For this week’s course assignment, we are required to prepare a social media budget for our class client, author Lisa Bell. We have not been given a dollar amount. Instead, we have been provided a percentage of 100% and must allocate this among the various spend we wish to put forward for our budget.
Currently, Lisa Bell has a small social media following on Facebook and Instagram for her book brand, Norman the Gnome. She commands a huge following on Facebook for her account as a journalist. However — and this is crucial to understanding the budget I wish to put forward, just because she commands a large following on her journalist account does not mean her book brand Norman the Gnome is relevant to her audience. They are there because of her background and work as a journalist, not for Norman the Gnome.
Having established the above, let us quickly list the major line items for a standard social media budget:
1. Content creation
16%
We will absolutely need to support content creation — however, this does not need to command an enormous amount of the budget. Lisa Bell is perfectly capable of supplying much of the content she needs for her social media channels herself. She does not need to hire a graphic designer or writer to assist with content creation.
2. Software and tools
16%
Unlike content creation, this is a fixed cost for Lisa Bell. She will need to set aside some of her budget to pay for content hosting (her dedicated website for Norman the Gnome) editing tools (she will likely need to make use of an editing or graphic design program) and a social media management platform to assist with scheduling, publishing, and centralized analytics and engagement tools. Again, this does not need to be costly, total expenses here could run to about 1000 USD per year.
3. Paid advertising
0%
Conventional wisdom recommends that a large chunk of the social media budget be allocated to paid advertising. I beg to differ. You can get much more bang for your buck through paid partnerships. As a user, I have been using social media platforms for many years now. I have been served countless ads during that time, I have clicked on almost zero of them. I am sure that I am not alone in that regard. Controversially, I am going to skip this in my budget. I would return back to this once I have a highly relevant audience for my product to re-market too.
4. Paid partnerships
66%
Again, controversially — this is where I am going to sink the majority of my social media budget. To generate sales, you need awareness. No one will purchase a product unless they are aware of the product and aware of the value. Right now, the Norman the Gnome book brand faces an awareness challenge. No one, beyond a very small pool of Lisa Bell’s network, knows about this brand. This is holding back Lisa Bell from reaching potential customers.
You could certainly provide a portion of the budget towards paid advertising but you could get far greater reach and awareness through an influencer led paid partnership. This is the reason any business or organization looking to sell a product or service has leveraged celebrities to help market and build awareness. In the age of social media that marketing synergy still exists, the key difference now is that you have a much larger and diverse pool of influencers and endorsers.
And they can have a life-changing impact on a business. I think classmate Madelyn Harris’s story about how an endorsement from one celebrity dramatically changed the fortunes of a business specializing in bath bomb products. They went from a few thousand followers to over 90,000+ followers almost overnight. And you can be absolutely certain that an increase in awareness and engagement helped funnel substantial numbers of these new followers through the customer journey and into a sale.
I would like to spend the bulk of my social media budget on securing the endorsement and engagement of influencers (whether they are mothers with large social media followings or famous social media parents) to help drive their outsized social media audience towards the Norman the Gnome book brand. This will help boost awareness, increase follower count, and engagement and hopefully eventually lead to additional sales for Lisa Bell’s children’s book brand.
And in defense of this Go Big, Go Home strategy, I would like to spotlight this article which seems to agree with many of the conclusions I arrived at to develop this budget strategy:
