post and include related hashtags. Your hashtag strategy should consist of branded hashtags, a campaign-specific hashtag, and hashtags related to the video content.
Use a social media management platform such as to publish and schedule your posts. With Sprout, you can also connect with your audience, manage conversations, review mentions, and more.
On your chosen social media management platform, to see how your social media campaign performs. Since you already set your goals for the campaign at the beginning of the process, you’ll have a clear idea of whether or not you’re achieving them. If not, revise your marketing strategy accordingly.
Whether you measure your engagement, follows, or shares, tracking your progress will help you create better content moving forward.
While you’ll always want to customize your social media campaigns to your brand goals and company persona, there are some standard tips and tricks that can help you elevate your content and build your brand authority:
Consumers, especially when they’re just getting to know a brand or company, want to know what they’re all about. They want to purchase and work with companies whose values and mission align with their own. To build that connection, share your company’s story, or founder’s story, through videos on social media. Go behind the business scenes and put faces to the brand name by introducing the team.
Every brand needs a color palette and logo, but . Collect images of people, places, and things that reflect your brand’s persona and your ideal audience to build a solid visual identity on social media.
Every single one of your brand videos shouldn’t look the same. They should, however, have a common thread, such as the same music, voice, or closing call to action.
The same video format won’t work on every social media platform. For example, a trendy meme video won’t connect with your audience on LinkedIn the same way it would on TikTok or Instagram. Align your content with the platform’s audience to see the best results.
If it makes sense for your brand or company, create multiple social media accounts on the same platform to speak to different customers, needs, or goals. For example, some larger companies with worldwide locations will have various Facebook pages for each branch since their audiences are looking for different content. Another fun idea is to create a social media account for your mascot (if it’s in line with your brand and audience).
Create and upload original videos directly on the app you’re publishing them on. Users don’t want to click through multiple links to watch a video or learn more about your company; you want to appease their need for immediate satisfaction, and uploading content directly will do just that.
Another perk: Social media algorithms prioritize native content, giving it an extra boost to your audience.
Promote giveaways, contests, and discounts on your social media profiles to captivate your audience. To qualify for the prize, ask them to engage with content through likes or shares by tagging a friend in the comment section or joining your mailing list. Keep the qualifier simple so users are more likely to participate.
Not using captions on your videos can quickly cut down your view count; it excludes the hearing impaired from enjoying your videos as well as anyone who would rather watch without audio.
People are consuming more content and brand videos than ever before. You only have a few seconds to get and hold their attention, so start your videos off strong with an exciting story, piece of information, or thought-provoking question. Use visuals with movement and alternating camera angles to keep the user’s attention on the screen.
As much as social media has turned into a marketing and business platform, connecting with your audience should still be a top priority. It’s social media, after all! Use the question box feature on Instagram stories, run polls, and ask for your audience’s input.
Engage with your followers, monitor DMs and comments for questions or concerns, and respond as quickly as you can with helpful and thorough assistance.
On platforms like Instagram or YouTube, your video post or Reel will appear on your main profile. It would help if you created an attention-grabbing thumbnail for each video featuring the video title/topic and an enticing photo. Avoid clickbait headlines and images that don’t accurately reflect the video’s content; it will only turn viewers off your content and brand.
Here’s how you can use the top social media platforms to their full potential, along with the best practices for timing and formatting your content:
Instagram is best used for humanizing your brand and interacting with your community. Use Stories to make announcements, host live interviews, highlight main feed posts, promote time-sensitive deals, and share consumer-generated content.
Timing and Formatting Best Practices:
Facebook is a good option for low-cost advertising and has a built-in video creation kit tool to overlay text, effects, and edits to your images to create videos. Use Facebook Lives for interviews, behind-the-scenes looks into your business, and how-to videos that promote your product or service. Promote your Live videos well in advance and create a recap video of the event after to share with those who missed it. During Facebook Lives, be highly responsive to your audience; interact with comments and questions during the session, and follow up with any comments you missed afterward.
Timing and Formatting Best Practices:
Pinterest video ads are more expensive than other social media platforms. You can use video ads on Pinterest for campaigns focused on traffic, video views, conversions, or brand awareness. They’re most effective at raising brand awareness and driving website traffic, but not so much for direct lead generation.
Timing and Formatting Best Practices:
TikTok’s demographic skews younger than Facebook or even Instagram, with over 800 million monthly active users. One of the app’s major draws is the in-app video creation tool, which features over 300 samples of free background music.
TikTok ads are shown on the “For You” page, which is the main exploratory page of the app where users can see content that’s tailored to them based on their behavior.
Timing and Formatting Best Practices:
When social media platforms first became popular, they weren’t used as a marketing tool for businesses; they were simply a place to connect with your friends and family. Now, they’re highly beneficial — a necessity, really — for any brand or company wanting to grow their online presence through organic reach or paid campaigns. Here’s why you should be using social media to grow your brand:
1. You Can Reach New Customers
With social media’s worldwide reach, you have limitless access to potential clients and customers. This access is a huge advantage for companies, especially when you consider the former constraints of local print marketing, radio ads, and TV commercials.
2. You Can Connect With Your Target Audience
When you know where your audience is watching video and brand content, you can tailor your campaign to meet them exactly where they are. By targeting specific locations and demographics on social media, you can get your brand in front of your audience’s eyes faster than ever before.
3. You Can Stay Top-Of-Mind
According to , 49% of Facebook users and 38% of Instagram users visit the platforms several times a day. By consistently posting on social media, users are more likely to think of your brand or company once they’re ready to make their purchase.
4. You Can Make Genuine Connections
By being helpful and authentic online, you can . Engage with your community, respond to their comments and questions, and you can turn your clients and customers into brand advocates.
5. You Can Drive Up Revenue
Overall, go to social media to research their purchases, and have landed a new customer thanks to a video on social media. Create engaging, entertaining, and informative content for your audience, and you’re bound to reap the rewards.
In 2020, companies saw from Facebook, followed by Instagram. But that doesn’t necessarily mean Facebook or Instagram is the best social media platform for building your brand. To determine which platforms are best for your brand, here are some of the top features and benefits of the most-used social media platforms:
TikTok
YouTube
Between the ever-changing trends, algorithms, and metrics, social media moves quickly. But one thing is for sure: Your audience wants to hear from you! More specifically, want to see more video content from brands and companies they follow. Creating video content and using it in your social media branding campaign can help you build your community, gain authority in your industry, and drive sales.
“I think video will dominate social media engagement,” says , Global Head of Influencer Marketing, Branded Content Marketing Association. “We’ve seen the growth in Tiktok and YouTube and now Instagram Reels. We’ve been exposed to creative, entertaining, and thought-provoking video content, and we want more of it.”
Guest post, originally published July 13, 2021.
