In the face of the remarkable digital revolution that has been lavished on us across the last 10-15 years, you will agree that social media marketing is no longer optional for businesses.
Given the competitive nature of modern social media marketing, you can’t just strew content on your social media channels just for the fun of posting. If you post sporadically on social media and yet be OUTRAGEOUSLY optimistic enough to expect results, you should equally HOPE for Christmas on Dec 24th!
For your social media marketing expedition to be successful – whether in lead generation, conversion, or sustaining your digital relevance – you must have a defined strategy.
Without a doubt, an effective social media strategy in the contemporary business space must be backed with a budget. Having a budget ensures that you are not only cutting your coat to your cloth but also ensuring that every cent you spend on social media gives you magnified returns.
Given how hard-earned your money is, I can bet my entire savings that you desire amplified ROI on your social media spending.
How much should you budget for your social media marketing?
Regularly, people jump in my inbox and ask how much they should budget for their social media marketing. Let me be honest with you, there is no definitive budget for social media that perfectly applies to every company on the face of the earth.
Flexibility is a core component of social media budgeting. Your spending should be optimized around specifics like your market reality, customer persona, competitors’ spending, and market demography.
Going by analysis from the Business Development Bank of Canada, it is ideal for B2C businesses to budget 5-10% of their revenue on marketing. Alternatively, B2B companies should budget 2-5% of this lot.
Would you mind me juicing things up with some real-life examples?
The same analysis reveals that large-scale businesses in Canada with over 50 employees, for example, tend to have an annual marketing budget north of $100,000.
A medium company with 20-48 employees can budget an approximate annual budget of $60,000. Lastly, a small scale business should budget around $30,000 as a yearly marketing budget.
Having established this general annual marketing budget, the next question you would ask me is what slice of this yearly marketing budget should you dedicate to social media.
Let me tell you some critical ingredients of your social media budget you shouldn’t dare to miss.
Critical components of your social media marketing budget
Budget for content creation
You should allocate a fair slice of your budget to content creation if you are not going to micromanage your social media. After all, isn’t content king?
You should have a specialized team or department that toasts unique content and dish it to your social media audience. Of course, you can retweet or share other people’s content on your page all day, but if you are serious about your business, you should be insatiably relishing originality.
It is no revelation that unique content engages far more than recycled content. What content would you be precisely spending on?
Written and visual content are the two principal content formats that you would be spending on. Written content is fundamental as it is the foundation of most social media channels. You need to dish out captivating captions leveraging high-value hashtags.
Next, you should be investing substantially in graphics and photography. I wouldn’t need to emphasize the importance of making sure all the visual content you put out on your social media is high quality.
High-resolution pictures and videos are the best ways to engage your audience. You could explore free stock photo sites if you are relatively low on budget. Otherwise, if you have got some handsome dollars to spare, you may want to hire a professional illustrator and photographer.
For your video, you can procure a dedicated video production department stocked deliciously with editors and professional videographers. If you have a sizable budget for high-production shoots, you may want to hire producers, directors, and even stylists.
Budget for paid social media advertising
If you tell me organic social media content is the bomb (in terms of remarkable efficacy), I wouldn’t argue much with you if you have already gotten a large audience.
But for an emerging business on social media, getting thousands of eyeballs on your social media posts organically would require something out of the ordinary.
Take it from me, paid ads give you a fast and furious ride to social media prominence compared to the slow and steady trekking that comes with organic content.
This explains why most companies are speeding their digital penetration on social media with paid advertising. These ads allow you to boost your posts or execute complete paid campaigns.
There are a couple of paid social media ads channels with glowing ROI. Facebook ads are most prominent as they give you a precisely targeted audience across different spectrums. There are a variety of formats and campaign objectives.
With a steady boom in Instagram – including that old granny pouting on her Stories – you may want to leverage Instagram ads.
Instagram ads are synchronized with Facebook’s capabilities. You can maximize a community of active users running over a billion.
For the 3-piece suit guys, LinkedIn ads give you the best audibility on a professional stage. There are several options to LinkedIn ads like text ads and InMail.
Also, you can make the best of Pinterest Ads (which is marvelous for its overwhelming DIY audience), Twitter ads, and YouTube ads.
Budget for dedicated social media software
With an increasing multiplicity of activity on a wide span of social media platforms, you would need to leverage automation and social media scheduling tools.
Tell me, if you have to manage almost 12 social media platforms all with their streamlined content calendars. Would you diligently and painstakingly manually post on all of them one at a time? Yes, and congrats for winning the psychopath of the year!
Contemporary social media marketing involves heavily leveraging social media management platforms and automation tools. You could use platforms like HootSuite, Later, and Buffer for scheduling bulk posts that would be automatically published on designated social media platforms at the allotted time.
You will also need analytic tools like BrandMention, AngoraPulse, and Reputology. For editing and branding, you could be spending on tools like Adobe Creative Cloud.
So here we are! We have given you a lovable framework for your social media budgeting for the rest of the year. The components outlined in this guide should form the spine of your social media expenditures. Undoubtedly, there are other avenues to spend on social media like training your team and hiring a functional social media manager.
At Eula Blue, we thrive at creating a strategic social media budget and strategy streamlined to your audience persona that maximizes every cent you pour in. We leverage delicious content garnished with cutting-edge technologies to ensure your social media audience is thrilled and overfed with value, compelling them to take targeted customer actions.
Most importantly, we don’t guess the efficiency of our approach. Instead, we measure it by adopting comprehensive digital analytic tools that enable us to measure your KPIs precisely.
Book a session today, take a seat and watch us take your social media marketing to the next level!