5 Ways to save money on your social media marketing
Marketing yourself on social media can become time consuming and expensive. It is important to create a plan and dedicated budget to keep your costs in check and to ensure you have enough time to market your business on various social media platforms.
The good news is that there are things you can do to save on costs of promoting yourself while still creating slick, professional looking posts. Here we list a few:
1. Saving money on your images
When creating blog posts, using stock images can be a good option to make the page more attractive for your audience. While this may be expensive there are, however, websites which offer free, high-resolution images.
You can use Unsplash, Gratisography, Pixabay, Stockvault, Pexels, Reshot and many more sites.
If you’re willing to increase your blogging budget, then you can use IconFinder or Creative Market. IconFinder offers a wide range of high-quality icons for companies to use, through subscription-based plans. These icons help to make websites look more professional and appealing.
Creative Market is an online marketplace that partners with designers to create fonts, graphics, themes and more. They also help to improve the general look of a company’s website or social media profile.
2. Comparing advert costs on various popular social media platforms
Social media platforms charge different rates and have different ways of charging customers who use them to advertise on their platforms. Narrow your focus on platforms with the highest return on investment (ROI) for your business. This means that you should only spend time and money on platforms that work best for your business.
Two of the most popular social media sites to advertise on are Instagram and Facebook. On Instagram, you can create promotional ads through posts or stories.
Instagram adverts use Facebook’s system for promotions. They target specific audiences through demographics, cookie preferences, location and potential client’s interests, online activities and hobbies. You have the option of creating a video, a slideshow, a single image post or a story advertisement.
The average Instagram ad (cost-per-click) ranges between $0.50-$1.00 (£0.38-£0.77)*. Instagram gives you the flexibility to set up your advert for how long you want it to run. You can do this through either setting up a budget or cap so that there is a limited amount spent in total, or you can set up a personalised schedule which allows you to change the start/end dates and times.
To find out more about how you can advertise on Instagram, click here.
If Instagram doesn’t suit your needs, then Facebook may be your next best bet. With Facebook advertising, you could spend on average $5 (£3.83) per day*. You could create your own Facebook page for your brand/company and use the adverts to push more traffic to the page. Or you could just create ads to promote your main website or page.
Much like Instagram, Facebook ads target your audience’s demographics. Age, location, connections, activities, likes and gender are all elements vital for the success of an advertisement. You must have clear knowledge of your target audience to create a specific Facebook ad for them.
To find out more about how you can advertise on Facebook, click here.
There are many other social media sites to market your brand or company. If you have a younger audience that you’re targeting then platforms like TikTok should be your focus.
TikTok was started in 2016, but its stable release was earlier this year. It has an audience with the average age of 18-24. Many businesses have created successful campaigns on TikTok like Gymshark. The company has partnered up with fitness influencers, and has gained two million followers. Their campaign #Gymshark66 was a challenge with a motto to ‘change your life’ in 66 days. Influencers posted workouts and trendy dance routines which are popular on TikTok. The hashtag was a success as it was viewed 45.5 million times.
You can create an advert on TikTok, from $10 (£7.66) CPM (cost per 1000 views). TikTok has a dedicated page about how its advertising system works if you want to find out more.
3. Create your own social media graphics
Canva is a graphic design platform. You can sign up and create presentations, posters, documents, animated designs and edit images. There’s a free and paid version.
Graphic design is a great way to make your social media posts visually pleasing. By creating your own designs, you can set yourself apart from the competition.
You can choose from a range of templates. There are themes and subcategories to help you pick out the best one for your brand. Canva also has an in-built photo library so you can choose images or icons to add onto your design .
4. Use your own smartphone to create content
There are a number of different ways you can produce creative content straight from your smartphone. Apps such as PicsArt, Snapseed and Pixomatic are all photo editors. Touching up lighting, saturation, adding filters and text can all help with creating graphics to attract your audience.
Hyperlapse, Manual 2.0 and Halide are good apps to help take unique pictures and videos.
The benefits of using a smartphone include being able to post and share content on social media with ease.
As a content creator you may sometimes come up with ideas on the go. You can use your smartphone’s voice memos or notepad to record any thoughts.
Having onedrive installed on your phone can be helpful, as all your documents can be accessed in one place. Or if you have an iPhone, you can upload any saved content onto iCloud.
5. Outsource your social media marketing
Outsourcing may cost money, but if you don’t have the time to focus on social media marketing for your own business then you could be losing money elsewhere. For example, if your key skill is sales then the last thing you want to do is focus on something that takes your attention away from selling your products or services.
Social media marketing takes time, planning and regular commitment and if it’s not your core skill then it’s better to outsource this to an agency. You could hire someone in-house to do this for you, but this could be more expensive as you’d need to offer benefits to that person and perhaps even the necessary training and management.
By outsourcing your social media marketing to an agency, you could benefit from the brainpower of an entire team of marketing and content experts that would be dedicated to helping your business grow and dealing with any queries that are made online.
To find out how Rare85 can help you with your social media marketing fill out this form to get in touch with us.
*Prices correct as at September, 2020
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay