Given our current economic downturn due to the pandemic, as a Canadian business, you’re likely looking for new and innovative ways to market your company and services. You certainly wouldn’t be alone.

Here’s some good news. If you engage in social media marketing, it will almost always be more cost-effective than other forms of business outreach in Canada or the US.

This means you’ll have the latitude to experiment, try new things, and take risks to find that perfect alchemy that your clients will respond to. One study found that even just a few hours a week on social media marketing efforts translated into increased web traffic in over 80% of cases.

And whether you choose to bootstrap a strategy based on your existing resources, or outsource to a digital marketing agency, the steps to success on social media are similar. Here’s how to ensure your efforts result in cost-effective social media marketing.

1. Cost-effective social media marketing – Quality & Clickable Content

Moving into social media without content is like putting the cart before the horse. And while sales and product posts are easy to produce, a quality social media strategy will require a bit more time to sketch out. Think of it as a platform where you can establish your brand and expertise, create awareness and build trust with potential customers. And to do this, you need quality content.

Meet your clients’ needs by carefully considering what they might be looking for, their pain points and their concerns, before building a strategy around this. You may already have advice, tips and hacks up your sleeve to this end. Feel free to repurpose white papers and business reports, as long as they are easily digestible.

Share your content across your platforms, and make sure to engage with any users that decide to comment or ask questions.

2. Use Facebook as part of your social media strategy

There’s a learning curve involved with using social media, but it’s not nearly as intimidating as it may seem. If you’ve ever used Facebook, you’re already well on your way.

With over 2.7 billion users, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn’t have a FB profile. For that reason, if you’re not sure where to devote your limited budget, Facebook is the place to start for cost-effective social media marketing. And it’s a powerful platform. You can create your business page, publish regular posts, and form an insiders’ group for your loyal clients. Your audience can bypass the extra steps involved in sending you an email and reach out to you directly through Facebook.

Facebook is also supremely effective at publishing targeted ads. You can choose who will see your ad, down to the specific age group, gender, geographical location and other attributes of your choosing and receive detailed insights on how well your ad performs – a tall order for traditional marketing.

3. Track the ROI of your social strategy

Most social media platforms have built-in functions to help you measure the success of your marketing efforts. You’ll be able to keep an eye on stats such as likes, engagements, impressions, and even sales resulting from your ads and posts. And because this tracking is all automated, there’s no need to expend additional resources to monitor marketing performance.

However, it is vital to regularly review each platform’s reporting, particularly if you want to keep your costs low. Check for underperforming posts, and rework them before trying again. Experiment with different types of content to see which appeals to your audience the most. And double down on your most effective marketing tactics while continuing to experiment with new ones – it’s ideal to have a diversified strategy.

4. Know who you want to talk to AKA your target audience

The cost-effectiveness of your social media marketing campaigns will largely depend on how well you know your target audience.

This means having well-defined buyer personas for each of your buyer personas and knowing their buyer journeys.

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer in terms of demographics, psychographics, life stage, or even their idiosyncrasies.

When you know your buyer personas and target them well, they buy your product and go back on social networks to spread the good word about your product or service.

It also helps to build a more long-term view towards your campaigns, by focusing on relationships instead of transactions.

While social media does influence purchase decisions, it is also a great platform to build relationships and hence repeat customers!

Building brand awareness and increasing trust happens only when you know exactly who your customers are and what they need.

For example, you could connect with influencers relevant to your industry, to reach out to followers who wouldn’t normally get to know you. You can create content that is more in line with their online personality, helping your post to be re-shared by them.

5. Leverage user-generated content

User-generated content is content that is related to your brand but not created by you. Sounds confusing?

As you might have observed, social media users have an opinion on quite a lot of things. And they are very vocal about it too. They re-share content created by others, but oftentimes they create content related to a brand as well.

This can be a simple text post or something more innovative as a meme or a video. This is user-generated content and it can have both positive and negative sentiments.

It also means that you could reshare that content making it a very effective strategy, especially if the original content is a positive review about your product.

These kinds of posts usually have higher conversion rates as well since it effectively is good word of mouth. Moreover, it sounds more genuine when it comes from an actual user of your product.

Even if you share this content or not, there definitely are learnings on how customers perceive your brand!

Rinse, repeat, recycle!

A lot of the social content you create might be evergreen in nature. For the content which is not, it might just need a little spin to make it reusable.

This is where creative content marketing comes in. Blogs could be clubbed together to create an eBook on a particular theme, long-form articles can be converted into infographics, and a lot more!

For content pieces where you’ve already done a lot of research, you can recycle it by pulling out bits of content (e.g., facts and figures) and posting it as a tweet.

It is important to note that not all pieces of content will be evergreen. A report you published in 2015 is clearly not relevant today.

But you could update it with the latest information and create a perspective on what’s changed since then. Thinking out of the box helps when it comes to content recycling.

You can also use #throwback campaigns that use the content you previously created. This is especially useful to resurface older content that got a lot of likes. Recall campaigns like this work and strike a chord with your followers!

To recycle effectively, you need to start building a content library if you haven’t already. Make a note of all the content you create and categorize it.

Start building a content library early if you haven’t already as things become harder as your business grows and you create even more content to post on social media.

Content recycling works wonders, especially if you are a small business with a bootstrap team and a tight social media budget!

If you’re interested in building on your existing approach to supercharge your social media efforts and increase awareness of your brand, generate new leads, and create additional opportunities, contact Asset Digital Communications for custom solutions to your business challenges.