Great social media marketing can catapult your organization to new heights, fostering devoted brand ambassadors and even generating leads and revenue. So when you get an opportunity to automate your marketing on social media for FREE, it not only boosts your online presence at no extra cost, but it can allow your business to operate much more efficiently.
Why is Social Media important for your business?
For any brand or business, social media marketing is no longer an option; it’s a necessity.
With so many demographics participating on social networks on a global scale, it's the place to be if you want to influence, engage, and convert.
Here’s why:
- There are 4.6 billion active social media users, accounting for over 60% of the world's population.
- People spend roughly 2.5 hours every day on social media.
- TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube users have increased in 2022.
- Every month, people use an average of 7.5 platforms.
Social media marketing gives you the means to stand out, to rise up from the competition and succeed. Yet, the success of social media is heavily reliant on its users. Their behaviors are always evolving, and new platforms are emerging. With so many developments and channels to watch, social media managers can easily get overwhelmed.
Social Media is the place to be if you want to influence, engage, and convert
Social Media marketing automation explained
Social media and Digital Marketing Automation (DMA) platforms are a match made in heaven.
Social media automation is the process of enhancing social connections via the use of automated technologies. This might involve things like scheduling posts and republishing content.
Integrating your DMA platform with your social media accounts provides numerous advantages, including:
- Automated social media posts
- Scheduling
- Easier management
- Data organization
- Optimized staff experience
- Increased brand visibility
- Increased levels of engagement
Above all, correctly using social media automation tools means less time spent on manual tasks, saving time and freeing up teams for high-value work.
Marketing automation tools can be a great investment and costs vary from freemium versions (albeit most have limited functionality) to thousands of dollars each month (a bespoke system can cost in excess of $3,000).
It’s certainly worth doing a little research to find a free social media marketing tool that suits your business needs. When you do, boosting your organization’s digital marketing becomes easier than ever, and here’s how…
Social media and DMA platforms are a match made in heaven
First, create or update your social media marketing plan
Free marketing or not, without a defined social media plan and a well-established workflow, you will likely lose out on seeing any benefits from your social media marketing efforts.
1. Before strategizing about where you want to go, take a short look at where you are.
While reviewing your company's social media presence check what networks you’re active on, whether those networks are optimized, (photos, bios, URLs, etc.), which networks are providing the greatest value, and how do your profiles compare to your competitors?
2. Next, determine who your target audience is.
It's a lot simpler to create successful, focused content that speaks to your prospective buyer's goals and difficulties when you know who you're marketing to. To create a buyer persona look at the following:
- Demographics - age, income, location, gender identity, job title, etc.
- Goals - what drives your ideal customer? What are their motivators and behaviors?
- Challenges - what are your customers’ pain points that your business can solve?
- Communication - what is their most used social network? What devices do they use?
3. Create your mission statement
Your social media mission statement will guide your future activities. It should represent your brand identity and will specify how you intend to use your social media presence, so keep your ideal consumer in mind when crafting this message.
4. Define your success metrics and KPIs
You won’t know how to improve the quality of your products/services or positively impact customer satisfaction without being able to measure “success”, whatever that means for your organization. Consider factors like:
- Awareness - impressions and reach.
- Engagement - time spent on website, total shares, comments, clicks, etc.
- Share of voice - sentiment.
- ROI - conversions and referrals.
- Customer experience - response rate and response time, CSAT (customer satisfaction score), etc.
Align a metric for each goal you have so that you know how social media marketing is adding value to your brand.
Define your social media plan
Create shareable content
Before you can start posting, you’ll need to create the content that will spread across social media. Getting the content right first time works hand in hand with the philosophy of free social media marketing; the better the content, the greater the reach, and the best content will go viral without you having to do much at all, giving your business the ultimate social media boost.
Content creating is an essential component of modern marketing tactics. However, while approximately 90% of all businesses engage in some form of content marketing, few are able to create viral material that Internet users love and share. Follow these 10 tips:
1. Create high-quality content
Shareable content is always high-quality content, period. If it’s not interesting and engaging, how can you expect your followers to pay attention?
2. Use interesting structures
Use numbered lists, bullet points, and headings to easily highlight significant information points in your content. A whole page of copy is very boring for most readers.
