What is your brand’s online reputation worth? How much you spend on social media marketing is likely to affect your reputation within your industry and among your clients, employees and community: good, bad and even damage control. Warning: the following is based on real events, though certain elements may be dramatized (maybe).
An influencer received a sentence promoting a product to post on Instagram at 4:00 pm. Said influencer copied and posted not only the promotional sentence, but also the instructions. Oof.
A company pre-scheduled a post congratulating an event’s participants for “surviving” said event. No one canceled that message after a tragedy occurred during the event. Way to read the room.
The U.S. Department of Education misspelled an author’s name when it posted a quote attributed to him. When called out, the DoE poster misspelled the word “apology,” leading to even more embarrassment. Yes, embarrassment. Come on, Department of Education.
To err is human. Some of the biggest brands on the planet have had social media marketing snafus, even those with powerhouse marketing agencies creating and running campaigns. And, a few CEOs have resigned their posts over missteps and mismanaged brand reputation.
Social media marketing is more than selling products or services. The public has license to weigh in on every post that comes across their feed, which makes it a matter of both sales and public relations. If you’re considering a more professional, full-scale approach to social media marketing, then it’s a safe assumption that it’s time to go the agency route versus having it be a bullet point in a job description for a freelancer or an administrative role.
You will find the cost ranges from a few dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars. A few dollars might result in posting some questionable backlinks or using sketchy English and rote, AI-generated responses. Hundreds of thousands will put your company in the big major brands league.
We Can Only Speak for Ourselves as an Outsourced Marketing Agency
EAG is a full-service outsourced marketing firm. As such, we look at our clients’ marketing as a whole; not post by post. When determining how much budget should go toward social media marketing, we ask a lot of questions first because no company survives and thrives on social media alone. Rather, it is one aspect of a comprehensive marketing strategy that supports sales, name recognition, brand loyalty and content marketing.
What’s Considered When Determining Social Media Marketing Costs?
The social media platform. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn to name a few of more than 100 social platforms in use currently. Where your business has a presence depends on where your prospects and customers are. Each platform has its rules, requirements and best practices for sharing posts, plus the content and tone of those posts change slightly for each platform. There is no sense in customizing posts for each platform or paying for ads on multiple platforms if your audience is the Facebook versus the LinkedIn crowd.
Narrowing down your list of social media platforms helps with setting budget for social media. It takes time and skill to link, tag, hashtag, shoot, scale and fine-tune images, videos and messages, plus respond to comments, when necessary. Expect to spend a little more if your company’s presence spreads across multiple platforms.
Sponsored and paid posts. Social media platforms offer paid advertising opportunities, putting your post in front of your target audience. Ads and advertised content can result in a higher percentage of engagement and even conversions, compared to simply posting to your page.
When paying platforms for sponsored and paid posts, you need results. Ensure all links work, message is on point, image is sized correctly, audience is carefully selected, copy and image fall within content guidelines. It’s also important to define your goal and analyze your results to determine whether your money was well invested. To be most effective, budget should allow for graphic design/photography, copywriting and management .
Social media marketing strategy. Your social media marketing needs a strategy to turn likes into ROI. EAG specializes in establishing and integrating social media in all aspects of your small business marketing strategy. We use our social media knowledge, expertise and tools to deliver fresh, relevant content that reflects your brand.
No hard numbers on the answer to the question of how much to spend on social media marketing, but certainly a case to think about all the opportunities with the right experts behind it.