Does your company have an unlimited amount of money available to fund your social media marketing campaign? No? We didn’t think so. Based on our nearly 20 years of experience working with retail businesses of all shapes and sizes, we have heard many social media success stories, and unfortunately, quite a few horror stories.
In this post we’d like to pass along a few common denominators of success we’ve learned along the way, both from our own social media campaigns and those of our customers. If you’re a startup or just getting ready to test the waters of social media marketing, this information will be helpful.
How the Best Social Media Marketers Handle Budgeting
- Think long-term. Start with a budget you can comfortably support for at least a year. It takes time and a consistent effort to build up a following on any social media platform.
- Labor looms large. Budgeting most properly account for labor, one of the biggest costs of social media marketing. Joining a platform is usually free — but one or more people needs to monitor platform activity and create/curate content to share on the platform. All this time must be tracked and measured.
- Milestones matter. Social media becomes a time suck when you have no idea whether you’re succeeding or failing. The key is to establish milestones along the way so you can gauge if your time is being well spent. For instance, on Facebook your goal might be to have 50 people join your group after one month, 125 after two months, 400 after six months.
- Allocate for advertising. On some platforms, advertising is an effective way to build a community. However, most companies dive into social media without first studying how the platform’s advertising works, what it might cost, and what results can be expected. Investigate this early on so you can weave advertising costs into your budget sensibly.
- Spend vertically, not horizontally. By this we mean budget for a lot of activity on a small number of platforms rather than a little activity on a lot of platforms. Social media is noisy. It’s crowded. You’re literally one voice among thousands. You’ll never get traction by skimming the surface. But if you keep at it, you’ll win people over.
- Budget for quality content. Perhaps the most important and fastest way to build a community is to share meaningful and engaging content. But doing so doesn’t come cheap: it requires a well-thought-out content strategy, skilled writers, skilled designers, skilled photographers, and skilled videographers. Visual content is essential. You have to understand how much content you need, and how much it will cost to produce it. Photography and video can be quite expensive, but the good news is, they don’t have to be. Many social media platforms prefer basic but sincere visual content over that which is overly polished.
There’s Nothing Wrong with Starting Small
Now you may have read all this and be thinking social media is way too expensive and involved for our company. But there’s nothing wrong with starting small and building up your social media presence very, very gradually.
For instance, it costs very little to set up a simple company page on a handful of important social platforms. But there’s value in doing it because for many of today’s customers, a social media presence is much like a business card was in the old days — it doesn’t have to be fancy, but it tells people you’re a legitimate, credible business.
In our case, we started blogging in 2008, when blogging was an essential social media marketing activity. As we went along, we found a lot of ways to use our content, promote it, and help customers with it. Eventually, we started to see our blog generate leads and positive social media conversations about our brand. A modest budget combined with patient persistence can pay off for your business, too!
Let’s Talk!
Interested in featuring packaging in your social media marketing campaign? We can give you plenty of tried-and-true ideas for doing that. Please call us at 630-551-1700 or contact us through the website to start the conversation.
Related Posts:
https://www.salazarpackaging.com/10-common-mistakes-dtc-start-ups-make-on-social-media/
https://www.salazarpackaging.com/how-to-allocate-limited-social-media-marketing-budget/
https://www.salazarpackaging.com/unboxing-design-elements-to-generate-social-shares/