Are you planning to launch as social media advertising and marketing campaign? If so, it can be difficult trying to figure out what kind of budget you need to set aside for your advertising and marketing strategy. While there’s no way you can get a clear answer, you can get a general idea of how much your social media advertising and marketing campaign will cost you.
What Cost Factors Come into Play in Social Media Marketing?
To start, let’s cover social media marketing first. You need to decide whether you’re going to work on your social media marketing inhouse or outsource it altogether. If you’re planning on building and managing everything yourself, you’ll probably need to invest around $30 to 100 a month into social media management tools like Hootsuite, Agorapulse, or Sprout Social. The big expense will probably be time. You’ll have to create your own content, keep up with posting on social media regularly, respond to mentions, network with influencers, and more. This is obviously not the ideal solution as most business owners are busy taking care of other aspects of their business. The alternative to this is to outsource part of the task.
You can hire somebody online to create your content and manage your social media activity. Content creation can cost anywhere from $10 to $30 depending on the format, length, and topic. If you plan on publishing two pieces of content per week to share on social media, this can run you $160 per month. Hiring somebody will also cost you anywhere from $200 to $500 per month if you use a freelancer. However, you will still need to be the leader behind the marketing. You’ll have to take on the role of the project manager, creative, and strategist. This still means you’ll have to spend a significant amount of your time on social media marketing.
That’s why most businesses that want to take social media marketing seriously end up working with a digital marketing agency. It can cost anywhere from $1,000 to $3,000 per month to have the agency to take care of your social media marketing. It’s often worth the cost if the agency specializes in social media marketing. They’ll already know what works, so they’ll be able to build your followers, engagement numbers, and extend your reach.
Determining the Cost of Running Campaigns with Social Media Advertising
Social media advertising is completely different from social media marketing. You will have to spend money no matter what. Many businesses using social media advertising will often have to spend a decent amount of money on their ad campaigns before they figure out how to make it work. So in a way, you can say there’s a toll fee for starting a social media advertising campaign. As for the costs, there are many factors that affect how much you’ll pay with your social media advertising campaign. The average click costs will vary depending on the industry, target audience, and how much exposure you’re willing to pay for.
Let’s take a look at what click costs are based on each platform:On Facebook, click costs can run anywhere from 45 cents per click in the apparel industry to $3.77 per click in the finance industry. The average cost per click across all industries is around 97 cents.Surprisingly, the click costs tend to be higher for Instagram even though Instagram is owned by Facebook and you use the same ad platform to advertise to Instagram users. The average click cost on Instagram is $3.56.Twitter tends to be the most affordable of all the social media platforms at 38 cents per click on average. This makes Twitter one of the best social media advertising channels to test for your business. It might prove to be far more profitable than the other channels due to the fact that you’re spending so much less.LinkedIN has the highest average cost per click costs at $5.61. This makes a lot of sense considering that if you’re advertising on LinkedIN, you’re targeting business professionals, freelancers, business owners, organizations, and entrepreneurs. The leads are more valuable as the purchase prices are far higher than most B2C businesses.Pinterest is another popular social media platform that many advertisers are doing well with. So how much does Pinterest advertising cost? There is an average cost of $1.50 per click on Pinterest. While it does cost more than Facebook, many advertisers report that their ad campaigns tend to be more effective on Pinterest.
How Much Can You Expect to Spend?
With that said, you probably want an idea of how much you should expect to spend on your social media advertising campaign. The truth is that there isn’t a clear answer. It really depends on how aggressive you want to be with your campaign. Beginners should try to spend the wind down their daily ad spend as low as possible until they are comfortable with the advertising platform.
For example, Facebook allows a minimum budget of $1 per day for impressions and $5 per day for clicks and other conversion goals. These social media advertising platforms are very technical and have a steep learning curve. You can quickly lose your money if you don’t know what you’re doing and set your daily budget too high.
In general, you should spend anywhere from $150 to $300 per month if you’re just starting out. Eventually, you will want to move the budget up to $500 to $1,500 as you see some results from your initial testing phase and want to scale up your campaigns. And of course, these numbers will vary depending on your industry and target audience.
So that pretty much sums up how much social media advertising and marketing will cost you. The costs will vary based on how much you want to outsource and how much you’re willing to do yourself for your social media marketing. Social media advertising costs will vary depending on the ad platform, your industry, and your experience with the platform.
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