How Much Should You Spend On Paid Social Media Advertising?By Emma

What do you want to achieve from your paid social media advertising?

First things first, work out what it is you want to achieve. You always need a clear goal for any marketing campaign, whether it’s awareness, traffic or conversions, as your objective sets your measure of success.

If you’ve run a few paid social campaigns, however big or small, then you’ve got some data to work with which is always a bonus. Use this data to help set target KPIs and calculate results based on previous spend thresholds.

If you’re working it out in the dark, things are a little more complicated. You can use paid social benchmarks for your industry to calculate what you’ll get for different levels of spend. This is a good way to kick things off, and then you can check data once everything is live and re-forecast.

How to forecast your advertising budget?

We’ve put together this handy template to help you forecast your spend across several different types of paid social. See which seems appropriate for your brand and what you’re hoping to achieve.

Visit here to download our paid social budget template

Some other things to consider when setting paid social budgets…

Your marketing channel mix

Your other marketing activity will impact results on your paid social campaigns, and vice versa. If brand awareness is low this will push up your average costs on paid social campaigns. Paid social should be used as part of your channel mix - don’t put all your eggs in one basket and make it your whole strategy.

For example you could be tempted to funnel all your spend through Facebook, and ignore the other paid social opportunities. We wouldn't recommend this for a few different reasons. Firstly, if Facebook has an outage then all your marketing campaigns will go off with it - definitely less than ideal! But not only that, in today’s digital landscape, you want a marketing strategy that’s synergised with multiple touch points for a consumer. People rarely see one advert and convert straight off the back of it, you need to vary your channels and communications to stay front of mind.