While your investment can range from a time and ad dollars standpoint—depending on how much you focus on organic or paid strategies—finding the right mix is an important step in delineating an effective strategy for building awareness on social media.

Organic social media initiatives generate an authentic presence; you need to show up consistently across key channels in lockstep with any paid media efforts you may pursue. Staying engaged with your audience is possible with an internal team dedicated to commenting, monitoring and staying ahead of what your social community is saying.

Paid media puts your brand in the driver’s seat; you control the budget, content, audience and objectives. When building out paid media campaigns, it’s important to use top of funnel brand awareness objectives to help aid reach and guide potential customers through the buyer’s journey. The best paid media campaigns offer unique creative with goals specific to stage of the funnel—something to keep in mind when choosing to invest at the awareness level. Boosting influencer’s content is another way to aid in awareness. If that content performs well, you can continue to put more money behind it and help generate more authentic content for your brand without having to invest in creating it yourself.

Not all social media behavior is created equally; each audience you’re trying to reach has preferred platforms and distinct habits that are worth paying attention to. Calibrate your social media strategy to show up in the right places at the right times for your audience. While Facebook remains a leading social media platform with 2.9 billion active monthly users, its popularity has considerably declined and isn’t where many audience groups are spending their time. People in the U.S. check in on 7 social media platforms monthly, on average, with Generation Z preferring YouTube, Instagram and TikTok.  

Whether you’re building a paid media ad campaign or investing time and energy in collaborating with influencers, where you choose to show up can make or break your performance. Differentiate your social media content calendar across a few priority platforms to diversify your content and expand your brand reach.

Be mindful of who you are trying to reach every step of the way. Honing your target audience and supporting audience segments is critical to your ability to build brand awareness with intention on your priority social media platforms. What may work as a strategy targeted to promote consumer products with millennial moms on Instagram wouldn’t resonate with Gen Z gamers who spend most of their online time on Twitch, Discord and Reddit. From a paid social media standpoint, platforms like Meta (Facebook and Instagram), TikTok and Snapchat give you the ability to target audiences by key demographic and psychographic factors, including age, region, interests and family dynamics. To ensure your campaigns receive maximum reach, target broadly at the campaign level for awareness and consider building out creative specific to personas (more specific audience segments) within your primary audience pool.  

The creative content you post and publish is ultimately the lynchpin to driving memorable brand awareness. If you want your audience to keep you top-of-mind, provide content that resonates with their life and is relevant to their needs and they won’t forget about you. The visual saturation of social media marketing is often referred to as the “sea of sameness,” something you’ll want to intentionally break from to stand out against your competition. To ensure your creative is effective, consider:

• Emotional resonance: Do you want to entertain, inform or inspire? Pick a lane, or carve out all of them, and make sure your storytelling is memorable along the way. Use emotion and relevance to connect with your audience and continue the conversation you started from the first asset to the next. Showcasing relatable content and themes with a regular posting cadence will help keep them engaging and coming back.

• Ideal ad formats: Short form video formats are proven to work well in driving brand awareness. Consider layering in :06-:15 second video ads across platforms. It is also recommended to ensure your assets are the correct aspect ratio and that you consider developing multiple sizes/styles for each area of the platform you are on. For example, Instagram Reels and Stories have unique best practices compared to the standard feed posts.

• Distinctive assets: Be true to your brand’s vision and values and be consistent about how you show up in the space. Visual elements such as colors, fonts and logos can help reinforce your brand identity across your assets. You’ll also want to make sure your profile pictures, cover photos you’re your overall presence by social media channel conveys who you are cohesively. But make sure you continue to pay attention to your competition. Know what else your target audience is being served in the market and break that mold with intention.

• Consistency vs. variety: Keep your content on brand but keep it interesting. Repetition can be good reinforcement of key brand messages and unique selling points, but you’ll want to balance that with a diverse mix of content to keep people paying attention and engaging. Consider creating a series of unique posts about one topic for your organic strategy and build paid media campaigns with 3-4 unique assets to generate multiple points of entry for your prospective customers.