We all know the importance of having high brand awareness. Brand awareness is the first step in almost every iteration of a sales funnel and that makes perfect sense. Is there any possible way (excluding crazy hypotheticals involving amnesia, time warps or phone booths) that a customer could make a purchase from your company without knowing who the company is or what it does? Not really. If you want to increase sales your first step is to increase your company’s brand awareness.

Companies understand this. They invest buckets of money in marketing for the sole purpose of introducing, and re-introducing, customers to their brand. They hold webinars, write blog posts and build vast social media empires, all to spread the word about their brands. The smart ones will take it a step further and work with social media engagement tools (like SocialToaster) to help get the most out of their social media efforts. These tools, when used properly, can have a direct impact on boosting your company’s brand awareness. How you may ask?

Here are five ways social media engagement tools can help boost brand awareness:

1 – Increased Reach

Social media engagement is all about reach. Reach is defined as the extent your messages penetrate your entire audience. The greater the reach, the greater your brand awareness among your audience. This increased social reach allows your messages to be published in spaces that might otherwise be un-buyable, like say, a dinner between friends or a chat conversation on Facebook. Social media engagement tools make it easy to extend your brand’s social reach by allowing your brand ambassadors the opportunity to share your brand messages on their social media platforms. This increasing reach exposes your messages to new audiences and can boost your company’s brand awareness.

2 – Increased Visibility & Frequency

Along with an increase in reach, social media engagement tools also work to increase your visibility. No longer are your communications regulated to the side of the page, spurned into the corner like some necessary evil. Your messages now become the content, front-and-center for the world to see. Further, an increase in visibility can allow a message to make a deeper impression on the viewer. A deeper impression can help to keep your brand top of mind with that user. In addition to an increase in the visibility of your messages, using a social media engagement tool can help to increase the frequency your audience sees one of your brand’s communications. The more often a user sees your communications, the more likely they are to develop a keen awareness of your brand.

3 – Analyze & Optimize

One of the clearest benefits of using a social media engagement tool to help build your brand awareness is the detailed reporting and analytics that these tools provide. Your company can measure the campaign-specific KPIs of your campaign (likes, mentions, tweets, favorites, etc.) and more importantly, what specific messages generated the greatest lift in those KPIs. By charting and measuring these metrics over the course of a campaign, you’ll be able to identify trends and expose those message types that are the strongest performers. Once you know the type of content that performs best, you can then concentrate your efforts on producing messages that foster the most social media engagement and increase your company’s brand awareness.

4 – Deeper Conversations

Well-built social media engagement tools allow you to not just interact with potential customers on a glancing notice, but allow you to have more deeper, meaningful conversations. Deeper conversations are a good thing. Think about when you meet an individual in passing, if you just say “hello” to each other and then continue on your day, you’re most likely not going to remember that person two months down the road. However, if that individual stops to engage you in a deep conversation regarding something you’re passionate about, you’re going to be far more likely to remember them the next time you meet. It works the same way with brands. By using social media engagement tools, you can monitor how and where people are talking about your brand and start having a conversation with them.

5 – Third-Party Credibility

You can shout until you’re blue in the face about how great your brand is, but that doesn’t mean people are going to be listening. Social media engagement tools and the streamlined content they allow you to create/publish, can help propel your brand to the frontal cortex of potential customers. Users, by nature, trust the messages they hear from friends far more than any advertiser. A recent Nielson survey found that on average, globally, 92% of individuals trust the messages/recommendations they receive from friends. The least trusted message: text ads on mobile phones (29%). To increase brand awareness you first need to increase the level of social media engagement your current customers are having with your brand. By encouraging them to communicate with you and share your messages with their social platforms, you can begin to build powerful brand awareness that is built on a solid foundation of trust.

How does your company use social media engagement tools? Let us know by leaving a note in the comments below. Interested in getting started with your own suite of tools? Contact the SocialToaster team today!