Social Media Marketing on a tight budget Tips and Tactics

Social media marketing can do amazing things for businesses of all sizes. It can help to boost brand awareness, generate leads, drive website traffic, convert prospects into clients, and grow sales.

And with that in mind, some companies are now spending thousands of dollars every year on social media marketing. Unfortunately, the majority of small businesses and start-ups can’t afford to spend so much money on social media marketing.

But, does it mean that you can’t achieve any success with social media marketing if you are on a tight budget? Fortunately, that’s not the case. In this post, we will walk you through a couple of tips, tactics, and strategies, which can help you to market your businesses successfully on social media on a shoestring budget.

Select a Few Platforms

Currently, there are more than 50 social media platforms out there. And, there’s a high chance you will want to establish a presence on all these platforms. After all, the more platforms you have a presence on, the bigger the reach, right? In theory, this is true.

But, you will need a massive marketing budget to establish a robust presence on all these platforms. And unfortunately, this is not the case. You are working with a tight budget. If you try to establish a presence on all these platforms with your tiny budget, there’s every possibility you won’t see any returns.

To this end, you must select a few social media platforms and then focus your resources there. That way, you will have more success as opposed to trying to establish a presence everywhere.

So, how do you determine which platforms to focus on? You simply need to take a closer look at your target audience. From there, you should be able to determine where they hang out, create accounts there and focus your efforts there.

Use Free Design Tools and Resources

A few years back, you would publish a plain and bland social media post. And, it would still get considerable engagement. But, this is no longer the case. If you want social media users to interact with your posts today, they need to be visually appealing and captivating. There’s simply no way around this.

In light of this, some businesses now have dedicated teams of graphic designers, specifically tasked with creating social media graphics. And as you may expect, such professionals don’t come cheap.

So, what happens if you are on a tight budget and can’t afford to hire a professional graphics designer for your social media visuals? Well, there are dozens of free design tools out there that you can use to create captivating social media graphics.

And, Canva is one of the best tools for this type of work. With Canva, you just need to log in to the platform and select a template from the templates library. You can also upload onto Canva, free and ready-made social media templates sourced from platforms like ContentBASE.

From there, you can customize the graphic according to your needs. Within a few minutes, you will have a professional-looking social media graphic. So, as much as you are working with a shoestring budget, you can still manage to come up with high-quality visuals, which will drive engagement on your social media channels.

Establish Co-marketing Partnerships

Co-marketing is an approach where two businesses work together to promote each other’s services or products. And, such an arrangement has numerous benefits.

With a co-marketing partnership, both businesses will be able to reach new audiences, new leads, and new potential clients.

Also, you will reduce marketing costs, since you will pool resources. So, such an arrangement can be extremely beneficial for someone like you, working with a tight marketing budget.

You simply need to identify a non-competing but similar business, which may be ready for such a partnership. For instance, if you run a fitness facility, you can enter into a co-marketing partnership with a business that deals in health supplements, workout gear, or other fitness-related accessories.

You can then come up with a marketing campaign where you will both be promoting each other’s business across your social media channels. With proper execution, co-marketing can be an effective way for your business to reach new audiences without having to spend too much on marketing.

Reuse Existing Content

You need to be posting at least once or twice every day on social media, to maximize your reach and engagement. And, this also means you need to be producing high-quality content consistently.

While you can outsource social media content creation to freelancers, the costs can add up quite fast, thereby stretching your shoestring budget to its limits. And, this is where repurposing content comes in.

Repurposing content is simply reusing or recycling content that you already have. You just need to change the format slightly and you will have a fresh post ready for publishing.

For instance, you can convert an infographic into a series of tweets. Or, you can convert a blog post into a video, which you will then post on Facebook.

When you repurpose content, you will end up saving money, meaning your tight marketing budget will go even further.

In Conclusion

You don’t need thousands of dollars to succeed with social media marketing. By implementing the above tips, you should be able to achieve considerable success even if you are on a tight budget.