Social media marketing has given individuals, small businesses and startups a chance to successfully market their brand to a wider audience. The right social media strategies and tools continue to yield more accessible options for online marketing. This stuff can be easily learned by anyone with an interest and a little extra time, and can be funded with little financial resources. I’ll tell you how…
Look Within Your Team
In-house social media marketing is a great option for small businesses just starting out. There’s already enough expenses with product development, web design and other initial costs. By taking social media efforts in-house, employees can truly hone their online marketing skills, which benefits the growth of the business and its online presence.
In order to make the most out of your in-house efforts, it’s important to utilize all the top applications and web tools for social media marketing. These are the same tools used by many professional social media marketing services. Furthermore, an in-house team needs to delegate the right candidates to oversee the daily commitment to Twitter, Facebook and other sites.
If you need some extra help but don’t have anyone on your team to take it on – try hiring a part time virtual assistant (I use a service called Zirtual; and for $200/month you can get 10 hours of help from a designated assistant – which ends up being A LOT of time.)
Grab Your Tool Kit!
Web and mobile applications are essential for managing any social media marketing campaign. For around $6 -$20, someone with little to no experience can use top applications, like Hootsuite and Sprout Social, to manage their various social media accounts.
This type of marketing requires the monitoring of all active social networking accounts, and these tools allow people to manage all their accounts through a convenient dashboard feature. This provides insight into user behavior and preferences, peak blog commenting times and more social media trends.
Most importantly, though – consolidating all of your social media platforms into ONE dashboard will save you a ton of time. And time is money, y’all.
Facebook Marketing the Right Way
While there are plenty of new social platform bandwagons emerging EVERY day, Facebook is still a social media giant with great marketing potential! On top of the standard free registration, promoting a Facebook page requires little financial resources as well. However, that promotion has to be executed the right way to get the most out of that time investment (and Facebook Ads are a huge help IF executed correctly).
Creating a Facebook page and promoting it is great, but accumulating “likes” is what really gives businesses that competitive edge. Once a business or individual is officially liked by Facebook users, their page updates immediately start appearing on users’ news feeds. This puts a marketing team in a prime position to increase customer loyalty through informative and valuable content, plus encourage new visitors to jump on board too!
It’s important that a Facebook page has something valuable to offer its visitors and audience. Just like a blogger needs enticing content to keep readers, a Facebook page manager needs to post the right content at the right times to keep growing a fan base.
And if you’re going to invest money in online advertising, Facebook Ads are one of the best ways to do it. Create a targeted, effective message, set everything up properly and you’ll start seeing conversions in no time for anywhere from .20 to 2.00 per conversion. (More on Facebook Ads HERE.)
Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and Google+ are other free social media platforms with “stay” power that you should at the very least have a minimal presence on with linkbacks to your website.
Marketing Directly To the Inbox
One of the oldest forms of web communication is email, and it’s still one of the best online marketing options available today. With so many social networking sites and management apps available, tried and true email marketing can get lost in the shuffle.
The truth is, email marketing is the best online solution for direct marketing. While email still has an edge, it can just as easily fall apart! Sending too many emails at one time from a personal email account is spammy (and illegal) so make sure you’re using an email marketing platform like Mailchimp (which is free) to keep track of your lists, create and send emails.
It’s a great idea to give loyal site visitors the option of a free email subscription. Their sign up alone is a reflection of the revenue potential of email marketing. This way, bloggers have a chance to advertise their new eBooks directly to readers, while online retailers can send exclusive promo codes to loyal subscribers.
One more free resource: I’m offering my 40something page social media strategy guidebook FREE for SBN readers for 1 more week (value $47). Click to sign up.