The world of social media ads can be uncharted waters you don’t want to just dive into. There are several factors to consider for marketing campaigns to keep your business afloat.
Among the most important is your budget, and how to budget for social media marketing. This helps determines what you can go for in your campaigns. So if you’re planning to get into social media marketing, stick around!
In this article, we’ll be exploring:
- How to create a budget plan for social media marketing campaigns.
- What to include in your budget.
- How to test the effectiveness of your campaigns.
- Tips for maximizing your social media marketing budget.
How To Create Realistic Budget for Social Media Marketing
Remember, marketing is about trying strategies out and tracking what’s effective and what’s not. So before spending time and resources, be sure to:
Specify Goals
Identify what your business needs. It could be anything from increasing engagement to boosting sales and conversions. To streamline the process, you can use SMART goal setting. It’s an acronym that stands for:
- Specific: Clearly state what you want to achieve
- Measurable: Analyze key performance indicators to see what works and what doesn’t.
- Attainable: Create realistic goals based on where your business is.
- Relevant: Aligning goals to business objectives.
- Time-bound: Your goals should have a defined period.
Understand Target Market
Before you can set a budget for social media marketing, you need to know who your target market is. Certain types of ads or content work for certain demographics. Your target market can be based on gender, location, age, and more.
For example, you’re a shoe brand with products catered to women. During data analysis, you find that your audience is between 18-29 years old.
In this scenario, you can go for Instagram ads because 65% of users fit the age bracket.
Choose The Right Platform
After doing research into your target audience, find out where they are. You can do paid marketing on popular platforms—but that won’t be effective if your audience isn’t there.
Data Reportal did an amazing job of collecting statistics on social media platforms. Here are some of the highlights:
Choose the right Tools
You can always do marketing manually. However, this will most likely take up a lot of your time. It also causes problems down the line, especially when it comes to scaling.
To make campaigns more effective, you need to invest in the right tools for the job. There are a lot of options to choose from. But as a rule of thumb, invest in software that allows you to:
- Schedule posts
- Automate marketing
- Do analytics
- Track key metrics
Track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Tracking KPIs help you pivot into campaigns that benefit your ROI. You can also do forecasting for your ROI using financial projections.
This is important for budget allocation as it quickly highlights the potential ROI of your campaigns. Check out these professionally-made financial projection templates from ProjectioHub to help streamline the budget allocation process.
What to include in your budget for social media marketing
Now that we have an outline, let’s explore what to include in your social marketing budget. No matter the niche or industry, your budget should include:
Budget for software and subscriptions
Social marketing tools help you streamline campaigns through automation, scheduling, and more. Some tools cost as low as $12/month while others can go into the thousands.
But if you want to test the waters, most of these tools have free versions or trials. They also include deeper analytics than what’s included in built-in insights from social media platforms.
Budget for content creation
Content is the meat and potatoes of any campaign. It can come in various forms such as copy, photos, videos, graphic design, and more.
You can save costs on photos by using free stock images from sites like Unsplash. But if you want to build brand awareness, you can pay graphic designers to make unique posters or logos.
Average paid advertising costs per platform
Here are the average paid advertising cost per platform according to data from Nutshell:
- Facebook
- CPC: $0.97 per click
- CPM: $7.19 per 1,000 impressions
- Cost-per-like (CPL): $1.07 per like
- Cost-per-action (CPA): $5.47 per action
- Ad spend: $200 to $1,500 per month
- Instagram
- CPC: $3.56 per click
- CPM: $7.91 per 1,000 impressions
- Ad spend: $200 to $1,500 per month
- Twitter
- CPC: $0.38 per click
- CPM: $6.46 per 1,000 impressions
- Cost-per-engagement (CPE): $1.35 per engagement
- Cost-per-follower (CPF): $2.50 to $4 per follower
- Ad spend: $200 to $1,500 per month
- TikTok
- CPC: $1 per click
- CPM: $10 per 1,000 impressions
- Ad spend: $200 to $1500 per month
Influencer Marketing
Partnering with influencers is a great way to build brand awareness and reach a wide audience. They can help your brand develop organic authority through well-crafted content.
According to data from Influencer Marketing Hub, businesses make $5.20 back for every $1 spent on influencers on average. On the higher end, the top 13% of brands see a $20 revenue for every dollar.
Tips for maximizing your budget for social media marketing
To maximize your budget for social media marketing, spend your resource on things that you can’t do well. For example, if you don’t know graphic design, hire somebody to do it for you.
You can also spend money on automation. Identify what tasks take the most time and see if they can be automated.
Above all, spend money to make more money. The idea is to use your budget in ways that lead to you making more revenue. This makes your campaigns sustainable and scalable.
Key Takeaways
You can always do organic social media marketing campaigns. But if you want to keep up with the competition, a healthy combination of paid and organic campaigns does wonders.
Here are some important reminders on how to budget your social media marketing campaigns:
- Specify goals and set realistic expectations through financial projections.
- Understand your target market—your audience and which platform to go for.
- Find the right tools to help you streamline and automate your campaigns.
Ervin Kalemi
