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