Every modern business understands the value of social media marketing. When done well, a personable, curated social feed can significantly boost your brand’s standing. But, as great as social media can be, it is still possible to haemorrhage money here if you aren’t careful.
To avoid that, it’s always worth tailoring your social budget towards your specific brand needs. Experts recommend spending roughly 12% of your marketing budget on this focus. But, that recommendation can seem frustratingly vague and, depending on things like your intended audience, isn’t always accurate.
In this article, we’ll help you address this modern-day problem by considering the best ways to work out once and for all how much is the right amount for your social spending.
Step 1: Understand Your Returns
Before you can develop a reliable social budget, you need to know what returns you’re seeing or stand to see from your efforts here. These could include income from direct sales on platforms like Facebook, sales that result from social clicks, or the effectiveness of social influencer campaigns.
Of course, these figures won’t be 100% accurate because you can’t always fully judge things like the effectiveness of social recommendations. However, taking the time to analyse these insights will be a huge help in beginning to understand what social media is doing for you, and therefore how much you can reasonably expect to spend here and still see returns.
Step 2: Consider Your Options
It’s also vital to consider what you could put your social media budget towards to ensure its effectiveness. For instance, even if social ROIs technically justify an in-house team, this money will stilll ultimately go to waste if your accounts are relatively small-scale and don’t require that much input throughout the day. In this instance, working with an affordable digital marketing agency will typically serve you better in helping to grow your social efforts. Once that growth has happened, then you may benefit from budgeting for provisions in-house, but typically not before.
It’s also worth considering your options in terms of the social platforms you use. Far from paying more to develop a minor presence across various social platforms, most brands find it best to set aside slightly smaller amounts to develop a larger following on no more than three socials. This can boost returns and help to solidify social media standing in the right places for your audience.
Step 3: Test the Waters
Ultimately, there’s no better way to test a budget’s feasibility than to simply jump in and test the waters. Spending modest amounts of your budget on things like A/B social media testing can give a more accurate idea of where spending works, and where you could benefit from pulling back on your budget, e.g. across certain platforms or types of social content. While it may involve spending a little more upfront, the information you glean here will be key to helping you stick to a concise, effective social budget according to each campaign moving forward.
Social spending can feel like a sticky subject, but it needn’t be when you develop your budget using simple steps like these.
