How Much to Budget for Social Media Advertising

While every business and brand should have a well-thought-out social media
advertising strategy, not all budgets will be the same. In other words, depending on the
size of your business, its goals and objectives, and its current available capital,
advertising budgets will vary greatly.
Nevertheless, for those planning on any level of advertising, a budget is all but
necessary…
With that said, it’s impossible to suggest or recommend a given budget for one’s social
media advertising strategy. Instead, in what follows, we’ll dive deeper into how to curate
a suitable budget for your business.

What is a Budget?

If you run a business or brand, or you work in the marketing & advertising arena in
some capacity, you’re more than likely familiar with what a budget is. However, for those
less familiar, a budget is simply a specified document outlining available capital and how
it’s to be spent over the course of a period of time.
A social media budget, then, is simply a document specifying how much capital is
available to be spent on social media advertising and where such capital is to be
allocated across platforms.
Consider a social media marketing budget a road map of expenditure, if you will…
As mentioned in the preface, while there’s no definitive budget appropriate for any given
business or brand, there are guidelines that one can follow in order to determine how
much to budget based on their specific needs.

How to Budget for Social Media Advertising

In order to accurately derive a budget suitable for your social media advertising needs,
it’s first important to identify what’s actually required of the discussed advertising
strategy.

The following are some of the most important factors to consider when curating
and budgeting for a given advertising campaign or strategy:

Content Creation (i.e. video, photography, graphics, copywriting, etc.)
Software (i.e. advertising tools, video editing software, media management tools, etc.)
Actual Ad Spend (i.e. Facebook ads, Instagram ads, etc.)
Payroll (i.e. what employees are actually going to execute, if any)

Once you identify what’s involved with a given ad campaign, you can then proceed to
allocate your budget as necessary. Before doing so, however, you need to first
understand how to actually create a plan, or social media advertising budget, if you will.

Here’s how to create a budget…

Perform an Internal Financial Audit
Create SMART Goals
Clearly Define or Refine Your Strategy
Create the Budget!
In order to reach the final stage (i.e. Create the Budget), it’s important to know the what,
where, and why of the budget itself.
In other words, you need to first understand your financial situation to determine how
much capital you actually have available. Next, determine what are your goals and
reasonings for spending money on advertising in the first place. Finally, clearly define
your overall social media strategy to ensure that advertising is an appropriate addition to
said strategy.

Final Thoughts

In closing, while it’s nearly impossible to recommend a concrete budget without knowing
the intricacies of your strategy, financial situation, and business goals & objectives, it
might help to know that the industry average for a social media advertising budget is
$200-350 per day or $2000-4000 per month.
With that said, depending on a variety of factors, a more suitable budget for your
business or brand might be more or less than the industry average shared above. Heck,
you might even learn that due to the current stage of your business, paid advertising
might just not be the best decision to prioritize at the moment!
Good luck!