Social Media Marketing on a Shoestring Budget: 5 Strategies
Social media marketing can do wonders for a business. It can help to increase brand awareness, boost website traffic, generate leads, and amplify sales, among other benefits. And this may explain why some businesses are spending thousands of dollars on social media marketing alone.
But does this mean that if you are on a shoestring budget you can’t succeed with social media marketing? Absolutely not. In this guide, we will walk you through tips and strategies that can help you to launch and run a successful social media marketing campaign on a strict budget.
Top 5 Strategies Of Social Media Marketing on a Shoestring Budget
Understand Your Audience
Before you launch your social media marketing campaign, you will first need to have a clear idea of your target audience. Having a clear understanding of your target audience will help you to create and launch targeted campaigns, which will specifically reach people who are highly likely to purchase your products or services. And with the right targeting, your conversion rate will be high and you will avoid wasting your marketing funds on individuals who won’t convert.
To learn more about your audience, you can simply use the information that you may already have depending on people who have interacted with your business. And this can be through visiting your website or buying your products. You can then use this information to come up with a buyer persona.
In case you don’t have a lot of information about your audience to go with, you can simply examine your competitors’ customer data. Considering you are targeting the same audience, your competitors’ customer data will also give you some valuable insights, which you can also use to build a buyer persona.
Building a buyer persona will provide you with a full overview of your ideal client. The buyer persona may feature details like age, gender, location, hobbies and interests and shopping behavior. And with this information, you will know which channels to use to get maximum ROI. If you wish to ace the game of social media marketing, you must give a shot to online digital marketing courses. A detailed training course will help you to generate more ROI as a business owner.
Choose Your Platforms Wisely
Currently, there are dozens of social media platforms. And, you may be tempted to establish a presence on all these platforms. But, since you are working with a strict budget, you will need to choose a few platforms where you can market your business effectively.
The question is, how do you know which social media channels to focus on? Well, you should think about your brand’s image, your audience, your competitors as well as the products or services you are selling.
Leverage Free Resources
You will need to use visual graphics in your social media marketing campaigns. Studies show that if someone consumes information paired with a relevant image, they are likely to retain at least 65% of it, compared to only 10% when there’s no image. Hence, visual graphics will help to boost your social media campaigns significantly and drive your conversions.
And the good news is that you don’t need to be a professional graphic designer or even hire one to come up with visual graphics. There are plenty of free resources and design tools out there that you can use to create striking visual graphics.
Also, there are several platforms where you can download affordable, high-quality social media templates and visual graphics for your campaigns. After downloading these templates, you simply need to optimize them to match your branding and you will be good to go.
Partner with Micro-Influencers
Influencer collaborations can be an effective method of boosting the ROI of your social media marketing campaigns. They can help to enhance your brand’s online reputation, boost your reach and attract new customers.
And, you don’t have to partner with celebrities. They are too expensive and you are currently operating with a strict budget. Instead, you should approach micro-influencers in your niche. Besides being more affordable, micro-influencers tend to generate more engagements and views, compared to celebrities. So, you will end up maximizing your marketing budget and the returns will be outstanding.
Repurpose and Recycle Content
Repurposing existing content will go a long way in saving you both time and money. So, if you have some existing material, you can repurpose it into different forms and post it on your social media channels.
For instance, if you have a blog post, you can convert it into an infographic and post it on Facebook. You can also repurpose the blog into a series of tweets or make a thread out of it.
When done right, repurposing and recycling content will help you to maximize what you already have. At the same time, it will help you to save money, which you may have spent creating new, high-quality content.
Summary
Just because you don’t have thousands of dollars to spend on social media marketing doesn’t mean you should miss out on the benefits that this marketing channel offers. With the tips and strategies we’ve shared above, you should be able to get results from your social media marketing campaigns, even on a shoestring budget.
