Creating a budget for your social media marketing activities

Before you get to the fun of social media content creation, you have to get the budget out of the way. Maybe budgeting is not as fun as making TikToks, but it is necessary.

A lot of larger companies do their financial planning and budgeting around October or November just to make sure that they have the appropriate budgets in place for the new year. The big companies also have a sales and marketing team as well as a pretty good idea of what they are going to spend in that area.

As a small business owner who wears a lot of hats, you’re probably not thinking about annual planning as it pertains to business growth and social media marketing. But this kind of preparation is important because that budget affects what you can do.

Take content creation. How many man-hours are you going to dedicate towards content creation and promotion? Whether it’s you doing it or your team. Your time might be better spent elsewhere – like on the dentistry that pays the bills and keeps the lights on. The time away from the practice means time away from customers.

It’s all in the details

When you’re thinking about how you want to promote your business, it would be a good practice to think about how many bodies you need to do it. For videos, how many times do you want to record each month? Who do you need to be there? Do you need a person to film? Maybe you can use a tripod. Someone will be in front of the camera too. You definitely need someone to write the script.

Once you get into the weeds, you’ll see how much it really costs to 

make your plan happen. It’s fundamental accounting that will prepare you for the next step of creating content on social media and pushing it to potential customers. 

One thing to keep in mind is the licensing for images and for content. If you hire a photographer or a videographer, the photos and video may have restrictions around them. For instance, you may be restricted to using them more than x amount of times, on more than x amount of platforms, or only on a particular platform. If you want more rights, you pay more money. Copyright infringement is no joke.

Once you have your package ready to go, it’s time to schedule the content. Who is going to post it after you create it? Are you gonna invest in software or invest in a person or an agency to use the said software to do it? Are you going to recruit an existing team member? Unless it’s part of their written job description, I would advise against it. 

On the flip side, an agency can easily post social media content as they have access to the licenses and the tools, but you’re going to pay for that. It’s a component of your budget.

Backtrack from the goal

Also, think about your desired outcome. What do you want your marketing campaign to do for you in 2023? Do you want to see a certain number of new patients or a different kind of patient? Do you want new customers at your new location? Or has business been so good that you’re opening up multiple locations?

Your objectives affect what you’re gonna do with your social media marketing – and the budget. On some platforms, you can set up just one channel, like a Facebook page for your business. With one channel, you’d promote everything about your business through that one page, even if there are multiple locations. 

But what if you then moved that same campaign to Google? You’ll have a separate listing for each location which means you need the appropriate tools to post to both platforms. Will your content approach be different because of the different audiences for each? We all know that young people are not on Facebook. Understanding objectives also helps you understand what your parameters are, which again impacts the budget. 

The new year is off and running but make sure you don’t get too far without a plan. It will save you time. It will save you money. And it will spare you the stress of a lot of ‘surprises’ along the way.