5 Cost-Effective Ways to Harness the Power of Social Media

No question about it, social media has made tremendous impact on digital marketing. Aside the huge popularity of social media, sharing marketing messages on the platforms is relatively very easy and effective. Even though the competition in digital marketing is tough and hugely challenging, social media helps to ease things up a bit for many marketers. With over 4 billion active users on social media at the moment with most logging into at least one of the platforms daily, digital marketers cannot ask for a more fertile marketing environment. The icing on the cake is that marketing therein is hugely cost-effective. If you visualize social media as some kind of Public Square where everyone interacts freely, you don’t really need to spend any money for this interaction since it is an open space for everyone. However, standing out and getting noticed in such free space for everyone has its own challenges. Marketers can always weave their ways around these challenges if they have the right marketing strategies and are consistent enough to make a real difference out there. That too is not at a great expense.

 

Here are 5 cost-effective ways to market on social media without stressing yourself financially.

1. Go Live on Videos: Marketing videos are very easy to make and easy to deploy on social media. You make more impact as a marketer when your audience hears directly from the “horse’s mouth.” This impact is more when you endeavor to go live on the most popular social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Marketing with live videos on these platforms is a great way for your audience to meet you live. That is hugely impacting and it is a free social media feature to boot.

2. Pay Genuine Attention to Your Audience: Make a habit of talking to and listening to your audience. By doing so, they feel cared for and do reciprocate as well. There is no question about it. Everyone likes attention particularly when that attention looks genuine. If and when your social media followers feel like you are giving them genuine attention, they will key into your content and support you. You can practically demonstrate this attention by devoting quality time to read comments/inquiries on your posts and respond to them all. By doing so, you are showing real concern and attention to what bugs your audience. They reciprocate and respond to your marketing messages as if it is person to person real time. That can be hugely impactful.

3. Be Consistent: There is no better way to show consistency than to show up every day. If you do, your audience will like and appreciate you better. Consistency helps you to build a connection with your target audience and imprint your brand in their minds. It makes you easily recognizable as a brand allowing others to find and notice you online with relative ease. Aside making regular and qualitative social media posts, you can ensure consistency in your social media profiles if you set them up using the same avatars, logos, descriptions and tone to make for easy recognition.

4. Make your Posts Creative and Interactive: Out there on social media, everyone is making a post every minute of the day. That is really a very huge trove of posts. For your posts to stand out from the crowd, you must endeavor to be creative in crafting your posts and making them interactive. No question about it, lots of people love the creativity offered by social media stories and marketing pitches. Always have that at the back of your mind when designing your posts particularly when such posts involve product launches, discounts, price adjustments, promos, and special announcements. If you are so inclined, you can post special snippets of your day-to-day life at work to give your audience some behind-the-scenes ideas about what you do and how you do it in your business. You can create quizzes, a poll, host a Q&A session and even make jokes to attract and engage the attention of your audience. These are all free but very effective marketing tools on social media.

5. Incorporate Hashtags Generously: Marketers use hashtags as little communities of content online. They do so by pairing their content with the right and appropriate hashtags. When they do this, the content automatically becomes part of these specific communities. That helps the content with very cheap online visibility. When your content is appropriately tagged, hashtags have the power and authority to help multiply your engagement provided they are correctly used. Many online searchers rely on hashtags to locate posts online that are relevant to their interests. That makes the use of hashtags some fantastic, cost-effective and incredible way to get your business noticed online. As a marketer, you can either create your own unique hashtags, or you latch on to any hashtags relevant to your business and content. Whichever you use, be sure it makes sense and relevant enough to help online searchers locate your business and your content.

Wrapping Up

Social media is now very deep and still developing. The reason digital marketers cannot afford to overlook social media in their marketing activities. If you are a creative marketer wanting to cut back on marketing costs, there is a lot you can do to leverage social media. The foregoing tips are very handy in that quest. Even if these tips will help you to save on some marketing money, to get good results, you must invest some more of your time and efforts. In the long term, it is worth the while for you to put some more efforts into finding the right tools, resources, and platforms that will help you build a sustainable online marketing strategy at minimal financial costs.