How do you justify your social media budget?

While tying overall business goals to social goals is important - don’t get caught in the trap of having EVERY social media expenditure tied back to a business objective. If your end game is always sales your social will show it and become bland, disengaging and quickly irrelevant to your target audience. When defining social media objectives there will be some initiatives that drive bottom line sales revenue, but others that are more brand plays that grow and nurture and build that social community. These may not have tangible bottom line results, but important to brand health and community engagement. You need to allocate room in your goals for innovative activations, social experiments and most importantly social failures.

The easiest way is right from the outset aligning your social media goals back up the chain to first your marketing goals then the business goals. That way from conception and road showing your strategy you are aligned and on the same page.

When calculating social media costs it’s helpful to reach out to your reps at each platform (i.e. LinkedIn, Meta, Twitter, Pinterest) to get budget forecasts based on the advertiser auction depth, competitive set, target audience and content relevancy score of your brands content. They can also be helpful in pulling SOV (share of voice) analysis and Impression to Frequency Reports so that you can determine how much you would need to invest to capture a specific SOV within your industry. If you do not have a rep and are a smaller organization then many of the platforms have forecast estimate tools now baked into their ad accounts.

You may want to measure where your lead generation is coming from and what particular customer you want. Each social media will attract a certain client and consequently you must align with the correct one. Do you simply want more views and likes or do you want to convert people?

Customization Options: Understand your client's needs and offer customisation for social media budgets. This is important for your client. Every client will not have a humongous budget for social media particularly ones who are new to business or have limited funds. Use a reverse gear approach. Instead of offering your set packages and plans, provide your client with customized solutions tailored to their budget. This may involve offering different social media packages or services that align with their goals. Some examples of customised packages could be: -Content Creation only - Content Creation & Management of Social Handles - Optimising Only Paid Advertising Campaigns - Offering Detailed Analytics and Reporting

It's always important to remember that when you choose to work with a marketing agency instead of hiring marketing in-house, you give yourself the opportunity to collaborate with a team of people who all have different specialties and talents.?? For example, when clients come onboard, they have access to a copywriter, graphic designer, account manager, and video editor—providing a variety of skills that, in my opinion, are much more valuable than a single in-house hire. Additionally, you benefit from multiple perspectives from an outside point of view when evaluating your overall marketing efforts.

Although I’m a founder of a social media consulting agency - this is not always the right move for your brand. There are a lot of variables to consider whether to hire in-house or an agency including strategy, budget, team dynamics, control and maturity of the social team. I’ve hired both during my career and at a very high level some of the pros for each: In-house: 1. Dedicated resource 2. Better brand identity / consistency 3. More control and customization 4. Long term investment 5. Less risk Agency: 1. Unbiased perspective 2. Cost savings 3. Diverse skill sets 4. Short Term investment 5. More risk