Marketing your business is essential across all available mediums. Social media is an important part of this process. You need to make sure you have a solid social media presence, and get as much engagement as possible from your audience.
Of course, it’s not possible to just throw all your resources into your social media marketing efforts. You need to consider your overall budget, and allocate a set amount for this purpose. Then, you need to make sure you stay within that amount. Otherwise, your other avenues, such as your website or sales, will suffer. It may seem like big companies get away with throwing money into their social media platforms, but that’s not true. Every company needs a proper social media strategy that fits into a certain budget. Here’s how you can stick to your budget, no matter how low it may seem.
Narrow down your target audience
First of all, narrow down your target audience. Don’t waste your resources on audiences which won’t really give you any results. Instead, figure out who responds best to your social media posts, and direct your efforts towards them.
This means that you plan your content, and do your demographic targeting accordingly. Most social media platforms have very user-friendly tools to help you do this. They even offer up trends and suggestions you can follow for the best results.
Figure out what platforms to focus on
Not all social media platforms are built the same. They all cater to different types of people and companies. For example, LinkedIn is usually quite professional and formal, while Instagram is more engaging and fun.
Determine what your general marketing tone is, and then see which platform fits that tone the best. This will not only help you improve your social media content, but also prevent you from focusing on the wrong platforms. After all, if you spread out your budget exactly evenly across platforms, you won’t get good results. Instead, divide it proportionally, depending on which platform serves your purposes the best.
Use a set of social media templates
It can be quite difficult to create new designs for every single social media post you put out there. So, it’s best to decide a visual theme, and make a few templates for each social media platform.
You can make these using PosterMyWall, and save them into your repository. Then, when you need to launch new social media campaigns, you’ll only have to change a few things around. This will save a considerable amount of time and money, as compared to making new designs every single time.
Offer attractive value propositions
Follow the 60/30/10 rule when you are carrying out social media marketing on a budget. This means that 60% of your content should focus on audience engagement, 30% on shared posts, and 10% on direct product or service marketing.
Most of your posts should offer informational value to your customers. This means that you can’t share random posts for the sake of it. There needs to be a solid strategy in place. So, you should focus on making cohesive social media campaigns which appeal to your target audience.
Create unique ads for each platform
While it may seem tedious, having templates at hand will help you make unique ads for each platform. All social media platforms have their own particularities. For example, Instagram is more focused on visuals, while LinkedIn is more text-based.
So, you cannot place the same ads across all your social media platforms. You need to change things up for each platform. This will help you maximize your social media advertising budget. You’ll get better ROI this way, rather than expecting things to go well without considering the differences between social media platforms.
Perform regular A/B testing
This is an essential process if you want to see whether your budget is utilized well. Before putting all your resources into a platform, run an A/B test with a few variables among a selected audience. Then, choose the variant which reaps the best results for your overall audience.
Therefore, A/B testing is necessary if you want to get the most out of a limited social media budget. You can also try multi-variant testing, but it will be harder to track what really made a difference if you don’t isolate your variables.
Track social media performance
All of these social media marketing efforts cannot go on without data tracking and analysis. You’ll be wasting your budget if you don’t keep an eye on your social media performance. Keep an eye on how posts and campaigns are working out. Then, if something is not working out, you can make the relevant changes.
This tracking also helps you plan better social media campaigns in the future. So, you need to keep track of social media performance using a variety of native and third-party tools.
In conclusion, it is possible to run the best social media campaigns without spending tens of thousands dollars. You can achieve a lot within your budget, as long as you plan things out well.
