10 Cheap Social Media Marketing Ideas For Small Businesses 

Social media has gone a long way from the simple ideas of just being a way for relaxing whenever you have some spare time. Nowadays it’s like a must-do for every business, big or small to be able to connect with the customers. If you don’t do that or think it is not important, the days your businesses have to close down may not be too far from now. With the rapidly growing number of people using social media, you know that to increase your brand awareness by using social media marketing is a must-do.

Social media and business are moving together and a part of each other. According to a report on Small Business Trends, it is recommended that businesses collate 10% of their budgets through social media. Obviously social media has created a big impact on consumers buying decisions.

As you know, to run a successful social media marketing often takes a lot of effort, persistence, time and ultimately in some scenarios, it’s a lot of money for spending.

If you are a big enterprise with a big marketing budget, the tips below I would suggest is not for you but for businesses just starting out, sinking in social media marketing may not be the best choice if you are lacking experiences.

But as we are here to share with you 10 cheap social media marketing ideas that actually work, nothing is impossible.

Start with Quality Content

There is always a right to say content is king in terms of digital marketing. Will it be any different for the content on social media? The answer is no.

By creating quality content on blog or website on a consistent basis which can then be easy to share through to other social media platforms. It will increase your traffic and your brand awareness by getting leads to the social media users, making it more valuable and effective towards acquiring leads and sales!

Here are a few options for your reference on how to develop a professional content marketing strategy when you start to write the content:

• How-To Guides
• Case Studies and Client Profiles
• Create tips in your industry experts
• Top lists

Making video contents

A video content?

Yes. Research from Campaign Monitor suggested that 62% of businesses who used video marketing, saw an increase in their sales levels.

Further, visual imagery is processed 60,000 times faster than text to the brain.

Why types of video content should we make to attract the customers?

Our advice is to make a video that highlights your products or services, you have to be at your audience’s point of view to understand how to touch them. In this scenario, instructional, educational, interview with the founders of how-to videos can be a great option. Your audience will automatically be interested in them and then can lead them to be your potential customer. Animated Videos is also a perfect way to make you stand out on social media with the cost-effective, attractive to the viewer and fun to watch.

Share the inspiring story of how your brand came to the market, all the struggles, and the challenges that you have overcome to stand where you are in the market today.

By producing video content like that, your brand awareness will reach potential customers faster than ever!

Use Email Marketing Method

As read here, you may wonder or be surprised with this one because this blog is about social media marketing tactic, how can email marketing be involved here?

You can use content from your social media channels to send out to your email marketing list. For instance, you can highlight customer reposts from your social media in your emails.

According to statistics from Statista shows that there is 3.7 billion email user in the world in 2017 and it almost reaches to 4 billion user in the end of 2020. Campaign Monitor research in 2018 has once again pointed out that email is the king in digital marketing, 59% of marketers confirm that the most ROI is from through email marketing and 25% of marketers plan to increase the budget spending for email marketing in 2018.

One of the biggest mistakes that many small businesses make with email marketing is not getting started with investing in building the customer’s email list at an early stage.

There are many small business owners usually stumble om the early mistake with email marketing that does not realize the importance of email marketing and start building up their customer’s email list in the early days.

Identify what is your target customer. The is 80/20 rule in marketing, also known as the Pareto Principle suggests that 80% of your company sales come from 20% of your customers. While other 80% of customers are more likely one-time buyers. By analyst the metric on your email marketing data, you can predict your customer preferences, what type of products or service is viewed the most by customers. This information can help you a lot by generating your target customers and wider your email list.

Getting people to click through is really critical because it can impact your search engine rate and higher rankings tell searchers that you are a credible source for information for the customers when they are searching the products

Facebook Ad Advertising

Facebook is an absolutely powerful marketing tool. There is no doubt about that. It’s like the milestone of the world’s largest social network and you can connect to wherever your customer is in the world.

Before the term of social media existed, no one ever believed that one day businesses will be able to reach their customer base so easily and can connect to the customer so closely like that. However, it also means you cannot go in without a proper marketing strategy, one which needs to be flexible enough to evolve with your changing business needs.

In general, there are two ways a business can take when marketing on Facebook. First is by unpaid advertising which is spending a large amount of time producing quality content, organic posts to attract the customers and another way which is going for the paid advertisement method by spending money on Paid Ads on Facebook.

But keep in mind that you also need to note the fact that unpaid advertising will only afford you a limited reach. If you want a paid option that is still cost-effective in the long run, then you better run both options together.

Focus on target audience

For many small businesses, define and target the audience is the most critical part. Don’t know your target customers it likes your lost in the maze and don’t know which way to get out. How can you give “them” what they want if you don’t even know who “they” are? By knowing that it is easy for you to develop your marketing strategy, where it is traditional marketing or social media marketing. It is the key point of selling your service/products.

The social media target audience is the specific group of potential customers that you want to reach with your social channel platforms. By defining the personas customer such as age group, hobbies, colors can help you in determining suitable contents for publishing. Which social media channels you should focus on and sharing the content that will get the big engagement from these people or consider when you choosing the main social media platforms to focus on.

Knowing your target audience will encourage a relationship between you and potential customers and it is critical to know what your target audience is before posting any content. For example, it is always easier to make a note of what you want to buy in the supermarket before you come there. Otherwise, you may miss some items or overspend the budget for other items.

