Social Media Marketing

For a small business, this can be substantial, but so can the effort and cost of properly managing it. Once you have a budget, big or small, there are several options available when your SMB is ready to hashtag it’s way to the next level.

You’ve been told that you need to leverage social media for your brand, and if you’re new to the platform, social media marketing (SMM) sounds a bit daunting to say the least. There are a lot of elements to success where SMM is concerned, including:

A strong objective

A strong plan

A strong strategy

A strong team

A budget

A plan for ROI

We know we need a social media marketing plan, but how much is this going to cost you? Tai Lopez claims he spends millions of dollars on his YouTube ad campaigns alone. Does that mean you should too?

Easy there – you don’t need to spend that much. Let’s take a look at the true costs of SMM for a small business as a first step to a reasonable budget.

Freelancers – or consultants as they’re often referred as – with 3+ years’ experience charge around $45. Their fee is in that ballpark.

Social media marketing generally requires you to post each day, with Social Media Examiner showing that around 66% of marketers saw benefits by using social media platforms at least 6 hours per week. So, let’s say that your consultant works one hour per day for 5 days a week for 4 weeks each month, if you’re paying them $45 per hour, that works out as $10,800 a year for one consultant.

That’s not too bad if they provide you with an amazing ROI. It also means there might be room in your budget for another consultant. After all, you might find that each consultant is specialized in a different area. Social media marketing encompasses different roles including:

Content creation

Strategy

Social advertising

Follower growth

Consultants are flexible, take up no office space and won’t cost you as much as a full-time, in-house employee.

In-House Employee (Full Time)

Unlike a remote consultant, an in-house, full-time employee is by your side all the time, which means you can assess their progress consistently. That said, you might also need to spend more time training them – and you’ll also need to pay them more money.

Typically, you can expect to pay as little as $35,000 per year or as much as $50,000 a year for a top-end in-house employee.

There are many pros to hiring an in-house employee, including the fact that you can see what they’re up to on a daily basis, but there are also cons including cost as well as the expectation for one person to handle everything from content creation to social advertising.

Pay a Small Marketing Company

Small marketing companies can be on the premium side of the pricing spectrum but there are just as many affordable, quality firms to choose from. You can work with a low-end one for around $400 per month, while a more experienced team might charge $1,500 a month for their services. This mean that you could get away with spending $4,800 a year on a small marketing company.

But how do you know if they’ll be worth it?

You’ll need to do your research and scout around, but each company will offer a few packages based on price. Low-mid cost packages can be really cost effective, but if you find that you’re spending too much, you can simply swap to a cheaper package.

Marketing companies tend to be very results driven, so one thing you can be sure of is that they’ll be dedicated to your company while they’re working with you.

It’s almost impossible for a small business to tackle their social media marketing all by themselves. However, if you do choose to go down the Do-It-Yourself route, there are tools that help to make your life easier – and cheaper.

Social Media – If you’ve got a massive cash shortage but still want to manage your social media channels, Hootsuite can help. There’s a totally free option that lets you schedule your posts, while the pro version costs just $11 a month. For that very small price, you can implement and manage an effective social media campaign.

Logos and Graphics – Your social media marketing campaign needs strong and consistent visuals that help it to stand out. However, if you don’t have the cash to splash on a top graphic designer, you can use Shopify’s Logo Maker to help with your logos. You can literally create logos in just minutes.

Videos – Social videos get shared a lot on social media – in fact they get shared 1200% more times than posts that contain just text and images. Videos don’t have to cost the earth to create. If you do your research, you can find a startup video production company that specializes in engaging and fun social media videos.

Decision Time

Do WE recommend that you do all your social media marketing yourself? It’s ultimately a case of needs and priorities. If your budget stretches far enough, hire someone in-house. Otherwise, do what you can to hire a marketing company. Failing that? A bit of DIY never hurt anyone.

Jared Carrizales, Heroic Search

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