No marketing strategy can work without social media. 74% of people use social media to make purchase decisions. Influencers are fast becoming the new ambassadors of brands and businesses because of the impact social media has on people’s lives. But like all good things, it comes with a cost. You cannot make a marketing strategy without including social media marketing costs.
Since there are many social media platforms, determining the social media marketing costs can be difficult. It all depends on the platform you will be using and the duration you want to use it. If your campaign is small-scale and for a short duration, you can estimate the cost yourself. There are automated social media marketing management services like Buffer and Hootsuite, you can subscribe to. They will help you monitor different platforms for your marketing campaign.
Doing everything yourself can be challenging, but it will save your marketing cost. These tools will help you manage and schedule your social media content. This means you can write your content before time and always be prepared. You can also hire a small or a large-budget social media marketing company as per your requirements. However, you need to understand the factors that determine social media marketing costs to know whether you can do it yourself or not. The Costs of Facebook Ads in Thailand offer valuable information to guide your decisions on budgeting and outsourcing.
Factors Affecting Social Media Marketing Costs:
What Is Your Aim?
The first thing you need to understand is what you expect to achieve from the campaign. The typical targets are to spread brand awareness, audience engagement, and lead generation. Next comes your target audience. You need to analyze your target data and demographics to make a buyer persona to understand what motivates them to make a purchase.
The next thing that you need to do is to decide which platforms you want to market on. Each platform has its process and significance. You need to develop a different strategy for each one accordingly. Different regions respond to social media differently; in some regions, Twitter or Instagram is more popular while in others Facebook is more influential. Do your research for your required demographic before choosing the platform.
Choose Between Paid Or Organic Marketing:
Organic marketing is the journey of your brand from brand identity, and brand awareness to purchase and after-service. It focuses on brand loyalty and customer-brand relationship. The marketing strategy includes branding, high-quality content, SEO, online PR, referral traffic, etc. for promotion.
Paid marketing includes paid advertising on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. There are many pricing models you can use for your campaigns. The most common ones are:
● Cost-per-click (CPC)
● Cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM)
● Cost-per-view (CPV)
● Cost-per-action (CPA)
How To Execute The Strategy?
Once you have decided on your target audience and the platform you want to use, the next thing that comes is the execution. You can get an in-house social media marketing management team or hire a marketing company to manage your marketing campaign. Hiring an in-house manager may sound like the cheaper option but practically it is not. You would need an infrastructure and marketing team to properly run the campaign. Not to mention the expense you will have to pay for online analytics, online advertisements, SEO, and promotion.
Compared to this, outsourcing your online marketing to a company may look expensive but it is more feasible than an in-house manager. All you have to do is pay the company for the marketing package you want and your job is done. They will deal with the analytics, SEO, and advertisements on the platforms of your choice. They will be responsible for planning and executing the social media content and ads in addition to monitoring the whole campaign.
Consider The Cost Of Improvement:
The marketing strategy doesn’t end at the execution of the campaign. You need to monitor and improve your strategy as well. Just posting and advertising online is not enough. You need to see if your content is getting you the desired results. You also need to analyze which content is more productive and which is not. Your ability to analyze your data depends on how effectively you use the tools. There are free tools like Google analytics that can help you in monitoring your content engagement, audience demographics, and return on your investment. You can also use paid tools like Hootsuite and Buffer to improve your marketing strategy.
The Takeaway:
Today business marketing strategy mostly depends on social media marketing and online marketing. That is why your marketing budget needs to have social media marketing costs included. The best way to determine it is to evaluate the above-mentioned factors to determine the cost. Do a deep analysis before deciding on your budget because it will affect your marketing strategy for better or worse.
Whether you decide to do it in-house or you want to hire a marketing company should be decided after comparing the estimated cost for both. Find out the cost of in-house marketing management and hiring an expert. Only after that, will you be able to make a fruitful decision. A successful and result-oriented marketing campaign can only reflect that you understand your target audience. A successful campaign also shows that your brand identity is well-developed.