Guide: Planning your social media budget wisely

Increasing your social media budget: does it pay off?

Whether uploading Instagram posts, writing Facebook and LinkedIn posts, formulating image captions for Pinterest Pins, creating graphics, tweeting news, filming and editing YouTube or TikTok videos, or placing paid ads – the tasks of a social media manager on these channels not only cost a lot of money and time, they also come with a huge level of responsibility. They determine how a company or brand is perceived by the outside world. The overall public image and brand communication of modern companies have long been largely defined through social media channels.

This is hardly surprising, given that social media channels provide direct access to your target group and let you convey the exact message that will turn your target group into fans of your brand, goals and values, and not just consumers of your products. This is achieved through

• the choice of channels in your social media marketing mix,
• visuals in images and videos,
• the style and tone of your texts, and
• the quality of your content.

By engaging with followers and users, you can build deep and long-lasting trust in your brand over the long term and benefit from social selling successes in the long run.

So should social be the whole focus?

Particularly in B2C marketing, social media activities have long become an essential focus that most companies could no longer do without. However, building positive brand awareness by maintaining a well-managed and up-to-date presence on social media has also become indispensable in B2B marketing. Social media marketing is a powerful marketing discipline in its own right, and social media managers are highly sought-after and hunted in the job market.

But is it worth going all-in on social media for your marketing? Of course not. As part of a balanced marketing mix, lots of other measures, including traditional ones, should obviously be incorporated as well. However, all of this is also a question of budgeting. How high should the social media budget be set? You’ll learn how to plan your social media budget wisely and on a sound basis in our free guide on “Social media budget planning”.

Your social media budget should match your strategy

In contrast, social media managers and marketing managers are responsible for using the allocated budget to draw maximum attention to their company’s brand message and generate user engagement among the relevant target group. For that reason, a well-thought-out social media strategy is crucial if you want to plan your social media budget wisely and with a clear focus.

Which social media channels you choose is of course an extremely individual decision and depends on the following, along with many other factors:

1. Your business goals
2. Your target group
3. Your message
4. Your desired brand image
5. Your previous experiences
6. The social media budget available to you

Personal experience and campaign analyses based on KPIs will help you utilize the designated social media budget in such a way that it ideally achieves or even exceeds the predefined marketing objective.

Planning your social media budget: social media is resource-intensive!

Social media marketing isn’t a one-way street where you simply announce your company’s latest news or merely send a brand message. Instead, the decisive edge offered by social networking sites is that you can directly engage with your target group. Your posts should encourage a response and a keenness to interact. Therefore, social media marketing can only work if you are present and invest the necessary time in sparking and participating in such a discussion. Community management requires time above all else. And time should be firmly integrated as a key resource in your social media budget planning.

If you want to save time when it comes to social media management and are active on multiple channels, you should consider whether your social media budget will allow you to invest in a social media tool. Although this would involve monthly software costs, such solutions significantly reduce personnel expenses and organizational work. Our “Social media budget planning” guide tells you whether and when it would be worthwhile for you to use a social media software tool.

Plan your social media budget using our free guide

The fact is that social media cannot be neglected if you want your marketing mix to be a success. However, it’s also a fact that social media costs time and money. If you rush into social media marketing without a plan or strategy, you’ll quickly get caught up in the sheer number of possibilities and probably end up having to use a lot more resources than the end result is worth. In the worst-case scenario, inadequate, poorly organized social media management can even put customers off for good.

With that in mind, it is essential to define a social media budget beforehand and plan it wisely in order to specifically channel it into the activities that are the most promising. In our “Social media budget planning” guide, we show you how to plan your social media budget wisely and on a sound basis. Download it now for free!