What budget to allocate to your social media strategy?

People spend more than 2 hours on social media a day, and following the “Three-Second Rule”, marketers must catch their audience’s attention within these 3 seconds before they scroll to another post. On average, they’ll see 2,400 posts a day and more than 50 billion in their entire life! (if they still use Instagram at 80y, which is, we know, debatable). 

You post 3 posts a week on each of your social media, and it costs 1$ a day per platform to have impressions on your posts.
You’re not further ahead, right? 

What if budgeting your social media strategy could be a much easier task? Let’s discover how to set your social media budget depending on your objectives.

Set up a solid strategy before defining your social media budget

Define your objectives & your KPIs

Your social media budget is part of the marketing budget. Should it be ⅓? ⅕? 1/10? It will all depend on your objectives. Defining them first can help you picture how much budget you should be spending. 

Here are some objectives you may think of when setting up your social media strategy (they all correspond to specific KPIs):

• Increasing brand awareness (KPI: engagement rate) 
• Generating more traffic on your platforms (KPI: visits per month)
• Boosting your sales (KPI: conversion ration or lead generated)
• Improving your e-reputation or gaining credibility (KPI: positive opinions or information relay).

Define your target audience

Once your objectives are set, it’s time to define your target audience. Who do you want to engage with? Influencers? Broadcasters? Potential customers? Your BFFs? 

Because you know you won’t allocate the budget if you create content to attract macro-influencers or your neighbors, it’s crucial to have a well-defined target audience. It will help you design a user-friendly value proposition that will correspond to their needs. To help you understand your target audience, ask yourself the following: 

• What’s their favorite platform of communication? 
• What language do they use?
• What’s their average monthly budget?
• What do they like? Brands? Inspiration? 
• What content do they enjoy? 

It would be best if you didn’t try to talk to everyone. Make your followers feel special. 

Select the proper social media channels

Budgeting your social media strategy implies defining on which platforms you have to spend your budget. Which platform should you spend your budget on? Linkedin or Facebook? Pinterest? Instagram? Tiktok? 

It depends on your objectives, target audience but also your content. You don’t know where to advertise? How to build your social media strategy? Our storytelling team can help you.

Internalize or externalize your social media budget? That’s the question

Social media internalization

If you internalize your content creation, it means that you should gather a dedicated team. To calculate your monthly social media budget.

Christmas is coming. Imagine that you’re in charge of promoting your new seasonal products for year-end celebrations (what a burden). It would help if you had an entire team to launch content in time. 

In this situation (even in less dramatic ones), ask yourself: 

• Which expertise do you need for this campaign? A social media manager? Content editor? DA? Community Manager? Paid advertiser?
• How many pieces of content do you have to create? 3 posts a week? 5?
• What sort of content do you want to display? 

After answering these questions, you’ll be able to estimate the cost of this campaign and see if it fits your budget. Never forget to calculate the ROI of your social media budget afterwards:

((profit - investment)/ investment) x 100
It will help you analyse the profitability of your campaign.

Social media externalization

If you externalize your social media production, your budget will include the management of the external strategy and the global content creation price. There are two ways to budget your social media externalization: 

• Time-based flee: the amount you pay is proportional to the time spent on your social media content creation, management...
• Flat flee: you pay for specific deliverables. For instance, you can pay a social media agency to create 3 carousels or 10 stories. 

Depending on the tasks you want to externalize (content creation, social media management, community management…), you may prefer a strategy or the other. Don’t hesitate to ask for a quote and compare. 

What about influencers?

Influencer marketing can be a way to skyrocket your number of followers on social media… but it can also be a way of skyrocketing your social media budget. It costs 1.5 million to have Dwayne Johnson post promotional content for your brand, while it can cost hundreds for a micro-influencer. Why so?

Most of the time, pricing is set like this: Engagement rate per post + extra factors (# for instance) = total rate.

If you want to increase your conversions, think about micro-influencers. They often have better conversion rates than macro-influencers. On the contrary, if you’re looking to improve your brand visibility, consider the other way round. 

3 key takeaways to set up a viable social media budget 

To set up your social media budget:

1. Focus on qualitative content rather than quantitative content (value proposition over numerous posts)
2. Measure the efficiency of your social media content (ROI) and adapt your social media budget accordingly
3. Benchmark and analyze your competitors' strategy

Now that you know how to set up your budget, it’s time to evaluate whether it’s more profitable for you to internalize or externalize your social media strategy. Let’s discuss it around a cup of coffee…