So you want to start marketing on social media. It could be for your business, one of your services or even part of your job requirement. Well, being in the industry for a few years there have been some changes and best practices that you may want to know about before embarking on advertising yourself or business on social media as well as how to begin marketing on the various platforms that dominate and can bridge the gap to reach your consumers.
But before we do that, we need to answer something.
What is social media marketing?
In the case you have no idea, and are asking yourself, “what is social media marketing?” Don't worry, we have you covered.
Social media marketing begins with using various social media platforms, from Instagram to Tik Tok for example, to help connect you with your audience to help build awareness of your brand to eventual lead building and more importantly sales.
To do this, it is essential to publish high quality curated content on multiple social media profiles that align with your audience, listening to your followers, analyzing the results collected, and running social media advertisements.
The major social media platforms in 2020 are Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Snapchat, and Pinterest. Tik Tok is rising through the ranks as well along with Podcasting.
There are multiple social media management tools that you can take advantage of to help your business get the most out of the social media platforms given above. Chief Internet Marketer provides classes and exams that can help you bring your social media marketing skills to the next level, so go ahead and sign up today. Whether you want to build a brand or grow your business, we want to help you succeed.
How much does social media marketing cost?
Now that you have a basic understanding of what social media marketing is and its various platforms you can use to bring out the most from your campaigns, let's take a look at what it may cost to run them effectively.
It is said that only half of marketers report on return on investment from social media channels, which is a wasted opportunity to fine tune campaigns; this can show that the majority of business owners may not be effectively using their potential reach.
When correctly implemented, social media can effectively scale and improve brand awareness, lead generation and conversion leading to company growth. Most social media platforms offer powerful analytics that can be leveraged to bring the most out of your strategy, maximizing the cost effectiveness of social media marketing.
It should be apparent.
Social media marketing costs vary between platforms and tactics. It doesn’t matter what platform you decide to use, you must have a strategy to bring out the most of any platform. You need to determine the budget you feel comfortable allocating to your social media marketing campaign.
How Much Does Organic Posting Cost?
The social media marketing budget you decide on should be split between paid and organic posts. Paid social media content may help generate immediate action. The organic posts will help with continual brand awareness.
Within your budget for organic posting, consider the costs for developing social media posts, and managing your strategy across multiple channels.
Social Media Management
Social media management is the other long-term cost associated with social media marketing. Management includes content calendars, scheduling, reviewing analytics, and setting the strategy per platform.
There are social media managers who can also handle and control creative and copywriting development. Social media managers may charge up to $50,000/year for their services, so plan that within the budget.
Without social media management, you may not be able to stick with a strategy. Posting randomly can end up wasting money in the long run. A manager will keep you on track to make sure your social media aligns with overall business goals. An alternative to paying a hefty salary to a social media manager is hiring an agency that focuses on digital marketing. Chief Internet Marketer provides services that can help with various areas.
This option allows you to focus on what you do best while leaving the marketing to experts who live in the digital world.
How Much Does Social Media Advertising Cost?
The price associated with marketing on social media is another factor in your strategy. Pricing may vary and drive up your social media cost, so decide wisely based on your audience. If your audience represents corporate executives, LinkedIn may be the way to go. Are you targeting between the ages of 14 to 24? Your target market’s platform of choice could be Instagram or Tik Tok. Like we stated before, it’s so important to have a strategy in place before creating budgets.
Remember Facebook ads cost about $0.25 for every 1,000 people they reach. It is primarily a pay per click platform for advertising. You can choose from several different campaign objectives that may affect your budget.
For example, if your objective is lead generation you may pay for each form submission.
Overall, Facebook has a medium-cost range when it comes to the cost you’ll spend per day. Facebook is among the best social media advertising platforms because of its enhanced targeting options. No matter who your audience is, you can find them on Facebook.
Facebook is one of the most comprehensive platforms to build your business online. Understanding Facebook Advertising is imperative for Digital Marketing professionals and business owners alike.
Instagram offers the same structure for setting up ads and targeting audiences as Facebook, however, it is much more visual than Facebook, so it aligns better with B2C companies and entertainment-based posts.
Instagram also tends to skew younger than Facebook, which may factor into your social media strategy when you’re developing personas.
On Instagram, there are fewer types of ad formats you can choose from, but that means they’re usually less disruptive than Facebook ads. If you’ve targeted accurately, you can count on 10x more engagement than Facebook at a similar cost.
