Low-Cost Social Media Marketing Techniques

Social media marketing (SMM) remains one of the cornerstones of successful advertisement. With millions of people actively using platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, marketers are bound to take advantage of such a lucrative market.

However, not every company or start-up has the budget necessary for paid advertisement. Does that mean they can’t use social media marketing techniques at all? Absolutely not.

Luckily, social media marketing allows for a plethora of advertisement techniques with little to no costs. That means that marketers working on a very low to no budget at all can still take advantage of what social media has to offer. All they need is the right kind of techniques and strategies. If you’re interested in finding out which SMM techniques you can use on any budget, we’ve got you covered.

Here’s everything you need to know about low-cost SMM techniques and why you should use them.

 

Benefits of social media marketing

 

Let’s kick this off by looking into why SMM is so important and why it should be an essential part of everyone’s marketing strategy.

Let's start with... what are the main benefits of SMM?

 

Raising brand awareness

Social media gives you the chance to make your brand more visible and widely recognised.

Firstly, it helps your regular customers bond to you more closely. In addition, it also helps you with attracting new customers on a daily basis.

It’s a place where your brand can show off, speak its mind and be recognised as unique.

 

ROI

Social media is definitely one of the best marketing platforms when it comes to ROI (Return On Investment).

Your job is to create engaging pages and entertaining posts. If you make all the right steps, you don’t need to spend money on paid advertisement. And that is what makes the social media ROI so high.

You get the job done, with little to no money at all.

 

Gathering Data

Using social listening, marketers are able to gather useful information about their customers. You can learn what they do and don’t like, what makes them actively engage in your post and what increases your sales and profit.

 

SMM Strategies to consider

 

Now it’s time to take a look at the most successful SMM techniques and strategies you can use, regardless of your budget.

 

1. Chase After Trends

When it comes to content creation and content marketing, your number one task is to stay up-to-date. That includes covering trending topics and writing about the latest hits and trends in your niche.

If you’re able to produce content people are interested in reading about, you’ll be able to increase traffic and customer engagement.

The best part is, you don’t have to invest any money, you just need to stay focused on what’s trending and cover the right topics.

 

2. Audience targeting and segmentation

When you’re building an audience on social media, you need to be aware that you’ll have various people follow your brand and become your customers. In order to be able to publish content suitable for all your customers, you need to learn who they are. To do that, you can conduct a survey or use data analysis to gather information about them.

Then, you can create targeted content aimed at specific groups of people and have something to offer to all your customers and audiences.

 

3. Using Thunderclap campaigns

If you have a message you want to share with others, you need to find ways of amplifying it. One of the ways to do it is to use a Thunderclap campaign.

All you need to do is set the campaign and target the people who may be interested in sharing it. By targeting the right people, you make your campaign more successful and consequentially, you increase traffic, conversions and it gets you trending.

In addition, this campaign will attract new followers and expand your audience base.

 

4. Motivational content works

Most people use social media to brighten their day, see or read something nice and evoke some kind of a positive emotion.

You can use this fact to promote your brand and have people get to like it even more.

Try creating motivational content, filled with inspirational images, life-goal quotes or optimistic points of view. Make it visually appealing as well as emotionally strong. In addition, make a connection with your brand to make the whole thing even better.

Your audience is going to love being inspired by a brand they chose to follow.

 

5. Implement proper hashtags

Hashtags are being used on different social media, even though Instagram prevails. They can quite handy and useful to help you attract new people and make your brand more visible on social media.

Come up with simple but catchy hashtags related to your brand. In addition, use popular hashtags related to your industry or niche. Mix them together to create the perfect combination of engaging hashtags.

This way, people searching for content related to that tag will be able to earn about you and connect to your brand.

 

6. Consider using memes

Adding a bit of humour to your social media profiles is always a good idea, especially if you’re aiming at a younger audience, and memes are the way to go.

Using popular memes in your posts can help people grow to like you and increase your popularity. In addition, you can custom make your own brand-related memes to further increase customer engagement and overall traffic.

However, don’t go too crazy with memes. Your main focus still needs to be on your brand so try not to turn your social media account into a humoristic page.

 

7. Use calls to action

Finally, you can use your creativity to get your customers to perform the desired actions.

At a zero budget, you can create engaging CTAs and send unambiguous messages to your audience. You can call them to purchase something, participate in a giveaway, share, like, comment, follow…whatever it is that you want them to do.

Remember, your job is to make the call-to-action desirable and not mandatory.

 

Conclusion

 

There are so many things you can do with your social media accounts, to increase traffic, conversions and engagement with a low budget, or without a budget at all. You just need to use a little creativity and some marketing skills.

 

By Elisa Abbott, Freelancer @ PickWriters