Do you sometimes stare at all the different options for social media marketing in front of you and feel incredibly frustrated? Figuring out your social media marketing budget is difficult because of the broad spread of social media. Luckily enough, you have no need to whip out a spreadsheet and do all the comparisons because we've collected a list of the best ways to run your social media campaigns while sticking to a budget.
Knowing how much to spend and where to spend your budget can save you time and money. You won't have to search around through sketchy and unsecured websites for potential information when they often regurgitate the same stuff that they link to in their articles. In this article, we can help you create a social media plan both through helping you figure out your budget and where to spend it.
Figuring Out Your Social Media Marketing Budget
In order to figure out where exactly you'd like to allocate your funds too, it would be smart to figure out exactly what your budget is. How do you figure out your budget strategy? Well, that all depends on you.
Returning the Money
Your goal should be to return all the money you spent and then make some more on top of that, but it won't always happen. Be realistic and think about how much money can come out of your budget- either through personal or business funds.
How Much Money Actually Makes a Dent
This is the question of the century because we'd all like to spend minimal money marketing and still turn a profit. How much money makes an impact depends on what you are doing- although on average around 7-8% of your revenue should be turned into marketing.
Budgeting to Help the Community
Potentially setting aside some of your budgets, perhaps a little extra, to donate to the community might prove beneficial to your business. It is tax deductible and it brings visibility to your business, not to mention people like to support a team player. It's important for your budget strategy to remember if you're going to donate money, as it impacts how much you're going to spend on your social media side of the campaign.
Minimal Spending
Advertising for free will require a lot of work and time reading articles on how to advertise with minimal money or even free. If this is your desired budgeting plan, don't throw out your money on people who promise they can manage your social media when there is plenty of information out there to become an expert yourself. Minimal spending is possible, but you'll need to put a little bit more time into it.
Planning Out The Best Social Media Plan
Spending the whole budget on one thing is probably not a great idea, so you already know what is within reach for you based on the budget that you've determined above. This means that you can now successfully start on your social media marketing plan with all the information that you need.
Creation of an Effective Ad
Before you can begin to plan out your social media campaign based on the budget you've established works best for you, you need to make a campaign worth clicking on.
Clickable Social Media
Social media is a visual experience and if you have a profile that doesn't pull people in, you've lost a potential customer. You want people to see your post and be interested in the product that you're trying to push. This means posting potentially professionally curated content- meaning hiring a photographer to take quality pictures that draw the customers towards you might be worthwhile.
Free is Always Good
Becoming active on social media and making sure the community that you're a part of knows that you're an option is important; engaging with your audience, posting quality content, utilizing hashtags and geotagging, and getting a hold of brand ambassadors all help get your business in the feed of social media users. Through consuming the myriad of articles and videos that are available on the internet about boosting your personal social media without paying for it, you can become a sort of expert on it without even having to pay if you're willing to put in the time.
Brand Ambassadors
Is there a person in your target audience (an employee, someone who's already a customer, or someone with your intended audience) that has a moderate amount of followers and is relatively influential? They are a brand ambassador and if they are within your social media marketing budget, you could very well have found yourself an incredible way to advertise and bring in new customers.
Another complimentary option to hiring brand ambassadors would be to to use Instapple. This allows you to grow your following and post engagement, which works great hand in hand with brand ambassador collaboration.
Increasing Brand Awareness
This can be done a number of ways, but one of the best ways is to use some of your budgets and put it towards Instagram or Facebook ads and YouTube video ads. This increases your visibility and shows people that you exist- not to mention if ad targeting works they'll click on your company ad.
Community Service
This was above in the budgeting but is important that if you do end up doing community service, that you are visible about it. Posting these pictures in a classy way is important, as it is more likely to drive people to your page. However, this might not be part of the campaign your company chooses if not genuinely interested in helping out because people can tell when a company is being disingenuous.
Facebook and Subsidiary Companies
Facebook owns Instagram and this means that you could pay in one place to advertise through both platforms. This is both more streamlined and effective since it's 20% cheaper to advertise them through Facebook Business. So not only do you pay less to advertise in this manner, but you've got access to all the data that Facebook has access to for its users.
Start Planning Out Your Business Social Media Marketing Budget
Through the creation of a social media marketing budget and a solid social media marketing campaign, your business can potentially reach significantly more people while still being easy on your wallet. Hopefully, all of this information helped you form an effective budget for your business and will help you create an effective plan of attack to help boost your business.
If you need more information or you happen to need business consulting, you can learn more about our services and the information on social media we offer at our website.
