Businesses with online stores have started to realize the extent and power of their reach. They’ve been getting inquiries and orders from places they’ve never heard of or set foot on. But since everybody else has an online store, they’ve had to deal with the same problem during their brick-and-mortar days. They have to attract interest in their online stores.
Businesses learned that the secret lies in promoting their stores on social media platforms because that’s where everybody hangs out these days. But then they realize it’s not easy to create and maintain an effective social media marketing campaign unless they know how to handle the tools of the trade. It’d help to learn more about social media tools like Instagram bot or project management software.
Here are some suggestions on making social media pages work for you and managing them without spending a lot of money.
1. Choose Cost-Effective Strategies
Businesses can manage their social media pages without breaking the bank by developing creative strategies that won’t cost a lot. Business strategies should focus on meeting business goals and deadlines. This doesn’t necessarily mean you have to buy the latest proprietary technology or software.
Having expensive advanced technology is not equivalent to a great social media marketing strategy. Instead, you should formulate strategies suitable to your company’s context, resources, and capabilities. Even free campaigns such as sending catchy emails to those in your email list could attract more leads.
More importantly, these strategies should be correctly aimed at meeting the company’s specific weekly, monthly, and yearly goals. Some businesses don’t identify their periodic goals. These should be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound goals.
2. Use Low-Cost Project Management Software
Another way to manage your social media pages at a low cost is to select and deploy reasonably priced project management software. This is crucial in implementing an effective social media marketing campaign. It helps you update your social media accounts more frequently, keeping your audience engaged and preventing them from unfollowing you if they don’t see anything going on with your account for days.
However, if you have quite a number of followers who don’t follow you back, your best option is to unfollow in bulk. This is a strategic move because it allows you to keep a more successful and natural-looking follower/following ratio.
When using a project management software, your company should store all account details, files, documents, and content in a single storage space. This is an indispensable requirement so that all the project stakeholders, participants, and contributors can access the resources and files they need to do their work.
There are numerous software options for project management. Most of them are quite affordable, while others are even free. These tools have features and functionalities that help you automate repetitive tasks. This gives you and your team more time to focus your efforts on improving the performance and effectiveness of your strategy.
3. Group Your Social Media Accounts
Admittedly, it could be overwhelming for a business to manage its social media accounts or make the most of its existing ones. An effective social media marketing campaign involves maintaining an active account on popular social media platforms.
This means you need to manage multiple social media accounts and pages. Small businesses with limited staff may not have the time and expertise to do this. When they think about what needs to be done, your team may simply shrug off the idea and fail to implement a social media marketing campaign.
To surmount this challenge, you can group all your social media pages and accounts from different social platforms. This enables you to share and blast similar content across various social media pages and platforms. This saves you a lot of time and effort. You can save your created content into folders. Then, you can just link these content folders to the social account groups where they’re supposed to be shared.
Grouping your social media accounts also helps you achieve and maintain the uniformity and consistency of your content and messaging. For accounts and platforms that are supposed to have similar content, you can group them and then simultaneously send content from the linked folders.
You can even use scheduling and automation tools, so you just need to set it once a week. The social media marketing CMS tool will upload the content as scheduled for proper consistency and optimized timing.
4. Cultivate A Network Of Freelance Content Creators
Creating content that will grab the interest of your internet audience and resonate with your target market is an essential aspect of a successful social media marketing campaign. But content creation often requires you to shell out some money for professional fees. Small businesses are often taken aback by this because they can’t afford to hire a full-time content creator.
To work around this limitation, you can cultivate good relations with a network of freelance content creators. It doesn’t have to be a vast network right from the start. You could talk to a few content writers, one or two graphic artists, and maybe a videographer and an animator. Then you can start farming out paid tasks to this small group as a start.
With this network of freelance content creators, you can manage your social media pages without spending too much.
Conclusion
Social media marketing can attract a lot of leads that would benefit a business or an online store. But it requires a certain level of skills or expertise to leverage digital marketing tools. It also involves content creation and production that can be consistently uploaded daily.
All of these things entail dedicating time and effort. But the good thing is, they help you manage your social media pages without spending a lot of money.