How much does social media cost?

How long should it take?

Am I getting ripped off by this fancy marketing company?

We get it. These are good questions for a few reasons:

1) If you’re hiring someone in-house for marketing, you want to know how long it will take them to do a task so you can figure out if it’s a worthwhile hire.

2) If you’re being quoted for a service, you want to know how fair that quote is.

3) If you are going to pay to have something done, you want to make sure it corresponds to it making you money or having some kind of return, AKA does the money in equal the money out.

Having done this work for 15 years, we’re happy to talk pricing (ours and others' pricing) and how we think you can evaluate if paying someone to do your social media is going to work for you.

(We might have a dog in the fight but it’s about the size of a corgi - take our advice for what you will!)

Nicole, Ben, Jessica, and Jane

Should you hire staff or an outside agency?

Here are a few questions to think about before answering the question if you should DIY none, some, or all of your marketing:

1) Is there capacity within your organization/business already?

Do you have a part-time admin you’d like to give more hours to? Or, someone in your company who loves marketing, but you need them to do other things too? If so, this person might be able to do some of the work you have in mind.

If this is your scenario, build capacity within your organization and give this person training. Not only will it empower them to do a good job but it’ll give them someone to call/email when they’re stuck, need feedback, or other times where having a colleague would help. It’s hard to be the solo person so you can hire us to train them and keep us in your contacts if you need more in the future, win win! Yes we train but there are also other companies, online courses, and Youtube videos that can help too.

2) What is the full cost of hiring someone? Listen, I’ve been doing a lot of this stuff for 17 years total, in my own company for 15 years. My billable hour is really not fair to compare to what even a very smart recent college grad can do. Before you see $200/hour and think, ‘I’m going to just hire someone for $25/hour for 8 hours a week’, it’s worth getting a quote and maybe as important before hiring, think through ALL the costs of an employee.

There are taxes, benefits, workers comp insurance, equipment, and other additional costs of a hire versus paying a contractor/outside firm. Ask your bookkeeper or accountant to help you get an estimate together of what those costs will be.

The other part though is the time investment you’ll make in this person. How much time will you have to train this person to do the job? How long do employees stay in your company? How hard is it to get rid of them if they are doing a bad job? I thought this was a pretty good article about the pros and cons of an employee versus an independent contractor. 

Many companies we work with start with us and eventually once there are strategies, systems, and training happening, transition our work to a staff member that they hire.

So just because you pick one path, doesn’t mean you’re stuck on it but it does mean starting down a path to begin with.

3) How much money can be generated with social media marketing?

So the two questions here are:

a) How well do you acquire customers on social media?  

b) How much is your average customer ‘worth’?

Let’s take on these two questions separately.

How well do you acquire customers on social media? To see if social media even getting you customers, here’s how to find out.

1) If you’ve set up a Google Goal in Analytics (or ecommerce reporting in Google Analytics - yes if you don’t have this, we can help you set it up!), reverse search for the ‘source’ of the person who completed that goal. You might see that in the last month, you’ve had 15 customers book a call or 25 sales in your ecommerce store come through social media. Look at the month before, and the month before and see if you can see things trending upward, trending downward, or remaining steady.

2) If you don’t have that kind of reporting set up on our website, you can look through your social media comments and direct messages for the past three to six months and compare them to your point of sale/accounting system to see how many became new customers or re-engaged as repeat customers. We can attribute those, at least in part, to social media.

How much is your average customer ‘worth’ is something you can find out looking at your Quickbooks and exporting a report with the average transaction by customer and then doing a spreadsheet calculation on the average (after you take out the customers you didn’t get from social media.)

Now if both 1 and 2 are too much math, the other thing you can do is figure out how many customers you’d need to get from your social media campaigns for it to be ‘worth it.’

One of our social media packages costs around $2000/month and we ask for a six-month agreement. The client has to ask themselves, “How many customers do I need to get to make $12,000 or more?” For me, it would be twelve customers. Can I get 12 customers via social media marketing in six months? I’m pretty sure I can. So to me, it’s worth it, even if I’d have to pay someone else to do it.

Comparing Apples To Apples

If you’ve decided to hire a company to help in your social marketing, make sure you’re comparing apples to apples. Here are some questions you can ask:

What would their strategy be for your social media content?How many updates a week is this company making for you?

How many (if any) will be videos?

Will they be responding to comments and messages?

If you have ideas, how will you be able to share them?

Do they let you approve content before it goes out?

How many content revisions do you get?

Is reporting part of this or can it be charged separately?

Are there production days where they come on site and film or do you have to send them all materials?

A lot of these can be answered in a sales call but if the company has packages, there’s often a features table that will allow you to compare the offerings.

We recording what I think is a useful video about navigating these questions using two sample companies as examples. (And we talk about our pricing in this video too.)

In short, there isn’t one answer, even the answer that 8-figure social media business owner is trying to tell you. But we are happy to walk you through options, work with your budget, and figure out ways to get you what you want out of your marketing and business.

Let’s 🌮-Bout It!

Other Fun Stuff On The Internet

Nicole was featured in this Vox article about influencers scamming with courses. They even gave her pull quote.

Read Now

Thanks to the Potsdam Chamber of Commerce for having me as their featured speaker at their annual luncheon. I came back and recorded what I did for them in real life, just click the thumbnail above to watch!

Is ChatGPT just making stuff up for you too? Apparently there is a thing called ‘temperature’ you can adjust in most AI tools which makes the tool less creative/more factual/more robotic at a lower temperature. Here’s a bit about it in Chat GPT but if you’re using another tool, see if you can adjust the temperature to improve your outputs: https://gptforwork.com/guides/openai-gpt3-temperature

In encouraging news, Google is helping out local news through several initiatives including money.

Companies are coming up with AI tools and new ways to support them. Adobe’s new generative fill (whose results can vary from impressive to hilarious) will stand by what its AI creates to such as an extent they’ll pay their clients’ court expenses if they are in a copyright suit for using the tool.