Social media assets for brands are an important element of your branding promotion.
Where your brand is your identity – your business personality – that the public sees, social media is now most likely the main platform you use where your brand meets the public.
At one time, an online presence was all about whether you had a website. Now, it is about how you interact with the public (your market) on social media and in many cases, a website is a secondary platform.
For now, websites still rule for most eCommerce stores in terms of selling platforms, but even that is changing – Facebook, Instagram and (eventually) Messenger and WhatsApp are moving into the eCommerce and selling platform market. (For more details on these moves, read Facebook shops – the new normal for eCommerce).
So, like it or not, whether you are an eCommerce business or something entirely different, social media is a big part of your future marketing strategy, even if you don’t know it yet.
And with the unusual events of 2020, that future is arriving sooner than you might think. We would argue that it is already here.
For an in-depth look at how 2020 may have shifted where you need to focus your customer engagement, Splento has prepared a free market report which you can download by hitting the button below. We suggest you do that now, to secure your copy, before moving on with the rest of this piece:
It’s always good to be prepared for the future, especially if the future is arriving today, so let’s examine social media assets for brands and why you need them.
What are social media assets?
First, a quick definition.
When we discuss social media assets, we are talking about one of two distinct elements:
- Every aspect of your web presence where you engage with your market, customers and future prospects.
- The visual and written media content that is used in them (for clarity let’s call these visual assets or brand assets).
If you want to focus on visual media (photos, video, other visual branding elements) then check out refreshing your visual assets and marketing library or Splento’s eCommerce product photography overview.
So your social media assets we can describe as your online customer touchpoints.
Consumers are now online-dependant. And much of that dependency is shouldered by social media.
To put it another way, in almost all circumstances today, your social media assets are where your customer’s buying journey begins, whether you know this or not.
If you’re not already convinced by this, then take some time to research within your customer base. Ask questions, find out where they are coming from. Dig into the data.
It may be time to update your customer avatars (your descriptions of your ideal and average customers).
Your social media touchpoints (assets) include any of the following:
- Facebook account
- Instagram account
- Twitter account
- LinkedIn account
- YouTube account
- Company Mobile Apps and app users
- Company blog and vlog sites
- Website URL
- Email address marketing list
- Customer database
This is not an exhaustive list, but you get the idea. Depending on the nature of your business, you may need to be extending your media presence to other platforms including Pinterest, Medium, Snapchat, Reddit, Slideshare etc. Also, don’t forget to add links to your touchpoints in the footer of your site so your existing visitors can easily find them. You can use social media icons, such as those from Icons8, which offers free and consistent icons for almost every social media platform.
You’ll need to decide for yourself what assets will be of benefit to your business, depending on the nature of your market and what you need to communicate. An alternative is to get in a specialist firm to review your marketing strategy and make recommendations. This can be especially useful if this is a new arena for you.
Further down, we have listed a couple of recommendations for services that may help you.
Why you need social media assets
As we have already said, most sales journeys now start with social media. This has been driven by two factors
- The trend towards social media popularity that has been going on for several years anyway
- The Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent global lockdowns.
We cannot ignore that the shift to online living as increased exponentially in the past few months since early 2020. Whereas the younger generations were doing this anyway, it is the older ones that have shifted towards online most, largely out of necessity.
And it is the older generations who have the most buying power. It is these who have begun relying on eCommerce like never before and online turnover has risen far more than was previously projected.
The other point to note about this is that it is not a temporary trend. Aside from the growing realisation that things will never quite return to ‘normal’ again, there is also the fact that now the new online shoppers have adapted, to a large extent, they are liking it.
As a result, we can no longer get away from the fact that social media is the number one marketing tool for the future (starting now). It is the place where people go to interact, chat, connect and now, buy (or at least look for recommendations).
If you do not have a social media marketing strategy, then at some point you may no longer have a business.
And for social media presence, you need visual assets (brand assets).
Social media marketing requires different formats on different platforms, and even each platform sometimes requires different formats depending on the intended use. Facebook pages are a great example – the profile picture and the cover picture are two completely different formats and you need a different stylistic approach to both. And then advertising has different requirements again.
And that is just Facebook – now multiply that across all the different platforms you use (or, should be using).
The solution is a library, or gallery, of visual media assets ready to be called upon, already edited and resized for various social media uses.
Ideally, if you create, say, a year’s worth of such material then you always have it to hand whatever social media marketing drive you are planning next, regardless of the platforms that you put it across.
Approaching planning in this way is usually the most cost-effective method, and a huge amount of marketing budget can be saved by consolidating your visual media creation.
What to do with your social media assets
The short answer to this is simple – use them!
If you are not currently engaging your market prospects on social media, then you need to start – because your competitors surely are!
Gathering insights on competitor strategies can be streamlined by using web scraping techniques. To make the most of this approach, ensure you’re performing web scraping without getting blocked, as many platforms actively prevent automated data collection.
Take a little time to examine both what you already have in terms of social media assets and what you want to have. Then get started on bridging the gap.
You may find a few useful ideas in this post – 5 steps to boost your new product launch on social media.
If you do already use social media marketing, then take a second look and decide if you should be doing more, and if so, what?
Here, we come back to your ideal customer avatar – what are your customers wanting, what information will help them, where are their main touchpoints, what are the best 3 ways to hit those points? …and so on.
What is certain in all this is that wherever you are on your social media journey – it’s time to take stock and review the map.
Read more on maximising your social media impact.
Social engagement is the key to success in the online marketing world – and social media is an amazing tool for this specific task.
If you need any help planning a social media campaign, then Splento is happy to help. Feel free to contact us anytime.
For a review of your brand assets, we have a great, experienced team led by our creative director, who can write up a brand asset audit for you. It’s the easiest way to find out exactly where you are ‘on the map’ and comes with recommendations for how to get to where need to be. Find out more about this here.
Finally, if you already know what you need, and you need it fast, then take a look at the Ultimate Brand Asset Gallery, which will give you all the social media material you need for the foreseeable future – and beyond.
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