How Much Does Social Media Management Cost?

As a business owner, your time is precious, and managing your social media channels can be time-consuming. Hiring a social media manager or agency can help you free up your schedule and ensure that professionals handle your digital marketing efforts. Whether you’re just starting or your business is expanding, outsourcing your social media management may be a necessary step. Before making any decisions, it’s essential to consider the cost of these services and how they can benefit your business in the long run.

The U.S. Small Business Administration recommends devoting 7 to 8 percent of your overall gross revenue to advertising and marketing. Part of that will need to go toward social media management.

A range of factors will drive your marketing budget, from how competitive your industry is to the stage your business is in — ongoing budgets can be smaller. At the same time, new companies and new products will need a larger budget initially.

Whatever the case, you must do some calculations and research to determine your marketing budget.

Developing a marketing strategy may help determine a budget: What are your short-term and long-term marketing goals? What social media platforms will you use? Will you publish a blog to increase your authority and as a way to share new, relevant content with your target market? What is the timeframe for when you want to see results, and how will these results be measured?

These and other questions must be answered when setting your strategy and budget. Prospective social media managers will also want to know this information to give you a cost estimate for their services.

The Value of Social Media Management

Once you decide what you can spend on your overall marketing and what avenues you’ll be using, you’ll better understand what you can pay for help in social media management.

To know the value of what a social media manager does, you have to understand what the work entails.

The following is a partial list of a social media manager’s work. The overall job needed depends on what your  digital marketing strategy will require:

• Industry research
• Strategy development
• SEO and Keyword research
• Competitor research
• Creating original graphics
• Producing original videos
• Brainstorming and developing campaign ideas
• Creating messaging for social media posts
• Writing blog posts
• Creating graphics for blog posts
• Researching and curating content to share
• Scheduling and posting all content
• Networking with Influencers
• Following, liking, and commenting on posts
• Monitoring and responding to comments, criticism, and questions
• Email marketing
• Creating landing pages for lead generation
• Social media advertising
  • Creating campaigns
  • Creating ads (which involves all of the above from producing more videos, graphics, and messaging, in addition to making unique interactive ads)
  • Developing targeted audiences
  • Continually fine-tuning creatives and target audiences to find the sweet spot
  • Monitoring ads for results and spending
• Analyzing and Reporting

There is much more to go into a proper digital marketing strategy, but these are the basics. The work of a social media manager can encompass much more if you are looking for one person or an agency to handle all your digital marketing.

Suppose your marketing plan involves any SEO work, such as directory listing, link building, and PR work, like writing guest columns for other publications and writing and publishing press releases. In that case, your manager’s work hours will increase exponentially.

Typical Social Media Management Budget

Typically, small to medium-sized businesses can expect to spend between $1,500 and $3,500 monthly for social media management services from an agency. It depends on how much reach and growth you want to see initially and what methods you want to use to reach people online.

If you hire someone to work full-time to handle your social media management, consider the average salary for a social media manager reported by Glassdoor is $51,000 to $83,000 annually. Experience, skills, location, and industry impact costs.

SEO work alone can cost from $2,500 to $5,000 per month, depending on the size of the business and the industry’s competitiveness.

In Conclusion

Establishing a marketing budget for your business is essential before determining how much you can allocate to social media management. Once you have a fixed budget, you can hire a part-time freelancer if your budget is limited or go for an agency or full-time manager to achieve better results.

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