Fablesquare
Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing activities include publishing content on your social media profiles, listening to and engaging with your followers, running social media ads, and analyzing your results.

The most powerful social media marketing strategy depends on several factors, such as the products/services being sold, the audience being targeted, and the budget and expertise of the marketing team.

However, best practice usually includes:

• Always start by setting your business goals, target market, brand identity, and editorial line.
• Plan content ahead of time to tell a consistent story that unfolds with every new post.
• Produce original, high-quality content.
• Collaborate with your team (ideally a cross-functional team that brings a holistic perspective to the content publishing process) to ensure that only on-brand, proofread, appropriate, and compliant content is published.
• Manage your community by responding quickly and accurately at scale.
• Measure the response of your audience to the content you publish, as a way to learn what resonates with them using advanced analytics. Fine-tune your communication to convey your brand values in a way that engages them the most, in a continuous improvement cycle.

You can start with the strategy outlined above.

Next, we recommend creating a social media workflow, which defines people’s responsibilities throughout the publishing process and implements repeatable steps and deadlines for each editorial period.

You can break down your social media team workflow into ten individual stages:

1. Ideation: generating ideas for your social media campaign.

1. Asset gathering: collecting the necessary resources for your updates.

1. Copywriting: creating the text-based parts of your updates.

1. Proofing: ensuring the updates are error-free.

1. Approval: getting the thumbs up for your updates.

1. Revising: reworking any rejected updates.

1. Scheduling: adding updates to your social media calendar.

1. Post promotion: creating awareness for your posts.

1. Engagement: interacting with your audience.

1. Analysis and learning: interpreting the data, assessing performance, informing the next batch of updates.

Then you’ll need to assign people to each stage:

• If you are working for a large company, this could be seven different teams spread across multiple offices.
• If you are marketing for a mom-and-pop shop, it might only be two people who do everything.

With a social media workflow in place, it’s easier to get your social media marketing done.

The CMO Survey highlighted social media as a tool to accomplish key strategic objectives for companies:

Here are a few more benefits:

Brand building

• Increase brand awareness
• Improve brand loyalty
• More brand authority
• Establish thought leadership

Growth

• Increase inbound traffic
• Generate more leads
• Higher conversion rates
• Boost organic search visibility

Communication

• Provides direct access to customers
• Build a community
• Improve customer satisfaction

Insights

• Gain marketplace insights
• Monitor brand and competitors
• Learn more about your customers
• Identify new product/service opportunities

Advertising

• Audience targeting/retargeting

• Measure the impact of your campaigns
• Prove ROI and cost-effectiveness

Short answer: it varies. You may spend anywhere from $1,000 to $20,000 monthly on professional social media marketing. The charges vary based on multiple factors, including the level of experience of the social media management company you choose, the size of your company, the range of services you need, and many more.

According to the 2019 CMO Survey, social media spending is expected to rise by 73% over five years:

The percentage of marketing budget on social media over the five years breaks down as follows: B2B Product: 6% B2B Services: 5% B2C Product: 9% B2C Services: 7% There’s no one magical formula for a successful social media budget. But according to We Are Sculpt, the simplest calculation is as follows: Allocate 5-30% of your desired gross revenue goal to marketing. Take 10-25% of your marketing budget and allocate it to social media marketing. Assign 60% of that budget to brand-building activities and 40% to sales activation. Furthermore, there are five main areas to consider in your social media budget: Strategic Planning: Setting the direction for paid and organic social media. Content Creation: Producing assets to be shared on social media. Community Management: Managing the posting of content and replies. Paid media: Managing ad spending, like boosted posts and acquisition campaigns. Measurement: Creating reports and tracking success. For each activity, ask yourself two key budget questions: What tools do we need to achieve your objectives? Which activities do we need to outsource?