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7 Cost-Effective Social Media Marketing Tips

Social media marketing tips

Social media is a huge part of everyone’s life in this digital era. It is almost impossible to find a millennial that is not using at least one social media networking platform. Hence there is a need for digital-conscious brands to seek out ways to penetrate this impressive and growing number of users of social media networking platforms in order to market their brand to them. If you don’t have a huge budget and are considering marketing your brand on social media, you can consider the services of a social media marketing agency to ensure your marketing budget is efficiently used. Here are 7 cost effective social media marketing tips.

1. Understand your target audience

This is the first and most important step to take when trying to market a brand on social media with a small or large marketing budget. You need to understand who the target audience is first in order to determine which social media networking platform would be best for this. Facebook is mostly used by those who are older and Instagram, Snapchat and Tumblr are mostly used by a younger audience. LinkedIn is mostly used by an older audience who are usually professionals – HR consultants, managers, job seekers and people building their personal professional brands. YouTube has a wider audience group but a larger percentage are young people. With this, you can have an idea about which of these platforms would be most beneficial to your brand.

You can also dig deeper to get more specific details about each social media app to understand which would work better for your target audience. It is also important that you track social media metrics that are important to the marketing goals of the brand. There are both free and paid tools that you can use to track these metrics, consider the free ones since you are work with a smaller budget.

2. Create unique content and share consistently

Content is an integral aspect of any marketing campaign. The kind of content pushed out on these social media networking platforms would determine how effective your social media marketing campaigns would be. Take time to plan the content for social media and ensure that all contents are visually compelling enough. Explore all kind of contents like infographics, GIFs, images, video, texts alone and so on.

While sharing content ensure that you use relevant hashtags as well (a maximum of thirty for Instagram). Hashtags can help boost the post and help you reach more people who are surfing through social media with such hashtags. You can also create a hashtag for the brand. This makes it easier for anyone to find contents peculiar to the brand easily online. In addition to all this, remember to always focus on the quality of content pushed out rather than the quantity. Also, remember that you are marketing a brand and every post must reflect that brands.

3. Create more video content that can help you go viral

There has been an increase in the consumption of audiovisual content and many marketing experts predicted last year that there would be an increase in the consumption of such content. The implication of this is that brands would have to step up their content creation game by creating more video content to increase their brand awareness. This way they can connect to more users that are drawn to video content.

Brands can start with showing behind the scenes footages of activities they are engaged in, creating self-explanatory videos, informative videos, and many other types of video content. You don’t need to hire an expert to create videos for you or edit videos. There are quite a number of free tools that you can use to edit videos to your taste. Unique videos tend to go viral which would give any brand more boost than a paid advert can. So get creative with your video content.

4. Partner with relevant social media influencers

A lot of small or medium brands often shy away from working with social media influencers because of the fear of the prices they will charge for such partnership – as well as other demands that might also come with such deals. But there are quite a lot of social media influencers out there who are pretty flexible with partnerships as long as it is presented with a win-win approach where both parties get to benefit greatly from such partnerships. This could be long-term or short-term, depending on the goal of your marketing campaign.

Work with social media influencers relevant to the industry of the brand and particularly influencers that have some sort of influence on the kind of target audience you are aiming at. This can really open up the brand to a whole new set of prospective consumers and you can connect on a deeper level with them with the help of these social media influencers.

5. Be interactive on social media

A lot of brands often shy away from being interactive on social media which totally defeats the purpose of these networking platforms. Engagement is a very key factor in determining the success of any social media marketing campaign. You must be ready to engage your followers. Chat with them, like their comments on your post and respond where necessary. Take a look at their profile too and comment on some posts or like them. You can also follow them back in return. Engagement boosts the reach of your posts as well as the views.

6. Do social media takeovers

Have a person with a good number of following and reasonable online popularity take over your account for some hours or a day. It is also a form of influencer marketing but this time the influencer is sharing content on your social media page and engaging your followers at the same time. This way, influencers can easily draw the attention of the people they attract to a brand’s page and help build an authentic following and increase brand awareness.

7. Encourage and use user-generated content

This is one type of marketing content that brands can never go wrong using. Find creative ways to encourage your clients to share user-generated content that the brand can share online. You could also arrange online contests to receive such content.