How Much Should You Spend on Social Media Advertising?
The first step to determining your advertising budget is to understand the numbers. A typical business marketing budget is between 8% to 16% of total revenue. Smaller companies tend to spend more on marketing and given that we are not showcasing at art festivals (a signifcant percentage of where we traditionally spend our advertising dollars) we can apply this rule to our art bussiness.
Social media advertising can be daunting for new users, yet it is the most efficient and cheapest form of getting your message to your target audience.
Content you post on social media doesn’t get seen by all the people that follow your page and you must pay to be seen. The upside is that social media advertising is affordable. You can reach 1,000+ people on Facebook or Instagram for $5 per day.
When you put out a piece of content that gets some good attention from your audience organically (without ad spend), that’s a pretty good sign that that piece of content would perform well to a larger, but similar audience in your niche.
Start with $2 per day and build to $5 for measureable results.
Once your ad reaches over 1,000 people, you can begin to draw broad conclusions on how your ad is performing, and if it’s worth it.
Start looking at the fine details of your ad in the Facebook Ads Manager. Your ad might have some good copy and a compelling offer if you’re getting a high click-through ratio or low cost per click. If you ad is performing poorly, you are able to cancel at any time and try something new.
Poor audience targeting is one of the premier reasons why an ad is not getting any traction. It’s best to identify a customer profile. A customer profile identifies the interests, habits, and behaviors of your target market. This will allow you to specifically narrow in on your target audience and find your niche.
Facebook requires $1.00 per day for advertising. Get in the habit now of selecting a Lifetime Budget for each promotion, which will help keep costs down.
Lifetime Budgets allow you to set a custom ad spend maximum. To get started, budget your spend between $2 - $5 per day as you run your first campaigns. This low daily spend is important, as you will be able to see which ads are more effective, and later increase ad spend accordingly.
It is crucial to note that your social media advertising might not sell any of your work at first. The strategy is to build your brand awareness to a larger customer base. Since art is a closed activity, buyers tend to buy artworks from artists they know personally. Social Media advertising improves your chances of making sales and broadens the network.
