How to Create a Social Media Budget for Your Business

Just like a small drop can cause a ripple in the ocean, social media marketing, advertising, and strategic implementation, can have a gigantic impact on your overall digital marketing efforts.

Data fetched from this report indicates that over 4.55 billion people actively spend about 2 hours 27 minutes, on average, using social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.

As an SMB owner or marketer, you may want to strategically leverage these platforms to promote your products and services.

But in the initial stages, especially if you are not generating massive profits and are facing budget constraints, you’ll likely want to get the most out of the marketing dollars you’re investing in social media.

If that’s the case, allow me to help you out. I’ve got you covered!

Throughout this blog post, we’ll be discussing:

• Understanding the basics of Social Media Budget
• Why do you need a Social Media Budget?
• Things you should add to your Social Media Budget
• How to create a fool-proof Social Media Budget for your Business?

Without further ado, let’s dive straight into the topic.

Understanding the Basics of a Social Media Budget

Over 73% of marketers have claimed social media marketing and advertising have been somewhat effective to very effective for their business.

On one hand, some brands invest thousands of dollars in social media yet fail to achieve the desired results. On the other, some brands invest a couple of hundred bucks in their social media efforts yet are subject to an impressive ROI (Return on Investment).

Naturally, there are reasons for that:

The brands that are failing to achieve the desired results, don’t have a fool-proof social media strategy in place.

They don’t know the platforms their target audience is hanging out on, the tactics they should implement, and the metrics they should track. As a result, they invest their precious dollars in tactics that don’t help them hit their KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).

Whereas the ones that are succeeding at their social media efforts, have cleared the clutter already and have an optimized social media marketing and advertising budget in place.

In short, a social media budget is nothing but a documented plan that lists down the amount you plan to invest in your overall social media efforts. This includes several areas like:

• Content Production
• Software & Tools
• Advertisement Campaigns
• Influencer Marketing
• Training Your Employees

That being said, let’s move on to the next important question, why.

Why do You Need a Social Media Budget?

Social media is hands down the best strategy to reach out with to interact with your target audience.

Not having a set budget is one of the biggest amateur mistakes a company can make.

Structured and realistic budget documentation not only strengthens your campaigns but also helps hit your KPIs easily in a short period.

To summarize, here are the three main indicators of why social media budgeting is important for any business:

• Social media budgeting can be used as an important way to measure your ROIs for each quarter. It is used by a business as a comparative analysis of how well your social media campaigns are performing.

  
  

• Having a set budget helps the social media team to explore new ways of marketing and advertising while also staying under budget, thus boosting intuition and creativity.

  
  

• Having a restricted budget helps in prioritizing tasks.

Having a structured budget plan in hand aids in tracking funds, helping businesses ensure that the right funds are utilized in the right place at the right time, which in turn helps in ROI calculations for each quarter.

Things You Should add to Your Social Media Budget

Building a strong social media campaign consists of many components that go together hand in hand.

And while doing so, you need to make sure that you’re getting the most out of your precious dollars. As a result, we’re now about to list down the crucial elements that you should focus on the most:

• Content Production
• Software & Tools
• Advertisement Campaigns
• Influencer Marketing
• Training Your Employees

Let’s dive more into these areas one by one.

Content Production

Content is the foundation of any social media marketing and advertising campaign. There is no doubt that content creation will take up the most funds.

Since visual content such as videos is the most sought out form of content, we’re witnessing companies spending a huge chunk of their marketing dollars in producing lucrative and informative videos to promote their business.

On average, video production costs about $880-$1200 per video, and blog production costs about $100–400 per blog post.

It’s not just the video and textual content that’ll eat up your budget. It is important to understand how much you’ll end up investing in your overall content production efforts. Some costs associated with content creation include:

• Photography
• Video Production
• Hiring Talent
• Graphic Design
• Copywriting
• And more!

Software & Tools

Building a social media marketing and advertising campaign is not an easy task. But what makes it less arduous is the different software tools you can use to implement strategic campaigns. Social media software and tools make life easier for social media managers and content creators.

