The reality: In an always-on always-connected social media-saturated world, your small to medium-sized business brand is not only competing with the competition for brand dominance but you’re competing for attention in a very cluttered environment of content and big brand messages.
The opportunity: You’re competing with the world biggest brands and the world’s biggest brands’ budgets on the world’s biggest stage.
Businesses realise that social media marketing is a quick and effective form of brand marketing, so it’s common for small to medium-sized businesses and brands to have high expectations when it comes to social media marketing but doesn’t allocate the time to plan and budget. Truth is, it’s about making the most of the opportunity, by being smart, targeted and creative. These are some of our key learnings to maximise social media impact on a small budget:
Creativity and insight don’t arrive overnight. It doesn't come from doing the same thing over and over again. It comes from trying new things and learning from those experiences. The main investment when it comes to social media marketing is the time and effort needed to generate and publish good quality content that the followers can engage with.
When cash is low, it pays to devote some time each day to research social media knowledge hubs and best practices from the experts to expand on knowledge, and get ideas that one can tailor for their business.
What are the tools you need to create your great creative campaign?
In the social multimedia world, we live in, creating quality video, graphic, animation or photo content from scratch can be very expensive. So, the big question is… What’s free but still reflects a quality depiction of the brand?
It’s increasingly common to invite your community to create with the brand. User-generated content is authentic content created by users about a brand, business or product. It can be a very effective social media strategy because even people who like your brand may be sceptical to endorse it, in fear of being “that friend” who spams, but most people will gladly share, comment and like other 'real' people’s content. So, get the community involved and encourage them to create content around the brand.
Quality content that portrays the quality of a brand is dependent on quality images. Photo shoots though can be expensive but so too are stock libraries. Before one takes out their mobile phone and desk lamp, look up alternatives like Pexels. High quality and completely free stock photos nicely tagged, searchable and easy to discover on the site.
How? When? Where? What? Why - The brand won’t only need free or affordable tools to craft its content to stand out but also tools to help it schedule the content, automate the process of publishing and analyse how people are interacting with that content.
Lastly, keep some budget available for the boosting and promotion of the content.
The great news is, that there are plenty of affordable and free tools that help a brand streamline its social media marketing efforts.
