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Budgeting for Social Media Marketing

Now that businesses of all sizes have started to truly understand the value of social media marketing they are starting to ask a lot of questions. Money is always a big concern for any business so one of the core questions that gets asked is “how should we budget for this?” Social media marketing is much more affordable than other types of marketing. Nevertheless, it does require some monetary investment. There are three things that you need to ask yourself when trying to budget for social media marketing:

1. What will be the approximate cost of learning and using social media marketing? The first step in creating any sort of budget is to get some information about what the investment is likely to cost you. There are two ways to handle social media marketing: do it all yourself (in-house) or hire someone to do it for you. If you’re going to do it yourself then you need to consider how much money and time it will cost you to learn the ins and outs of social media marketing as well as how much time will be required of you each week to do this marketing. If you’re going to hire someone else to do the work then you should get several quotes so that you have any idea of how much it’s going to cost you.
2. How should the budget be distributed across different social media marketing opportunities? One of the things that you have to take into consideration is that there are a lot of different options for social media marketing. You can focus your attention on low-budget social media marketing like the use of Twitter and Facebook. You can invest your energy into creating and promoting viral videos. Or you can get into the area of social media press releases. Consider what areas of social media marketing are of interest to you and determine how much of your budget you want to allocate to each area.
3. Where is the money going to come from and approximately how much is available? Finally, you need to get realistic about how much money you have as compared to how much money you need. Where is the money for this budget coming from? Are you getting a small business loan? Are you going to redirect some of the hours of an in-house employee to this area of marketing? And approximately how much money per month can you come up with for your social media marketing?

Once you’ve answered these questions, you should have a good idea of the basic budget for your social media marketing campaign. You can take the amount that you have access to and apply it appropriately to the areas of social media marketing which are most appealing to you. Review your results every 2-3 months and tweak your budget accordingly.