How to Scale Your Social Media Budget
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Your social media budget is essentially how much money you are willing to spend on your social media channels. There is no set rule for how much you should spend on paid social, however, there are industry benchmarks available online that can give you a good indication of where to start.
Obviously, this number will differ based on your specific return on investment targets and any additional KPIs that you may be looking to achieve through your paid social channels. Seasonality may also impact your spending month on month. However, the main thing to bear in mind is the mix of social channels you will utilise. The platform you choose to run your ads on will also have an impact on your paid social budget
Each channel has its own list of pros and cons and it’s likely not all of them will be suitable for your business. However you will want a mix of different channels in your paid social efforts, and with some channels costing more than others, this will have an impact on your overall budget split.
We’re experts at scaling paid social budgets carefully and successfully for years now, helping brands expand their paid social presence across platforms. In an industry that runs on auctions and bidding, an appropriate social media marketing budget is vital to ensure that your ads get chosen by the Metas and TikToks of the world.
To learn more about our paid social campaigns and how they can benefit you, get in touch today by calling us on 0161 327 2635 or email [email protected]. Alternatively, hit the contact button below!
When to Scale Your Paid Social Ad Spend
If you have set your budget for the month but find that once your ads have been running for a while, you are seeing constant results that are perhaps surpassing your targets, or if you heading into a busy period for your industry such as Black Friday or Christmas, it may be worth considering increasing your budget.
There are a number of considerations to take into account when deciding how best to increase your social media budget. It’s important to note that this isn’t just a case of adding large lump sums to your current campaigns. If anything, this can have detrimental effects on your social media ads’ performance, especially on Facebook.
How to Scale Your Social Media Budget
After a couple of weeks of running ads, you should be able to see what is and what isn’t working on each channel, if results are looking positive, now is the time to consider increasing your spending. The best way to do this differs from channel to channel, and if done too aggressively, it can negatively impact your results.
Whether you are running your campaigns on a daily budget or a lifetime budget, with campaign-optimised budgets or ad-set budgets, the general rule Facebook has given is to not increase or decrease by more than 20% of the original budget. If you want to adjust your budget by a higher percentage, you should do it in multiple phases with no individual phase exceeding the 20% rule. It may be tempting to push more budget into a campaign that you can see is performing well, especially in the lead-up to events such as Black Friday, when you know it’s going to be more competitive. However, doing this can put your ads in an extended ‘learning phase’
Facebook states that “During the learning phase, the delivery system is exploring the best way to deliver your ad set – so performance is less stable and cost per result is usually worse” essentially for Facebook ads to be fully optimised, they need to be out of the learning phase and making major budget adjustments can delay that.
Similar to Facebook, LinkedIn offers two types of social media budgets for your campaigns, daily and lifetime. As mentioned above, if you have seen success in your campaigns, increasing your campaign budget can be the ticket to taking performance to the next level.
However, it’s important to note that compared to other social media platforms, LinkedIn can cost a lot more per result, meaning if you scale spending too aggressively, it can cost you a lot of money, therefore it’s essential that you are confident in your approach before your increase budget.
Facebook recommends you take a slower approach to boost your spend, however, LinkedIn allows advertisers to be more aggressive as the learning phase tends to be much shorter. As long as you keep a close eye on performance once you implement your changes, you can increase spending much faster than you can on Facebook.
Pinterest is a slightly different example. When you set up your initial campaigns, Pinterest suggests social media budgets based on the campaign objective that you choose. Aside from the video view objective that uses ad set budgets, all the other campaign budgets use campaign-level budgets, which similar to Facebook and LinkedIn can be either daily or lifetime budgets.
Pinterest takes a similar approach to Facebook in that it is better to scale slowly and by increments of around 20% of the campaign budget to allow your ads to optimise effectively.
TikTok
As expected, TikTok has another set of suggestions for how to effectively increase your ad budget. According to the platform, similar to other channels, it recommends that you make no changes to your campaign budget during the learning phase. Once your campaigns are out of the learning phase, TikTok suggests that your campaign budget never surpasses a ‘50% range of your previous budget’ and you should allow at least 2 days between making any more changes to the campaign, be this budget or targeting. This is definitely worth keeping in mind if seasonality impacts your business, it may take longer for you to increase your budget to a specific amount in the lead-up to busier periods.
Conclusion: Scaling Budgets Helps Your Brand Be Seen by More of Your Audience
It’s important that you have an understanding of how each social platform works when you are running ads as something that could seem like a relatively simple can, if done incorrectly, can have a negative impact on your campaign results. As you are more likely to increase spending based on seasonality or due to consistent high performance, it’s vital that you do so based on platform recommendations. With many paid social channels, in particular, Meta, changing their best practices and their algorithm frequently, it pays to stay in the loop.
That being said, scaling budgets is vital if you want to grow your social media presence. Hitting a ceiling in your ad performance is dangerous as it increases the threat of competitors outbidding you because they’re happy to invest more in scaling their budgets. If you’d like to let experts scale your brand’s social media budget then get in touch with our team today by phone at 0161 327 2635 or email [email protected].
