Most business owners today realize that marketing a business online, particularly through Social Media is a necessity and not an option.  Here are a few key reasons:

First, eight out of every ten buyers of products or services will start with online research.  Of the eight, six will look for a social media presence.  The content on the site will often drive a decision to continue to a website and do business, or not. The second reason to market online is all about the cost of marketing in general.  Compared to the older, more traditional ways of marketing like print ads, radio and television Social Media marketing is not only effective, it is simply less expensive.

There are a host of Social Media platforms available for the business owner to market themselves.  The most popular, of course, are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn.  Once the research is done to determine which platforms are best suited to the business (a topic for a blog on its own!), hen it’s time to determine the best and most cost effective approach to leveraging Social Media as a marketing tool.

6 Tips for Low Cost Social Media Strategies

1) Free Training

The heads behind the scenes of all Social Media sites have created how-to’s, training forums, and videos to show newbies the basics of using the sites.  Get a good understanding of the general rules and processes for each site.  This tip will also help set in stone which sites will work best for your business.  As a latecomer to Instagram, I found it a little embarrassing that I recently had to watch a short training video on how to even post photos.  Now, I’ve become a pro and it took a 14-minute video to help me.

Next, go a step further than the basics of using the site, and look for marketing professionals who have made it their mission to learn and teach others how to get the most out of these sites.  They are out there and they are teaching (or “sharing”) techniques specific to marketing. Many of these professionals offer the free training to get you on your way.  Caveat: they wouldn’t be professionals if they didn’t offer paid training, but the free training will give ample opportunity to learn how to get started and will help determine which, if any, professionals you might choose to take the training to the next level.

2) Create a Series

Once you have the basics down and you have some resources in hand to create the attention grabbing post, tweets, pings, shout-outs, pins and all the other buzz-words used in the Social Media world, it’s time to create! (We will use the term “Post” as the interchangeable one here). Don’t stop at one post….create a series of them.  Store them up in a folder on your computer, or use the FREE features some sites offer to create and schedule many posts at one sitting (Hootsuites is a great one to use).  Creating a series can take some time, but it takes less time overall to stay on a roll and create many at one time.  Then the work is done for a period and you can focus on other tasks.

3) Create Groups and Communities

Creating a new group or positioning a business owner posts as a subject matter expert can easily help build brand awareness. As the expert, you can invite others to join your group and help you spread the word about your vision and your business.   Group and community features within Social Media allow users to create posts, comment, and interact with content within their niche – all utilizing the power of the internet. These groups allow you to effectively connect with peers and prospective customers.

Something to think about…  When creating a group, focus on being helpful, building relationships, and asking and answering questions.  Use the group to stay connected to prospects, promote events, and encourage others to interact with you and your brand.

4) Monitor Social Media Sites

After you setup all your accounts and develop content, you might ask yourself, “How do you keep up with it all?”  The answer is simple, “Use a great Social Media monitoring tool!” There are a number of low cost monitoring tools available, including Hootsuite and Buffer, the most popular tools in use today.  They are low cost to get started and boast a host of cool features, like allowing you to track activity on a variety of Social Media sites simultaneously, create and schedule posts on those sites, and comment or respond to comments all from one place without logging in and out of each site. There are many more monitoring tools available and the costs vary to great degrees, so choose a low cost tool with as much bang for the buck as you can get. Ask others what they are using and why. You know, someone from that new and awesome group or community!

5) Advertise!

In a nutshell, Social Media advertising is both cost and results effective.  As mentioned in the first tip – about learning to set up and navigate sites – advertising on this platform requires some know-how, and a bit of creativity.

Advertising this way is low cost and you can customize everything about your ads.  You are in control of WHO your ad reaches, HOW LONG the ad will run, HOW it appears on the page pages, and, the best part, HOW MUCH you are going to spend on the ad! At the beginning of this adventure, set a low budget and create a number of ads customized for different audiences.  See how they perform, and as you determine the best results increase the budget as you see fit and then watch the business roll in! Does it get any better?

6) Outsource

Even the most organized business owner is limited by the number of hours in a day.  The tips highlighted here are a beginning for some, and like any adventure the process costs time that busy people simply don’t have. Time for the business owner is money. That fact never changes. Chemistry Multimedia is a professional firm that creates social media strategies for businesses with the end goal in mind to convert connections to customers.  If you want to outsource your Social Media, please consider calling us at 314-603-2866 for pricing.