If you’re a business owner or entrepreneur, when you’re first starting out, you likely don’t have extensive resources to invest in outreach campaigns. And even if you did, the truth is that it simply wouldn’t make sense to pour huge amounts of time and money into growing your audience. You have a million things to worry about: budgeting, campaign strategy, product development, customer service… the list goes on. And in your early days, there’s simply no guarantee that you’ll get a high ROI when you try to increase audience engagement.

This is not the message you typically see, though.

Everywhere you look, articles are urging you to pour funds into audience-building right from the beginning, set up a marketing team, and drop a few grand on social media marketing campaigns.

This is why it can be hugely beneficial to hit the ground running with plenty of automation. There are two big payoffs in concentrating on automation.

It allows you to have a consistent presence.

Imagine seeing campaigns from two new businesses which interest you. You investigate their web presences, popping over to their social media feeds to see what the latest news is on Twitter and Instagram. 

One business has put up a post every few days. The posts are enthusiastic but irregular. Some of them seem to be done in different styles. There’s one short video. You have to dig back a couple of weeks to find out information about their newest product.

The other business has multiple posts for every day. They have a consistent style, with simple, aesthetically-pleasing images attached to each post. Some of the posts are repeats, but within the most recent ones you can easily find information about their most recent product release, a press statement about the product, and a link for where to buy it.

Which company do you trust to be more professional? Which one are you more likely to make a purchase from?

It allows you to invest your resources efficiently.

Not just your finances, but, most of all, your time. You can spend an enormous amount of time scrambling back and forth, trying to log in and out of your business’ various social media accounts each day, taking photos and editing them and trying to think of appropriate content to write. But it’s a much smarter use of your time to simply set up your content for the entire week. Social media management tools are a great option for this goal. Choose the most appropriate for you and give it a try. You’ll see the difference at once.

You’re also going to be able to plan more effectively if you take a few hours once per week to set out your content calendar because you’ll be able to get an overview of the type of content you’re posting and ensure balance and variety. You can be sure that some of your posts are useful information for your target audience; some are updates about developments in your business; some are about your latest product launch; some are pictures or video of customers using the product. You can also have better control over when you repost material (which you should absolutely be doing!). It’s good to re-post content on Twitter two or three times to ensure it gets seen in a rapidly-scrolling world.

One more tip for expanding your outreach potential using these tools, with no investment: set up a group promotion. Reach out to creators who are promoting similar products and promote them together, whether that is by building a newsletter or mailing list together or selling your products together as a bundle. This may seem counter-intuitive, but when you’re just starting out, it works. You get the benefit of different audiences building on one another, essentially pooling your customer base. Additionally, customers will appreciate it if you introduce them to new, useful products. This will even increase their feelings of trust, because now you’re catering to their interests, trying to help them to find better resources, not simply promoting your own products endlessly.

In short, using tools will allow you to streamline the work that goes into maintaining an online presence so that you don’t have to invest nearly as much time. And many of these tools have free versions or at least free trials. Do your own research to determine which tools are right for you– some have versions that cater to specific fields – but remember: more money does not always equal more benefits.