The reality that we live in today, is that social media and business are inseparable.

There are now around 3.2 billion social media users all over the world. That is more than 42% of the current global population! And this number is only going to grow.

So here are 5 cheap social media marketing tactics (which actually work!):

1. Begin with quality content

Quality content is important for any online marketing strategy, and the same is true for social media marketing. Ensure that you have quality content on your website and blog consistently. You can share this content on your social media platforms to get the maximum out of it. Here are some examples:

• Create tips where you dispense your expert opinion within your industry.
• Best practices and strategies can be added to the tips you come up with.
• Lists, (i.e. top 10 lists) are a great choice when coming up with written content.

2. Use videos

Video content has proven to be effective for business, with the popularity of it growing rapidly on social media. Three out of every four businesses that use video content say it has helped them increase sales. A number that high can only be considered conclusive! The great thing about video content on social media is that it can still be low cost.

Types of low cost video content includes:

• Telling stories. These can be stories about your brand, or about you and how you started out, with the challenges you’ve overcome.
• Highlight your products or services. In this sense, educational or how-to videos are great.

3. Use email marketing

Did you know that nearly 90% of digital marketers believe email marketing to be effective in closing leads or sales?

There are a couple of ways you can leverage email marketing in your social media marketing. If you have an existing email database, send out newsletters and let them know how and where to follow you on social media.

Vice versa, use content from your social media platforms to send out to your email marketing list. For example, you could highlight customer content from your social media into your emails. Use posts where customers have tagged you, and then encourage more users to do the same by giving them a shout-out in your emails. This is particularly effective if you have a younger target audience.

This strategy calls for patience. Build it up through time and earn people’s trust with useful content.

4. Online reviews

Try to include online reviews in your cheap social media marketing. Online reviews offer unbiased, reliable and fast information to customers when they’re deciding on a purchase. People rely heavily on them.

How do you get positive reviews?

Start by asking some of your top regular customers to write them for you. You could even offer incentives to customers, such as a discount or a competition entry to win a prize.

Also get in touch with previous clients who were happy with your work. A great tactic to encourage more testimonials is by creating a simple survey with open-ended questions. You can then use the information gathered from this (with permission!) to create testimonials. People are much more likely to fill out a survey sent to them, rather than coming up with a testimonial from scratch.

On SurveyMonkey, you can easily create your own surveys for free.

5. Reuse old posts

For quick, cheap social media content, reuse your old social media posts and blog posts. Not everyone would have seen your old posts the first time. So when reusing them, there’s a big chance that a whole new audience will discover them.

Take a look at your previous posts from over a year ago, and see what posts had the highest engagement. By doing this you may also notice a trend, giving you inspiration on creating new posts!

Conclusion

This article shows that you don’t need a massive budget to have an effective social media marketing strategy. There are so many cheap alternatives that work just as well (if not better) than costly tactics.

If you’d like more advice on how to create a strategy which is bespoke to your business, as well as exactly what type of content you should put out on your business’ social media platforms, why not set up a social media training session with me?