The “new kid on the block” in the world of online marketing, social media marketing is an incredibly fertile ground to explore. Almost all businesses are maintaining their online presence through Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites, but they do not have the confidence yet to state the right budget to improve sales and increase traffic. In this article, we will answer how much money you should invest for the Social Media Marketing of your business.
1. Platform
Consider thinking first the market and niche you want to reach out to before signing in to the media platform you’ll be using. Most cost effective ones are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and blogs. If you prefer small talks with a wide network of people, Twitter can be a good choice. If you are more into in-depth conversations and engagement, then blogging is a better suggestion. If you’re into network-building, both Facebook and LinkedIn are good ways to go. All these will impact your budget accordingly.
Note that when you opt for blogging, you must be able to create and post quality and readable content regularly. If you’re not an expert in content development, hiring writers and researchers is your best bet. And this is where most of your budget should be allotted to. What comes next is promoting your blog, since a great content without link-building and marketing is like futile.
It is essential to build your own website or blog as a base first before spending money much on marketing to other platforms. As for marketing through social networking sites, you can always have contests, giveaways and special treats to keep them signing or subscribing into your feeds, visiting your profile therefore leading them to your website ultimately. So your money will go to buying these attractive prizes for winnings. When these potential customers are tuned into your updates and you’ve already gotten their attention, next step is to improve your content and differentiate yourself from others by giving out helpful and interesting content with personality.
All these social media marketing surely take time. For starters, investing at least $150 month in the first month ($5 a day) is advised. Following this will be an increase to $300 to $450 in each of the succeeding months. Of course, you should be vigilant on the performance metrics, so you can spend more on those contributing channels later.
2. Duration
Three to months of time is the least you can have as interim time to establish your brand in the digital market. If you are "doing it right," (meaning you have launched a true social effort based on content, engagement and the best practices of social marketing), then six months can be a fair duration in building initial rapport and spending most for the planning and monitoring stage for a good chance of success. When you reach the six-month mark, then really start to analyze metrics that will be used to calculate your estimate ROI. These metrics include, traffic to your website or blog, number of people who signed up to your newsletter/email feeds, downloads of your offered content, and number of fans and followers on major social media sites like Twitter and Facebook.
3. SEO or PPC
If you decide to take off with three months to initiate social media marketing, the most excellent way to drive qualified and immediate traffic is through PPC (Pay Per Click) marketing. In one month, you can already see the results. A rate of $600 per month is powerful enough to have your ads shown within search engines to potential and target customers. In PPC, you pay and bid for every user click so you must have a good set of keywords to place more exact listings.
PPC can be applied while you also have SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as work-in-progress in the background. The SEO marketing tactic takes a longer time frame but its implementation is recommended when you want to build a solid presence for your company so you must be willing to wait. In average, it takes about six months before end-results are achieved. A full service SEO program entails spending of about $1,500 per month accounting for the pay of the writers, content developers, link builders/farmers, digital marketers, etc. and purchase of software/tools, subscription to online tutorials and other resources or hiring SEO experts to do the job.
Given this case, PPC may provide a quick cheap alternative to investing in the full SEO strategy, as it will help to test your marketing model before investing into quality SEO services. But over time, when your links have grown full-pledged to the online market over time, SEO is likely going to be cheaper than most pay per click marketing.
Social media is now the "in thing" to business practitioners nowadays. But setting a budget for it can be relatively hard, especially if you’re new to this type of marketing. When unsure, two justifiable approaches are
(1) to spend a super high budget on it then cut back while things stabilize further and
(2) to stay under budget first and just spend more as necessary.
Whilst there are many factors in determining the allocation of your budget, you can follow the high-level budgeting purpose’s perspective: Invest 25% of your marketing budget to social media marketing is recommended for business-to-business and 15% for business-to-customer type of companies.
Author bio:
Alexis Thompson is a former Mountain Backpacker, Real Estate Business" Real Estate Sales Personnel and a 26 year old mother of 2 daughters, Sophie and Rhian. She is into almost all types of Music especially The Fray and Hillsong. She also has a passion in Singing and Scrap Booking.Alexis Thompson on Twitter Follow her escapades on her Twitter.
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