Developing a Social Media Marketing Budget doesn’t have to be expensive or tedious
Budgeting or setting up budgets can be one of the most difficult things for small business owners. Often we figure if the revenue number is bigger than the expenses number then that mean our business is working. More experienced businesses might not always have to worry about that but complacency can set in and make it hard to allocate funds to something that might not be worth it.
Guess what though? Its 2014! Now is the time to change and build your business even stronger than last year. So here are some tips to help that happen on the budget side of things.
If your a B2C style company, then Facebook should be dominating your social media marketing budget. Never advertised or marketed on Facebook? Here’s some tips and estimated costs (both time and money):
Free but consume time:
- Define your goals for 2014, whether that is growing
by 100 Likes or 20,000, goals really help (10 minutes) - Update your cover image for 2014 or the season (2 hours)
- Create a weekly content schedule and follow it (1 hour initial + 1 hour a week)
- Plan your promotions and add them to your social media calendar (1 hour a month)
- Use an application like ShortStackApp (Free) to create a coupon page only accessible after “Liking” your page (1-4 hours)
- Create QR code fliers for coupons that direct the mobile user in your store/shop to “like” your Facebook page (1-4 hours)
Less time but cost more money:
- Run a generic Facebook ad for your town and get a base demographic of who generally will be interested in your business ($15 ad to run 1 day, 1 hour total of time)
- Analyze who is looking at your business and create a specific advertising on Facebook to get more likes, leads, or clicks ($5/day for week at a time, 2 hour initial setup)
- Run a Facebook contest for the most creative use of your product or picture of people happy with your service or having fun at your location, have users submit content and win a $50 gift card. Make sure its worth their time. Use ShortStackApp to build this contest or another reputable Facebook app for it. ($50 gift card, 2 hours initial setup, 1 hour selection process)
- Total to implement these for the year financially: $325
These are easy to do and take very little money in the grand scheme of things. On a more expensive note, recently we did a $15 demographic test. It did not work out exactly how we planned, however for $15 we were able to reach out to almost 4,000 people. In comparison, typical direct mailer campaigns will cost about $1700+ for 5,000 post cards to be sent… Direct Mailers are very effective by all means, but in terms of building brand awareness, I would be more than happy to drop $100 and build awareness in my local city area in a tactful and meaningful way.
Want help building your Social Media Marketing Budget? We would love to help! Email me Adam@PullmanMarketing.com or Call 509-240-9735.
As always, if you want to talk more about this and other things, feel free to call 509-240-9735 or catch me on twitter at: https://twitter.com/YourAdAgency_
