Social Media Marketing
How much social media marketing cost? Well, social media marketing is a monster all its own. Where do you even begin? What platform should you be trying to gain a following on? Do you need a following for your business or should you just run paid ads and have people find you that way? What is the best way to tackle this?
Well, let’s start out by just quickly running through the main social media platforms that you’ll want to use and why you might want to use each one.
Facebook is the longstanding and constant platform that everyone uses or at least has. You would be pretty hard pressed to find someone who does not have a Facebook account that this point in time. So, with such a large audience, who will Facebook reach? Who should you try to reach on this platform?
Like I said, almost everyone has a Facebook account, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone is using Facebook constantly or that they would be on Facebook looking for whatever product or service your business offers.
If your company focuses mainly on business-to-business transactions, Facebook might work depending on the industry, but you might want to look at a different platform such as LinkedIn. Facebook really shines when it comes to a more direct relationship between the company and the individual consumer. Most of the time people are on Facebook for personal reasons, so they would be intrigued by an ad for a product they can use in their own life or at home, but they might not be so interested in a new software service that can change the way the company they work for does business. The mindset just isn’t there.
Ok, so now you know that Facebook should be used mainly to target individuals, families, groups of friends, etc. but can that be defined any further? Of course! One major consideration you need to take into account is the demographic of your target audience. If your product appeals to teens or a younger audience, they probably will not be on Facebook quite as much as you would hope. Facebook campaigns will have the most success when your target audience is a little bit older than that group. That doesn’t mean that you should avoid Facebook all together if your target market is young, but you would probably want to focus your efforts elsewhere and then supplement with Facebook marketing. Knowing your audience is huge.
Instagram is a fantastic spot for businesses to grow! It can produce incredible results. But again, just like Facebook, you really need to dial in your audience.
So who is on Instagram and what type of businesses do well there?
Instagram is the best spot if you want to reach out directly to consumers and those consumers are younger people. This is where you should definitely be if you want your product to be “the next big thing,” or if it is something that can catch on and spread by the way influencers or other people are using it. Instagram is best for things like clothing, food, personal products that people can use everyday, and anything that is about creating a brand for yourself (such as a singer, author, artist, etc.). Of course, these are just examples, and almost all businesses should have an active Instagram account, but these types of products do really well on Instagram.
LinkedIn is almost the opposite of Facebook and Instagram. This is where you do not want to be if you’re trying to sell something like clothing. People don’t get on LinkedIn to shop for clothes or to find their next style. People use LinkedIn mainly to find other inspiring people or to find cool new tools or services to help take their company to the next level.
This is the place where business-to-business transactions come alive.
If you sell straight to a business, then you are going to want to have a larger influence on LinkedIn than you are on Instagram or Facebook. Again, pretty much all businesses should still have Instagram and Facebook accounts, but those should serve as supplements to your growing base on LinkedIn.
Hopefully that answered some of the questions you might have about the differences among the social media platforms. I would still recommend cementing a final strategy with your social media expert of choice, but this might at least help get you in the right direction.
Now we need to talk about what kind of marketing is available on these platforms.
There are basically two strategies that can be used in various ways on each of these platforms. It is the same two base strategies for each platform, so I will cover them broadly below.
Organic Posting
The first strategy is what we like to call organic posting.
This is when you (or the agency that you hire) is creating and posting original content to your actual social media feed and account. These are all of the posts that people will see if they search for you, and it is the way that you can generate followers and supporters of your business.
Organic posting is best used when you want to have a presence on any of the platforms. This is what will get you the most followers or could eventually turn you into an influencer or a voice that people listen to and look forward to hearing from.
This can take a long time and a lot of work to build up; however, it is very long lasting and the results can grow exponentially as you increase your brand awareness and your following.
Paid Ads
The other option that you have is to pay the platform of your choosing to promote your brand for you. So you would give Facebook a certain “budget” and an ad campaign that you create and then Facebook would algorithmically place your ads into other people’s feed based on a target audience type that you set with Facebook. I used Facebook as the example here, but you can do this across all platforms.
This is an easier way to have your brand and product be promoted without having to put in all of the time and effort to increase your following through organic posting.
If you need quicker, but not as long lasting results, then this is probably the best tool for you to use.
You can use either of these options but this is definitely something that you will want to consult on with your social media marketing expert. Picking which platform and which type of advertising you run can honestly make or break your business.
Should I do my own Social Media Marketing?
As you have seen here, there are so many factors and ways of thinking that go into creating a solid social media marketing campaign. I think that this is an awesome thing for anyone to learn and can be of great value to you and your business to learn how to do it on your own; however, it is a major, major time commitment to do this right, and, again, there is a ton of strategizing involved, so I highly recommend at least involving someone who knows a little bit more about this than you might know yourself such as a digital marketing agency.
Social Media Marketing Cost
Ok now for the real reason that you came to this article. How much will social media marketing cost you to have an agency or another person do it for you?
The good news is that there aren’t a whole of variables to social media marketing cost! Which platform you decide to use should not really affect your price (other than ad spend as that is determined by the platform), but creating posts for Facebook vs LinkedIn isn’t really a cause for an agency to charge you differently.
The biggest factor that will affect the pricing is whether you would like organic posting or paid ads as your service of choice.
Paid ads service is much more simple. There will be a monthly management fee from the agency running the ad campaign for you. This fee will probably start somewhere between $600 – $800 per month depending on the complexity of the ad campaign that you will be running, and then the rest is really up to you. The higher budget that you have to pay the platform that you’re running the ads on, the more that ad will pop up on everyone’s feed. You want to make sure that it is worth it for you to pay the management fee by having a large enough budget for ads that your campaign will actually have an impact. Some businesses only have a few hundred dollars each month that can be spared on these ads, but some might even go up to a few thousand each month to really spread those ads around. This is purely up to you!
Organic posting is where the pricing gets a little bit trickier. If you are paying someone to do this for you, then you want to make sure that you will be getting quality posts put out that will really help to increase your brand awareness and followers. I do not recommend finding the absolute cheapest option just to have any kind of posts on your account. In this case “something” isn’t always better than “nothing.” The way that your business is portrayed on social media can have a negative impact, so you want this to be high quality. The other big factor is – how big of an influence are you trying to build? How many posts will you be wanting? If you want to post once a week, you might not grow super fast, but you will still have a presence on social media, which is great, and you can save some money that way; however, if you want to really grow on social media, you’ll want to be posting more frequently. The more frequently you are asking someone to create content and post that content onto your social media accounts, the more that person is going to need to charge for their services. To really break it down, you’ll probably end up paying around $75 – $100 per post. This could be slightly cheaper, but again, you don’t want to go too cheap or you’ll have poor quality content. So, from a monthly perspective, if you want to post twice per week (around eight times per month), you would probably be somewhere between $600 – $800 per month.
Hopefully that gives you a better idea of what you could expect to see for your social media marketing cost!
If you are interested in having this service performed for you, check out the Lemonade Stand website or contact our team right here! We would love to hear from you!
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