Social media is a great way to reach a new audience and keep in touch with your existing one. There are a variety of ways to market on social media and you have to figure out what kind of marketing you want to do before you set a budget. Of course, there isn’t a single answer that works for everyone. It all comes down to your total marketing budget and the audience you’re trying to reach.
Benefits of Social Media Advertising
There’s a lot of noise on social media and paying for social media marketing can help you get into a position where people see your posts instead of others. Adults from 18 to 34 are most likely to follow a brand on social media instead of in other ways. This means that you’re reaching that audience when you advertise on social media and create an account that represents your brand. If you get people to follow your accounts, you can also continue to advertise to them through your posts, which might reduce the overall amount you have to spend in the long-term.
Types of Social Media Advertising
There’s direct advertising that shows up as sidebar or on-feed ads. These are standard advertisements that you direct at a specific audience. When you set it up, you can choose things like age brackets, languages, locations, and interests to try to find the right market that will respond to your ad. It will show to people who don’t follow your brand and possibly some people that do.
The other type of advertising is designed to bring your posts from your brand page to the top of your feed. These only go to people who follow your account, but can be shared by them to help you find new customers. One of the benefits of this type of advertising is that you’re reaching out to existing customers and solidifying their relationship with your brand.
The type of advertisement you choose depends on who you’re trying to reach and what you’re advertising.
Social Media Marketing Budget
According to The Content Factory, the average business spends between $200 and $350 per day on social media marketing. That sounds like a lot but it’s important to remember how massive some businesses marketing budgets are. You don’t have to spend that much to see some kind of return if your marketing budget isn’t as high. The same study found that social media spending hovered around 11 percent of the total marketing budget.
Your social media advertising budget should only be a part of your overall marketing budget. Keep in mind that you need other types of advertising too in many cases. Make sure you don’t overspend on social media advertising and neglect other avenues of reaching customers. Especially if you’re just starting out, it’s important to take it easy and practice how to get the best return on your investment.
Remember that you’re trying to attract people to follow your business on the social media site or trying to get them to respond to your promotions. If you can get followers on the social media site, more of the posts you make will make it in front of them even without an investment — which means that you should always consider putting some money into gaining followers.
Start Small
If you’re just getting into social media advertising, start small. It takes a lot of trial and error to reach the right audience and it’s better not to spend too much until you get the hang of it. It’s better to put in the time and learn what you’re doing before rushing ahead.
Try A/B testing to see what gets you the best results. Put out two ads to the same audience and check your analytics to see which has the stronger response. Then use the better ad and test it against another. Over time, you’ll figure out what it is people respond to and become more confident in spending larger amounts of money.
You should also look at what your competitors are doing to reach out to people on social media. It may help give you some ideas about how to design your own marketing approach.
So How Much Should I Spend on Social Media Advertising?
Ultimately you should spend enough to see a positive response. Even $5 per day on sidebar ads can help you reach people and have them start to follow you. It’s also a low enough amount that if it doesn’t work right away, you have room to tweak your approach without running your budget into the ground.
Try spending $5 per day for a week and seeing whether you get positive results. If you do, nudge the budget upward a little. If not, stay at that level until you start to see results. The important thing about finance management is being flexible. As long as you’re willing to adjust, you’re going to get more mileage out of your investment.
You can also decide how much you spend based on what social network you’re on. For example, you might want to focus on the network where you’re the most active. You can also decide based on the metrics of the social network. Like Facebook has the largest number of users, but you might have more luck marketing to professionals if you choose LinkedIn. Twitter is a good place to start if you want to try getting organic shares and views, but it might be a little more difficult to craft an advertisement that grabs someone when most posts are very short and designed to be read quickly and moved on from.
Deciding how much to spend on social media advertising can be a challenge, but the rewards are worth the potential risk. Social media connects you to a large audience who already uses the platforms to follow brands. If you start small and work your way up, you might be surprised with how quickly you’re seeing a real return on your investment.
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