How Creating a Brand Personality Can Leverage Your Social Media Marketing

Creating a strong brand personality is critical if you want to connect with your customers. The most popular brands know exactly how to best use all of their online marketing channels, so they can expertly showcase their brand personality and traits.

The content they share has been carefully crafted to reflect their values best and sometimes professional skills or quality of their product. But first and foremost, their core message is always about their brand.

Why is brand personality so important?

If you want your customers to engage with your posts and follow you on social media, your brand personality is your number one asset that will make it happen. Even if your content is exciting and informative, you still need to make a connection with your readers.

Without a strong personality behind all the content, you won’t be able to attain high engagement rates, which will help to propel your reach even further in the social media sphere. Many of the hidden algorithms behind Facebook and Twitter, for example, will share your content to a broader audience if you successfully engage with people.

Have you ever heard of the phrase “People buy from people, not from businesses”? It essentially means that people prefer to buy from other, authentic people, and not nameless and faceless organizations. By creating a persona with your brand personality, you’ll create your own name and face that people will enjoy interacting with online and will want to buy from.

It’s why corporations spend so much money on brand ambassadors. When you think of their company, they want you to imagine the face and name of well-liked famous people.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a small business or self-employed one-man (or woman) show, follow these steps and you’ll be able to create and promote your very own brand personality and leverage your social media marketing.

Research and know your market

The very first step to take if you want to create a strong brand and grow your business using the power of social media is to know your market. You need to understand as much as possible about your customers. Because the clearer you are about the demographic you’re targeting, the more successes you’ll see on social media.

If you’ve never researched your market before you can break it down into two steps, and by the end, you’ll have all the knowledge needed to leverage your social media marketing.

Step 1: Analyze your customer’s demographics and identify what their needs are

By determining your customers’ age, gender, occupation, education level, and family situation, will help you establish who your core customer base is—also referred to as your target market. This doesn’t mean you should try and guess either. You need to conduct proper market research by either talking to your customers and sending out surveys, or use online tools and focus groups to understand as much as you can about them.

During your research, you want to establish what their needs are. This is going to become a core part of creating your customer personas later on. Some of the best selling products in the world are so successful because they solve a problem, whether it’s a service such as house painting or a tool that makes people’s lives easier.

One of the most common needs people have is lack of time. They want to do something but don’t have enough time during the day to do it, which is why they’re prepared to pay for someone else or a tool to make it quicker and easier.

Another need is money. If you’re able to provide a similar service or product that’s considerably cheaper than anyone else, then you’ll want to target consumers whose need is for a lower priced item.

Step 2: Create customer personas and segment your audience

Once you’ve established the demographics of your target audience, such as their age, gender, and education level, you can begin to create customer personas. Also known as a buyer persona.

These are essentially customer profiles which you can now build using your customer’s demographics. And they allow you to develop fictional characters you can use to create a brand personality that resonates with them and will help tailor your social media marketing content.

Another reason to create customer personas so that you can share them with your team to help everyone develop a better understanding of your customers and how to solve their needs.

Creating your brand personality

Because you’ve created customer personas using the previous outline above, deciding on your brand’s character shouldn’t be too difficult. Your brand personality needs:

A brand voice

The tone of voice your brand speaks with. It can be cute, funny, sarcastic, serious, or a mix of different tones. It doesn’t matter as long as your brand resonates with your audience. Often the best brand voice to use with social media is a mix of funny and professional. No one wants to engage with a robot.

A brand story

Why your brand exists and does it what it does. It can be a historical outline of how your brand started, or it can be a delightful tale of your past failures and eventual successes. Your brand story should also have a clear message at the end, which is the nuts and bolts of your brand’s identity. It’s who you are and what you stand for. After everything your brand has been through, you’ve come out better and stronger, and this is your core message to your audience.

Creating your brand’s look

On top of your brand voice and story, your brand personality needs its own unique look and style that ensures people will recognize your brand no matter which social network they’re on. You’ll need:

• A color palette – these are the colors you’ll use across all of your branding, and you should use them with your social media banners. It helps to make your brand instantly recognizable. Be sure to use warm colors that contrast well with each other.
• A logo – a logo is the visual representation of your brand, so you must have a well-designed logo that’s modern and fits your brand identity. Instead of hiring expensive designers, you can use an AI to do it for you, such as Tailor Brands logo maker.

Remain consistent

It can be tough to deviate from your brand personality, especially when someone else takes overrunning your social media marketing. Still, no matter what happens, you have to commit to your brand’s personality and remain consistent. You can, of course, test different messaging tactics, but don’t try anything too unusual, instead, slowly evolve your brand if you need to change your personality.

Be Authentic

Social media allows people to project whatever they want via their accounts, which is why authenticity is going to be one of your best brand traits. If you believe in your brand’s core values, then that’ll come across in your social media marketing efforts. You can also help to show authenticity by using real-life photos of you or your office.

Crafting your social media content

Once you’ve created your brand personality and your assets, such as banners and logos, it’s time to think about the actual content you want to post. If you’re going to best leverage your social media and create a strong brand reputation, then you need to curate valuable, shareable content.

So don’t pump out endless amounts of content that holds little to no value. Every piece of content you post should be of the highest quality, and it should always support your brand’s image.

You can use content marketing tools like Social Animal to find great content or of course you can also check out your competition and see which type of content they’re publishing and which content their audience engages with. If you don’t have any customers or social media, yet then this is going to be one of your most valuable data and idea sources. Don’t be afraid to copy your competition’s ideas, as long as you put your unique spin on it and make it better.

Concluding Thoughts

Social media marketing is going to be crucial if you want to connect with your customers on a more personal level, and you’ll need a strong brand personality that resonates with your customers if you’re going to succeed.

Keep your content original, fresh, and exciting otherwise, you’ll bore your audience with the same content day after day. One of the best ways to avoid this is to create a posting schedule that allows you time to research and create valuable posts without relying on last-minute rushed jobs.

It can take time to build up momentum on social media, so don’t be demotivated if you don’t see instant results. Do your research, use data, and with some hard work and patience, you’ll create amazing results with your social media accounts.