Do you know that 54% of users research products/services on social media? That’s why it’s crucial for any business to have a prominent presence on social media in 2021 and beyond. However, not every company has enough budget for that.
So, is it possible to develop a strong presence and engage the target audience (TA) without burning a hole in the pocket? Here we are with our top 7 low-budget tips for successful social media marketing to suit any business.
7 Low-Cost Social Media Marketing Tips
Almost 4 billion users on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social media networks are active in the world. Such a huge number of potential clients offer an incredible opportunity for businesses. Thus, using social media platforms, you can:
- Build a brand;
- Improve brand awareness;
- Learn your audiences;
- Develop relationships with your customers;
- Boost sales, and many more.
What’s more, there is no need for a huge budget. Using the following 7 tips even companies with a tough budget can achieve settled objectives.
1. Set goals and establish the most important metrics and KPIs
The very first step is to define and set goals. So, what do you expect to get from the social media efforts as a result? Here are a few samples of social media goals to pursue:
- Build a community or a more dedicated following;
- Enhance brand awareness;
- Generate leads and sales;
- Grow your brand’s audience;
- Boost community engagement;
- Drive traffic to your site.
Knowing what exactly you expect to get, it’s easier to develop a content plan and define the workflow.
However, whatever your business size, industry, and niche, the strategy is to be data-driven. Herewith, as soon as you define the goals, it’s also important to determine the key metrics and KPIs to track and focus on so that you dig into data that aligns directly with the settled objectives. It can be:
- Reach: how far is your content actually reaching your target users’ feeds?
- Clicks: the number of clicks on your content or account made.
- Engagement: who the people interact with your profile/posts?
- Organic and paid likes.
- Hashtag performance: what were your brand’s most-used/most popular hashtags?
- Sentiment: how users reacted to your brand, content, hashtag, etc.
2. Learn your audience and build relationships
The knowledge of who your buyer is can cut the costs several times. Just because when you understand your TA, you can create targeted campaigns to specifically reach people, who are the most likely to convert. That’s why it’s crucial for successful low-cost social media marketing to know the TA, considering such key aspects as demographic, location, likes/dislikes, behavior.
Having the ability to talk directly to the prospects via social media, make most of it, and build relationships with your users. In such a way you can retain your customers and build a loyal community that will lead to ongoing sales over time.
How to build relationships via social media?
Here are the three tips that will help you do long-term business and get real customers:
- Be human, be natural.
- Do not copy and paste.
- Show that you care about people.
3. Create appealing and engaging content on trending topics regularly
Create and curate high-quality content. What’s more, publish appealing and engaging content regularly because inactive feeds are bad for any business. Keep on track of the trends in the niche and publish useful, informative, and interesting content on the hottest topics. Yet, you should always prefer quality to quantity. If you don’t have worthy content, don’t publish a post/story/reel/IGTV just for the sake of posting.
Here are a few tips on how to make your social media account more engaging:
- Create a content strategy. Plan what and when you will post.
- Schedule your posts. Don’t go chaotic, be consistent and post when your users are most active.
- Make the most of UGC (user-generated content). Customers are 2.4 times more likely to interact with UGC posts as they are perceived to be more authentic and credible.
- Keep an eye on the key competitors. Track what they share, get inspiration, and find what you do better to stand out.
- Adapt your content to suit the definite social media marketing (SMM) platform.
- Constantly gather data and monitor the campaign performance. Audit your company’s posts on social media, track engagement activities, and keep an eye on key metrics and KPIs.
Experiment and mix up your formats. Search the type of content that works best for your brand. Experiment and monitor the results to reveal what you should use more frequently to keep your audience engaged.
4. Engage your target audience
Valuable and informative content is good but not enough. It’s highly important to engage the TA and interact with users. Here are a few ways you can boost user engagement as well as connect and reach consumers on social media:
- Ask questions;
- Host polls;
- Respond to all of the comments on the posts;
- Run competitions
- Add branded hashtags to boost brand awareness;
- Ask Questions
- Run Live videos and streams;
- Write compelling captions and include a call-to-action to ask people to take an action.
5. Use the right tools: creation, scheduling, and automation
It’s vital to use the right tools to make campaigns more effective. Today you can automate tasks by using special tools. Thus, there are programs and software for creating and curating high-quality content, scheduling posts, auditing social media accounts, etc.
- Use Crello for creating stunning graphics and visuals for your social account. It’s a full-stack editor with help of which you can not only make background transparent free of charge for your business logo but also create covers, posts, stories, infographics, animation, and many more.
- Integrate management and analytics tools like Soho, Hootsuite, and any other so that you can:
- Centralize mentions and messages from all the social media networks;
- Respond and engage users without a need to log in to each social media account.
- Utilize different tools for content curation like BuzzSumo, Pocket, or any other to organize content to share.
6. Optimize content
It’s crucial to optimize the content due to the specific requirements of certain SMM platforms. Use the following tactics for content optimization:
- Add images and photos styled in similar way;
- Optimize image sizes of each network;
- Include hashtags and usernames;
- Target specific groups and/or users;
- Use call to actions (CTAs) (share, follow, tweet, and so on);
- Limit the number of characters;
- Add videos because it’s the most-wanted and best-working way to engage users (90% of consumers on social media watch videos);
- Add links to the official website (if you have such one) in the profile;
- Follow influencers of your field/niche;
- Show off the human side of your brand.
7. Monitor and refine your performance
As we have said, to make your strategy effective, all your decisions and efforts are to be data-driven. That’s why you may collect and analyze the data to build a successful and strong digital marketing strategy. Learn the pains, needs, and wishes of the consumers to improve the product/service and campaigns not only attract new buyers but retain existing customers. Use monitoring tools to make the right changes when it’s needed.
Takeaways
It’s obvious that social media networks are a fantastic tool for building a brand and boosting its awareness, unlocking sales opportunities, and reaching customers for any kind of business, and on and on. Implementing these social media marketing SMM tips described in the article, any business can generate great results even on a low budget.