Article by Emma Gosper, Business Advisor, Western Sydney Business Centre
One of the most unanswered questions when it comes to social media for business is how much money should be spent on social media advertising. But because every business, target market and social media strategy is different, the best way to figure out how much your business should be spending is through trialling, testing and constant monitoring.
If you weren’t aware, the main social platforms like Facebook and Instagram allow you to put some of your content into the world for free (we refer to this as organic reach), but if you want to reach a higher percentage of social users, you must invest some of your marketing budget into these platforms to reach your potential clients – and sometimes even existing ones.
The best part about social advertising is that most platforms provide Insights as to how your advertising and paid posts performed. It will allow you to see the amount of people who seen your campaigns, clicked on links and visited your website. The Insights will give you a fantastic indication of which posts worked and which ones didn’t, so you can tailor and fine tune your future campaigns accordingly.
Usually, the higher the budget, the better your post will perform. But it also comes down to knowing your demographics like location, age and gender. Start off with a smaller budget of $10-20 per post to your main target market demographics and monitor the results. From there you can narrow down who responded to what content, so you can ensure you invest the majority of your budget to the content and audiences that get you results and sales.
Facebook can give you a good indication of how many dollars can potentially reach how many people before you submit your post, for example $10 may reach 1,000 people, so you have the opportunity to increase and decrease your budget based on reach. You can also stop your campaigns at any time, so if you feel like it’s just not getting the results you were hoping for, you don’t have to waste your valuable money on something that’s not working for you.
