Social Media Marketing on a Shoestring Budget
Not Everyone Can Afford Facebook Ads
Certainly, ads on social media through Facebook or other outlets can do a lot to make your business visible to target demographics. However, getting proper return for your investment can end up being a little expensive.
If you’re going to get the balance right, a wise move is exploring less expensive options and graduating up to more mainstream, costly marketing moves. Under that premise, this writing will include several worthwhile tips you may well want to explore as a means of most cost-effectively utilizing social media for your business’s marketing needs.
-
Memes, Humor, And Generating A Following
Memes are a new medium, and they’ll be here for a while. People love them because they’re hilarious. Now just what is a meme? Well, specifically, it’s a unit of information generally involving cultural points of data that are humorously co-opted as a means of spreading information through the natural viral nature of qualitative online entertainment.
Usually, a meme will be a picture, maybe of Ryan Gosling or Elvis making a funny expression. The top might say something like: “that face you make…”, and the bottom will say something like: “…when you save a bunch of money on car insurance by switching to X”.
Now that’s an example of a meme “language” being used to sell insurance company “X”. Generally, memes aren’t advertisements, they’re strictly for fun; so if you’re going to use them as a marketing tool, it’s important to have a bunch of fun, humorous memes that don’t sell anything. You then pepper in similar memes used to market your business with the “fun” ones.
Basically, you’ll generate a following that way which will tune into new things you produce, and so be more poised to consume marketing media when you make it. Keep in mind also that memes aren’t only static images; some are “.GIFs”, some are short videos where two snippets from popular shows are combined to make a new funny message.
-
Utilizing All Social Media Channels, And As Suits Each One
Facebook is a social media channel. So is Twitter, so is Instagram, so is LinkedIn, and there are many others. Parler, Minds.com, Gab.ai, YouTube, Telegram, GETTR, LIVIT, CloutHub, MeWe—there are numerous options out there, and these merely scratch the surface. Understand what social media avenues are available, and have a presence on all of them.
It’s worthwhile to have at least one individual in your marketing team dedicated to social media management. Once you’ve got a presence on all social media outlets, and someone to keep them updated, your next step is using each one correctly. IG or Instagram tends to be one of the “hottest” options now and is fine for generating visibility through pictures and video.
Twitter’s primarily used for interacting with clientele owing to the limited size of Tweets. You don’t have to spend an hour responding to someone when there’s a 280 character limit. LinkedIn is more professional, LIVIT is an experimental Chinese app so be cautious with this one, Minds.com, Gab.ai, YouTube, Telegram, CloutHub, and MeWe are still in flux.
YouTube should be better but algorithms hamper your reach, so keep that in mind. Non-traditional social media avenues have more freedom. Facebook is good for branding, and for engaging customers, but you get bogged down if you’re not careful, and there are restrictive rules defining Facebook—much like YouTube. Also, don’t forget Rumble, Vimeo, and similar options. Have a presence on all social media; who knows what will disappear like MySpace.
-
In-House Content Production And Distribution
You don’t have to outsource content production. Essentially, the content you produce and disseminate across social media is going to assist in the facilitation of your online “footprint”. The more content you produce, the bigger that footprint—provided you don’t use restricted techniques for visibility, like keyword stuffing.
Essentially, if you’ve got a marketing team with one person devoted to social media management, you may want to hire someone else as a content producer. This individual will write X amount of content (based on consultative best practices for your business) a day. If you can’t acquire or afford a consultant as a guide, learn from competitors.
This content will have a blog element, it should have a pictorial element, it should have a video element, and if you can put together compelling infographics, do so—those tend to be rather popular.
-
The Visual Element: Acquiring Video
As regards the visual element, it’s notable that more people are going to interact with passive content than that which requires critical thought. Video is easier to ingest than text. The text requires individuals to read and think critically, which ends up being a bit of a task. People don’t like tasks, especially as regards marketing.
What makes sense is putting together visual materials which are stimulating to the eye and mind, encouraging viewers to watch each bit of visual content through to the end. There are a number of ways to do that, and they can be expensive, but you don’t necessarily have to break the bank for qualitative visual content.
Having video marketing for small local businesses does a lot to enhance visibility to target demographics and overall reputation in the local community. However, securing such video isn’t always easy—options like that in the link are affordable and can help your local business have the veneer of larger and similar national outlets.
Video content can also be created in-house utilizing smartphones, but if you’re going that route, you’ve got to be careful to have a certain angle that justifies the “cheap” design associated with such output. You can easily make it more professional with a simple Instagram selfie editor app. Unless of course your brand “culture” doesn’t necessarily require that sort of justification.
-
Using Multiple Employees To Facilitate “Blasts”
A chat blast or a profile blast can be very effective. With a chat blast, you’re adding as many relevant individuals to one “chat” window as you can, then sending out a specific message to them all. This can be very effective in spreading your marketing message, though if those to whom you send such messages are merely customers, it can be a bit intrusive.
A better move is using Facebook message blast techniques to get marketing personnel with Facebook accounts on the same page. However, this isn’t the only sort of “blast” technique you can explore. Something that may be even more effective is using employee Facebook accounts to make status updates that are shared and sharable across multiple networks.
Say you’ve got fifty employees, each averaging 300 contacts, ten of which would be demographic fits for your company. So that’s 500 potential leads from a body of 15,000 potential viewers; some of which may organically share posted content if it resonates with them. So what you do is have employees share marketing messages on personal accounts.
From there, you have them share those posts with other employees. If you get fifty people to share a piece of content a dozen times between themselves, and once individually, then you could potentially get those materials in front of 500+ new potential customers. This could very well result in a number of conversions.
-
Crafting Each Post To Be SEO-Optimized, Gaming Algorithms
SEO means Search Engine Optimization, and this applies to social media posts as it does to general content distributed through traditional blogs. You want keyword saturation, you want sentences to be structured properly, you want short paragraphs with plenty of white space and a strong visual element. Each post needs to be SEO-optimized along with known best practices.
To game algorithms, it can also be worthwhile to establish multiple social media accounts. Maybe you have one just for humorous memes, and one just for marketing memes, and you share on the humor memes profile at intervals to co-opt its following without discouraging those followers.
It’s a common tactic these days. SEO-optimize social media content, and get around algorithms as best you’re able to.
Co-Opting Social Media Cost-Effectively
Notable social media optimization techniques include strategic SEO post design, multiple accounts, “blasting” certain social media avenues, mastering the visual element in terms of video, producing and distributing content in-house, utilizing all channels appropriately, and generating a following through humorous content and the like.
These are a few tips that are exceptionally affordable to employ. Different options exist than these, but on a basic level, these should help you reach target demographics cost-effectively. Seek a little consultation to help you more effectively utilize available tools without paying out the nose. Social media represents a prime marketing opportunity; don’t let it get away.