Chief Internet Marketer provides an Instagram Marketing course for anyone who wants to learn how to enhance their knowledge of Instagram’s marketing tools.
By taking this course, you'll gain the knowledge to create inspiring and engaging Instagram campaigns that will drive real business results for your clients. You'll learn about tagging and tracking campaigns, including how to set up and use the Facebook pixel. You’ll also master how to define the best custom and lookalike target audiences for your client’s objectives, create inspiring ad content, as well as take away best practices on reporting and optimization in Google Analytics.
Being primarily used for B2B, LinkedIn is one of the more expensive advertising platforms out there especially compared to Instagram; it structures its campaigns similar to Facebook and Instagram, where you can choose a total, daily or per-bid budget. You can also choose objectives for clicks, impressions or messages.
With this platform, you can expect to spend close to $6 per 1,000 impressions, which is about 24% greater than Facebook’s costs.
Twitter is a more limited advertising platform when compared to Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. You can still target users based on demographics and some user behavior, but Twitter doesn’t collect as much affinity data as others.
Using Twitter, you can expect to pay $0.50-$4 per engagement on promoted Tweets and promoted accounts.
Twitter also offers one of the most expensive forms of advertising through promoted trends, which is visible to the largest audiences and excellent for building brand awareness. Promoted trends can cost you about $200,000 per day.
YouTube
Youtube offers enhanced targeting that is tied to a user’s behavior online. YouTube can of the best platform to build brand awareness since it consists of so many users from a variety of demographics.
YouTube can be one of the more expensive advertising platforms out there, due to its popularity. It’s significantly more expensive than a standard Search Network campaign through Google Ads.
You can expect to pay anything from $2,000 per 100,000 views or $20 per 1,000 views. It’s on average 80% more expensive than advertising on Facebook.
Investing in a Social Media Strategy
When creating social media marketing, costs are meaningless if you haven’t already invested in a social media strategy. Without one in place, you won’t have any benchmarks to measure your success.
That’s where we can come in and develop a social media marketing strategy to help your business, or you can take social media marketing training to help you develop your own strategy.
The most cost-effective way to develop a strategy and manage your social media platforms would be to hire a marketing agency. Agencies usually price their services as a retainer fee, which means you can count on a single price per month for everything from strategy, management, analytics reporting, and more.
Developing a strategy can mean evaluating each platform from Tik Tok to LinkedIn, to determine which ones make sense to your audience. You don’t have to be present on every single platform. Working with a digital marketing agency can help save you time and resources to focus on the platforms that help you generate the most leads.
How to market on social media?
Social Media Marketing Tip #1: Bypass ‘Leaky’ Landing Pages
Most marketers are obsessed with the funnel. However, leads often take a hike just at the point when you're trying to get them to convert. Luckily, certain PPC and social media advertising formats allow marketers to bypass the leakiest part of the funnel – landing pages.
The first social media marketing tip is to stop the possibility of losing leads in your landing page stage. A way that we found that helps is using the call button in Facebook posts. Since most users already primarily use smartphones, they can immediately call into your business without going through the website and potentially dropping off. There is no more risk of long loading time or gaping chasms into which potential leads disappear.
Social Media Marketing Tip #2: Use Life Events
Targeting the right people with the right social media marketing message is essential. Going after the right people at the right time is incredibly effective – and quite simple actually. The second tip is to leverage the events in people’s lives to create timely, relevant advertising. Simple right? This helps to target people during periods of major change using Facebook’s “Life Events” parameter.
Imagine your arch-nemesis from high school lands your dream job or your crush gets married to that one guy you know. Well, you can use these life events as the basis for a marketing campaign.
Facebook can target audiences based on such events, such as getting married or having a child, you can even specify how soon after these events occur that your ads begin to appear to these audiences. Wedding venues have the opportunity to set their ads to appear to newly-engaged couples after a period of 1 month while a baby clothes retailer can set their social media advertising to appear to couples shortly after announcing their pregnancy.
Social Media Marketing Tip #3: Provide an Easy, Cohesive Visual Experience
Lastly, social media has changed more than the way we all shop; it has changed the way consumers view the online experience in general.
If a user sees a well-designed, aesthetically appealing ad then clicks through to a god-awful-looking landing page, they may not go completely through the funnel resulting in loss of sales or leads. It’s crucial that your ad creative is both well-designed and seamless from beginning to end. This means that landing pages should match their ads perfectly, in both appearance and messaging.