5 Steps for an Effective Social Media Campaign Budget

Every business can thrive with a social media presence. It's how you connect to your target audience, clients, and other companies. To grow, you need to spend. That’s why it's important to know how to create a winning social media campaign budget.

How much money do you need to create a social media campaign budget? This guide will help you further decide.

Why have a social media campaign budget?

Social media advertising is a great way to grow and get your name out there. The problem, however, is that costs can add up. If you don’t keep track of those costs, you could spend more than you can afford. Even then, you might not get the results you want.

That’s why creating a budget is so important. On top of that, you could use these account reconciliations examples at the end of every year to help you check that your numbers add up. It could also reveal whether anyone has been spending more than they should have.

That’s why having a budget is so important. It keeps things affordable and helps you keep your marketing team accountable.

Importance of social media in 2024

According to a 2024 Statista survey, 83% of marketers saw a boost in exposure thanks to social media marketing. 73% saw increased traffic, and 65% claimed their social media campaign generated leads.

In short, social media is a great way to connect with your target audience.

Moreover, it can be used as part of a brand awareness campaign, to pump up sales, or to generate leads. The best part is that all paid social media marketing helps grow your number of followers. More followers means more eyes on your business.

You could reach every user online with an unlimited budget — but that would cost a fortune. That’s why keeping your marketing in line with a budget is essential.

What does a social media budget cover?

Your budget will need to cover every bit of your social media strategy, from the social media tools you use to content creation.

• Social media management tools: Any third-party social media analytics tools, content calendar, or content curation tools.
• Content creation costs: Creation tools, licensing, and content design costs. Additionally, for best results, split up the budget by content type.
• Advertising costs: You'll need to factor in the cost of developing advertising strategies and your social media advertising PPC costs.
• Partnership costs: Influencer marketing is a massive part of any social media marketing campaign and can be the priciest.

How to build an effective social media budget

Let’s take a look at some of the ways that you can create a strong social media budget.

1. Start by creating your social media goals

Set short-term and long-term goals before you start creating your social budget. For example, you may want to use your social media to:

• Boost sales
• Grow an audience
• Boost awareness
• Build loyalty
• Find leads

Be specific with your business goals and create milestones for the best results. A vague goal like "increase sales" can be achieved after just one sale. By creating milestones such as "increase sales by 25% by next year," you have a goal you can work toward.

2. Decide on your social media advertising budget approach

There are three main types of marketing budgets you can use:

• Traditional budget: One fixed budget for the year
• Flexible budget: A master budget that can be allocated to smaller budgets like your social media marketing costs
• Zero budget: Every cost, even annual costs, needs to be justified and approved

Decide on which budgeting approach works best for you. Once you decide, you’ll then need to use the following tips to help you understand how much to set aside and for what.

3. Understand your set social media advertising costs

Next, you need to understand your overhead. This will include:

• Salaries: The cost of your overhead or outsourcing social media management or content creation to a social media marketing agency.
• Cost of software: The cost of design tools like Canva or Photoshop, which are often charged monthly.
• Minimum social media ads cost: Most social platforms have a minimum daily ad spend. On TikTok, for example, users must spend at least $50 when on the daily budget plan or $20 if they have a lifetime budget. Explore the minimum spend on each of the social media platforms you use to create a realistic budget.

Include these fixed annual costs in your budget from the start. That way, you’ll know exactly how much to set aside for your overheads.

4. Decide on your variable budget

You can use industry averages to help you work out how much to put into your social media ad campaign pot.

Historically, marketing budgets make up around 10% of a business's overall revenue. However, this does change based on economic conditions. For example, pre-COVID, marketing budgets were 10.5% to 11% of a business's revenue. In 2024, they make up 7.7%.

On the other hand, social media budgets make up around 12.1% of marketing budgets in 2024.

For example, if your average revenue is $100,000 per month, you would want to spend $7,770 on marketing. This means you should set aside around $931.70 for social media.

5. Track and adjust your budget

The tips above can help you decide how much to put in your marketing budget. You’ll want to track performance and test it to work out exactly how you use that budget.

Tracking your budget is as easy as making sure you make note of the cost of everything in your accounts. You’ll want to have two versions of this to compare them later. If they match up, you’re golden.

Also, to test your budget, compare strategies. By doing this, you can find the most effective social media marketing strategy with the best ROI.

How to make your social media campaign budget go further

Unlike your other digital marketing efforts, there's a lot about social marketing that's free. Setting up social media profiles is free, sharing social media posts is free, and using many of the top organic marketing methods is free.

Yes, you need money to create high-quality content, boost posts, and reach new audiences. That doesn’t mean you can’t make that money go further. These top tips will help:

Use social media as a launching point for direct marketing

Social media marketing is more than just growing your account or driving traffic. It can also be about building relationships. For example, you can collect emails on Facebook that you can then use in retargeting email campaigns.

Share user-generated content

Looking for free social media content? Sharing user-generated content is a great way to engage your audience and save. You can even run competitions with a small prize if you want particularly great social content.

Remember, it's wise to ask for permission before sharing user-generated content. While being tagged in a post is a good sign, it's not consent.

Boost social media engagement

A boring ad will always be boring, no matter how many times you pay for it to show up in someone's feed. That's why knowing how to craft engaging posts is so important.

If you're struggling, try these engagement post ideas to help you improve future posts. Since these tips are focused on organic marketing tactics, they don't cost extra.

Final thoughts

To create a social media campaign budget, first set realistic business objectives. Then make a base budget for your fixed social media marketing costs. From there, you’ll want to work out how much of your revenue you should set aside for your social media budget.

This can be something unique to you or based on industry averages. But no matter what, you should always use organic marketing techniques to make each post go further.

At the end of the day, your budget needs to suit your business. You can count your efforts as a success so long as your accounts add up and you don’t go over budget.