3. Solve users' problems
If content is genuinely helpful, it’s likely to get passed around. Show your users how to overcome problems; this will keep them coming back for more and build brand loyalty.
4. Keep your audience in mind
Will your content be something your audience wants to see and share? Try polling your followers to generate comments and initiate discussion to get an insight and create engagement.
5. Use infographics
Infographics are a convenient way for users to digest information; the visual content is highly shareable and it’s easy to create something your audience will find valuable.
6. Stir up emotions
Some of the best viral marketing campaigns spark strong emotional reactions among users. Many studies have shown that emotions such as happiness, grief, or rage have the ability to engage individuals and motivate them to share digital material.
7. Be nostalgic
Talking about emotions, remember the good old times? Users generally like material that takes them back to old experiences, and if you carefully examine your audience, you can pinpoint exactly what would appeal to them.
8. Offer incentives
People love a freebie. Frequently, social media pages may offer a gift based on a random draw, and users are merely asked to like, share, or follow a page to enter the competition. This can have a large ripple effect that more than compensates for the initial investment.
9. Embrace video content
Video content makes up 82% of all Internet traffic so embrace video as part of your marketing strategy.
10. Turn your customers into advocates
User-generated content (UGC) refers to unsponsored or unpaid social postings that individuals from all networks publish when they use or rave about a product or service. Despite being organic, sharing and re-sharing UGC can have a significant impact on your business and customers. Fathom where your target audience lives on social media and where potential advocates have the most influence.
Turn your customers into advocates
Utilize free social media Digital Marketing Automation (DMA) software
Time-consuming. That’s one way of describing social media marketing - manually posting to each platform, creating projects and campaigns - it's no surprise that social media management solutions are in such great demand.
As mentioned earlier, Digital Marketing Automation (DMA) tools bring many benefits to your business, so when you can reap all or some of those benefits at no extra cost, life is made even easier.
To boost your business’s digital marketing strategy using free social media marketing, use the following tips:
1. Download and fully utilize tools to make a comparison
Look for a free social media DMA platform that offers features that align with your organization’s needs. It’s difficult to know how you’ll feel about the tools until you start using them, so it’s ideal to download the software and try it out fully.
2. Get social media scheduling with no or few limitations
Not all free social media marketing tools are created equal; try to get the most by using a tool that has the least limiting features. For example, unlimited scheduling, unlimited profiles/channel categories, the ability to create unlimited projects and campaigns, etc.
3. Go for a customizable option
Customizable features within free social media tools help social managers organize their workload or to match existing systems. However, for a longer-term strategy, think about using open source software so that the code can be altered to meet your specific business requirements. That way you get all the benefits of a bespoke system without the price tag.
4. Think about the employee experience
Bear in mind that you're not just wanting a social media marketing system that saves time and boosts ROI, but actually creates a better employee experience. Happy staff makes for better marketing.
5. Post optimally
Work out which days/times get you the most interaction, when are the best times to post on social media overall, what are the best days, and indeed, the worst days. Each social platform will have its own habits, as will your different target markets.
Free Digital Marketing Automation tools have tonnes of benefits
Assess your tech
- Put the time in
Even free products are only as good as the time you put into them. That does not entail mindless devotion; rather, it implies putting in the effort to understand how it may be most utilized to fulfill your goals.
- Check the Roadmap
Product roadmaps outline how a firm intends to change its platform in the following year and should include anticipated new product rollouts as well as any other important system changes in the works. For example, AesirX DMA Roadmap shows all the upcoming features and gives you a good idea of how to plan out your workload in upcoming months.
- Go with scalability
Always go with a DMA platform that has integrable features and will grow with your organization. If you can’t live without your CRM or Intranet, find a solution that can.
The takeaway
Social media marketing is a powerful tool for businesses of all kinds to reach out to customers and prospects. People use social media to find, learn about, follow, and shop from companies, so if you're not on sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram, you're missing out!
Meet your customers where they spend most of their time, on the internet. With free social media marketing, now there’s no excuse not to.
Sign up for FREE Social Media Digital Marketing Automation now! (No card details required).
Visit AesirX DMA for more information.
DOWNLOAD AesirX DMA for FREE via GitHub.
