The Cost of Social Media Marketing

Since I have been working on helping artists and clients build their online presence and start using social media tools to drive traffic, I have been asked the famous question....

Question: "How much does a social media marketing campaign cost?"

Some of my clients have very specific questions and others have a basic understanding of the social media landscape, but they’re not sure how it can help them, how much it costs, etc. In this post, I’ll give some rough cost estimations and guidance.

First of all, asking how much a social media marketing campaign should cost is a lot like asking how much an advertising campaign or a PR campaign costs. An ad campaign can cost $5,000 or it can cost $250,000,000. A PR campaign can cost $2,500 a month or it can cost $100,000 a month.

ANSWER: It really depends on these two key factors:

1. How much do you need to do?
2. How much can you afford to do?

So how much do you need to do is a question that we will uncover during an initial consultation and discoverty process where we identify your goals, needs, budget and timeline.

"I told one company yesterday that they should probably allocate their budget in other ways; social media marketing wasn't going to be their best ROI. I told another company yesterday that they should allocate a significant portion of their budget toward a few different social media marketing efforts. There is no pat answer. " said Jim Tobin from Ignite Social Media.

As for how much can you afford, that's a standard series of questions:

How much is your marketing budget overall? What tactics are you using already and how are they working? What percentage of your overall budget should be redirected to social media marketing. That might be 5% of your budget or it might be 100% of your budget. Again: it depends.

Setting up social media tools, sites, and widgets, and networks is relatively low in cost. But many can't really do a campaign unless you have a team out there working it properly. And while much of social media is "free" ... time (whether it's yours or mine) never is.

The right answer very much depends on your situation. So take a look at your overall marketing budget, your target audience and your goals and contact me or someone like me to figure out what's right for you.

Abridged: Ignite Social Media

Artists: Who Do You Sound Like?

by Bob Baker

Admit it. Most musicians hate to compare themselves to other artists. Does this describe you? If you feel you are a unique, one-of-a-kind creative being, I wholeheartedly agree with you. But if you think you shouldn't tarnish your musical identity with comparisons to other artists, I ask you to reconsider.

Why? It has everything to do with this crazy little hunk of matter called the human brain. According to the Berkeley Lab, "Humans retrieve information best when it can be linked to other related information." In other words, without a familiar reference point, people have a tough time filing away and remembering new sights, sounds, smells, etc.

Memory is a dynamic process: Tap Into 'The System'

In an article by Allen Barker, he writes, "Memory is a dynamic process. It arises from reminders and cues." The process that helps the brain sort out new stimulus is called "associative memory." Barker continues, "An associative memory is a memory system that takes an input 'key' and produces the 'closest' stored memory that matches that key. If the memory had stored a picture of a chair, for example, and were presented with a 'key' of half a chair, it would fill in the remaining half of the chair."

If you think this is all impractical mumbo jumbo, check out the work being done by Pandora. It's Music Genome Project is a system that analyzes music using "a set of attributes that capture not only the musical identity of a song, but also many significant qualities that are relevant to understanding the musical preferences of consumers who browse the material. Each song is analyzed along 400 distinct musical attributes to create a complete musical analysis." Sounds deep, but in essence, the Pandora research works much like Amazon's "customers who bought X also purchased Y" recommendations.

The Importance of Making the Mental Music Connection

Another site that understands the importance of this concept is WeSoundLike.com. The home page reads "Find new music like your favorite music! Just browse for your favorite music artists and we'll tell you the new and upcoming artists that are influenced by them!" To add your act, go to the submission page at www.wesoundlike.com/SubmissionForm.cfm.

Convinced yet? Music fans need clues. People who enjoy your music also enjoy other artists. And many of those artists are more familiar to the masses than you are right now. So tap into the mental links that already exist in the minds of fans who support other similar-sounding artists.

Bob Baker is the author of "Guerrilla Music Marketing Handbook," "Unleash the Artist Within" and "Branding Yourself Online." He also publishes TheBuzzFactor.com, a web site and e-zine that deliver marketing tips, self-promotion ideas and other empowering messages to music people of all kinds.