Live Streaming

Do you know live streaming has been alive since the 90s but the significance and uses of it have drastically evolved over the years. The mobile internet revolution has changed the live streaming social to a new level.

Now everyone with a smartphone and a good internet connection can easily broadcast live videos to the world.

Live streaming is very similar to creating video content but much easier. It’s more about focus on the live event and broadcast to your audience. What you need to do is just simply press on the red button to start streaming.

There are many options for you to start. Facebook, Instagram or Youtube all have the feature of live streaming so it’s really convenient for you to bring the live event to your audience on different platforms.

It is the time that the audience has the chance to interact with the entire marketing process in real-time and understand deeply about your brand. And this is also the chance for you to tell them about your brand as they watch your presentation

The more customers know about you, the more they will trust you and be aware of your brand. And from now on, it can all lead to better business and increased your sales and revenue.

Create Infographics

An article with heavy text is not always for everyone, other readers  may prefer image content over text. What infographics can help you is reaching out to people with different preferences and expanding your visual search.

Infographic provides you a new look of your old content and keeps your blog constantly updated. Choose some of your older, text-heavy blog posts and convert the points into image information for an infographic. The best thing about infographics is that between the beautiful colours and clever illustration images. There is space for the important information.

Next is the design part. It is about choosing whether to do it yourself or hire a designer to create it for you. If you have the in-house team to design infographic, you have the freedom to include valuable important points that you want to highlight and want your audience to see. Otherwise, you have to design it yourself through some free tools such as Canva. Or you can outsourse a designer to create your infographics depending on your budgets.

Utilize Hashtags

It’s popular in social media nowadays when you see the sign (#) you may think it is only meant to be used when you check your voicemail. But when it comes to social media it stands for draw attention, organize content and create a trend.

To use the hashtag, you don’t have to be a developer or coding expert to be able to use it. Anyone can use it, just remember these simple rules:

– Use the # before your chosen keywords

– No special characters, punctuation or spaces in hashtags.

– Make it brief and unique.

Is it important for using hashtags?

Social media is a busy place and keep changing the trends all the time. What hashtags useful the most that is you don’t need to pay any money for using the hashtag. As you find the right niche of your brand, you can use trending hashtags on social media about your industry. The people who have the same interest in your industry will easy to see your post through the searching process. For instance, you have just finish the Instagram post about Make the mint chocolate and attached the hashtag #mintchocolate. Anyone who searches the same keyword that you have hashtag will likely see your latest post pop up in the meantime.

One of the great things of hashtags is totally free, the only thing you need to invest is to discover which hashtags are trending.

As you see your followers start to increase, it’s time for you to make your own hashtag! This is a great idea if you are running a contest or building your brand awareness.

Leverage online competitions

The term “competitor” sounds negative to many business owners, something scary that they either need to fight or run away from. But what if you looked at your competitors from another angle, and see it  as a leverage for you to embrace and rise above them?

For instance, if your business is already offering some potential products or services, then why not host a giveaway event to attract other potential customers. Asking people for a follow or like on a social media post to be entered and they can have a chance of having some of your new products.

Even though you don’t earn any money by doing it. But if the company can afford to give away just one item from stock, then this is a great opportunity to build your brand awareness. As result market products giving many people the hopes of winning one. This way makes your products reach out to more customers.

By holding a giveaway event competition, brand awareness will be increased dramatically, more and more. Potential customers will be much more aware about the company, and ultimately will turn them to be future buyers.

Repurposing Your Old Content

Let me ask you something?

When you are planning to create new content, there are also other materials you need to prepare such as photographs, videos, content ideas and editing time…to create the best content on your terms.

And after you finish all the works, what if your content gets buried in tons of contents out there or doesn’t get index on the search engines.

What are you going to answer?

Content repurposing is a way of reusing old material for digital marketing purposes. To make it easier to understand, it means using your old content for creating a new updated content.

For instance, many of your audience didn’t know or ever read some of your old and awesome content. Are you going to buried these old content forever?

Just by simply reuse these old content, update content information in real-time. You can save so much time and also having new and fresh content while you can planning on creating new content on the way.

By repurposing content, you can have many benefit in return such as:

• Reach out to a larger audience.
• Maximize your efforts.
• Bringing forgotten stories back

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One example that is you can use the old contents, organize it in the same category, and create a new ebook. A free ebook for Top technique to use on social media marketing 2020 or How to create a successful marketing campaign in real data..who else don’t want that? This will create entirely fresh content for your audience. Another example is you can create some of your old videos into a comparison of what has changed through the certain time of a new selection of tutorials on how to do tips.

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Let’s wrap it up

As you read here, you know that you don’t need a big budget to have a successful social media marketing campaign, there are many other ways that you can increase your brand awareness, reach out to a big audience with a limited budget. Just start from small steps such as:  create an event to give away, create a new ebook based on some of your old contents.

We hope our 10 practical tips have listed above can help you along the way of having a successful marketing campaign in the future.

Author Bio

Dung Duc Ho is a passionate by heart digital marketer at a web design agency Vietnam. He focuses on creating brand content that is conversational, engaging, and bring values to people. His passion for visual storytelling and creating a meaningful customer experience has turned him a force to be reckoned with.

Featured Image Courtesy: Pixabay