A common small business question: how much does social media marketing cost? While social media itself is free monetarily, there can be incurred costs when creating a social media marketing strategy. These costs include: time, creativity, tools necessary, and monetary costs if you decide to use ads.

 

Social Media Marketing Cost: Time

 

Is your time free? As a small business owner, if your time working on social media marketing is pulling you away from other money generating activities – then it is costing you money. 

 

A great way to mitigate this is to create a schedule for yourself. Carve out dedicated time to focus on your social media, this way you are not actively pulling yourself away from something else. 

 

Bre is a small business owner who owns a waxing salon. She sees clients throughout the day, and it can be hard for her to find the time to create video content for social media. To circumvent this (and to not constantly be late for her appointments) she creates a scheduled meeting to bulk create her video content for the month. This way she is not worried about an interruption in her schedule, and she is only blocking her appointment schedule once a month.

 

Creativity

 

Let’s be honest. It can be exhausting trying to get creative and come up with content. This can lead to burnout or exhaustion, and can have a huge impact on your small business. Finding ways to spark inspiration and find new ideas is important if you want to be successful in your social media marketing. 

 

Many small business owners turn to AI chatbots, Google, and even social media itself. No matter how you decide to spark inspiration, just make sure you are not plagiarizing in any way.

 

Tools Necessary

 

There are many tools and apps out there that are designed to help create quality content for social media marketing. Here at The Seasoned Marketer we personally use InShot, a video editing app. This allows me to easily and quickly edit all of our video content on my phone and then upload straight to social media platforms. 

 

Whatever tools you decide are necessary for you to create quality content – remember that they may have a cost. While InShot (and many of these types of apps) have a free version, it might be in your best interest to pay for the pro or premium version.

 

Ads

 

If you do decide to run ads as part of your social media marketing strategy – this will have a monetary cost. How much you end up spending depends on your small business and your end goal for your ad. It is possible to spend anywhere from $50 to $5000, just remember that it is up to YOU. 

 

Want to learn more about Facebook ads and tools that can help you create an effective ad? Check out our video on the Facebook ads library!



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Feel free to share your thoughts with me, I can be reached at vivian@theseasonedmarketer.com!

 

Looking for more free marketing tips and content specifically for small business owners? Check out our podcast, S.O.B. Marketing Podcast. Every Wednesday we discuss a new topic to help small business owners take on marketing on their own. Listen to our episode of the S.O.B. Marketing podcast wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube! Have a topic you want us to discuss? Email us at Help@TheSeasonedMarketer.com!

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