Here is a list of types of tools that require a good amount of funding and that are used by the majority of companies:

• Designing Licensed Software (such as Adobe suite, Canva, etc.,)
• Video Editing Tools
• Team & Project Management Platforms
• Social Media Management Platforms
• Sales and Lead Management tools (such as SalesBlink)
• Social Media Analysis Tools
• Advertising Tools

Advertisement Campaigns

Advertising has been always used as a tool to generate a higher inflow of traffic. With everything going digital, creative ways of advertising have taken shape online.

Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn act as ad platforms to help businesses instantly put their products and/or services in front of their audience.

Running ads across major social media platforms is a great way to generate traffic inflow without sweating too much. Setting an ad budget every month for these is a good strategy.

Here is an average basic cost per social media platform to give you an idea of what your budget plan might look like:

• YouTube: $10/day*
• Instagram: $1/day
• Pinterest: $0.10/click
• Twitter: No minimum
• Facebook: $1/day

NOTE — These are just minimal amounts.

Influencer Marketing

Collaborating with popular content creators or influencers is a proven way to build trust and boost your reach on social media.

When you collaborate with influencers in your niche, you’re tapping into a well-established audience — which will help you build trust and further establish your brand. But — as good of a strategy influencer marketing is, it’s not cheap.

If you want a famous influencer on board, you will have to pay them more. So it’s advisable to choose and collaborate wisely.

You can collaborate with micro or nano influencers — influencers with limited followers — with high engagement and a cheaper pricing model than influencers with millions of followers.

Training Your Employees

Employees are the wheels that keep a business running. Employee growth in terms of skills is also an important asset to the growth of a company.

You need to train your employees on how to run social media campaigns, how to use the right tools, how to build processes and systems to achieve the best possible results, and more.

And if you want to get the most out of your social media efforts, you’d have to invest your top dollars in employee training.

Hiring a Social Media Manager

Getting a dedicated industry expert on board to help you with your social media campaigns can help achieve the best possible results.

In-house, social media managers help in identifying key factors and weaknesses in your marketing and advertising campaigns and will analyze how to tackle them.

They will also help in strategizing what is the best approach to increase your social media reach and how to hit your KPIs within a stipulated period.

Hiring an industry expert to do what they do best is a very important investment most businesses ignore.

How to create a Fool-Proof Social Media Budget for your Business

Now that we have covered the know-how, let’s get into the main action plan. Listed below is our five-step process to creating a social media budget plan:

Step 1: Recognizing Your Goals

The first step is listing out goals and what your expected ROI is for a particular time frame. Understanding what you aim to achieve from running your social media campaign is key to creating a social media strategy.

Step 2: Identifying the Target Audience

Having a clear idea of who your target audience is and how better to reach them is a key indicator of what your social media strategy is going to be. Before setting the budget, having a crisp idea of the campaign will help strategize and prioritize which funds go where.

Step 3: Create a Budget Frame

Setting a set amount of marketing dollars aside for the social media campaign helps crystallize the marketing strategy.

As per your business model, fixing the budget according to the type of budget plan (traditional, flexible, or zero) is an important step in marking the beginning of the marketing model.

Having a fixed budget also helps in strategizing different ways of marketing within the financial frame.

Step 4: Developing a Resilient Social Media Strategy

After setting a fixed budget aside, brainstorming to create the perfect strategy is the next step forward. Having a strong marketing model within the financial constraint. Reaching the target audience is a key indicator of a successful business model.

Step 5: Production of the Final Budget

After strategizing the best social media marketing plan for a particular time frame, it is important to document your budget. This can be done with the help of Excel or Google spreadsheets.

Categorize different campaign types and allocate how much each category is going to receive based on the priority. The final added up value will give you the budget for the period.

Wrapping it Up

Running successful social media campaigns is no easy task.

Having a strategized and systematic way of going about the whole process is going to help reduce the stress of running a marketing campaign and helps in growing your business manifold.

A fruitful social media campaign is a key performance indicator of a successful business. That being said, a successful business is one that has smart minds behind it handling the finances.

So, what are you waiting for?

Prepare your social media budget today!