How to create a social media budget: hub and help

Watch the video above to learn how to break costs down by hub/help with the relevant platforms.

This budget relates directly to your social media channel strategy and the budget allocated to the social media team.

How to build your monthly hub and help budget

In your monthly budget, the key things you need to consider are your help and hub content as, generally, these won’t be factored for in any wider organisational campaign budget.

Your hub and help content will increase your opportunities to achieve your set organic traffic objectives. It’s also important to factor in any additional requirements for software, tools, reporting etc.

It might be useful to break down on a platform-by-platform basis so you can see where your spending is going. This will come into use when you’re measuring the effectiveness of each platform.

Social channel running costs

Some of the costs will not be naturally connected to content or a campaign. You will have to decide whether to accept these as a social media department cost and leave them on one line or whether to attribute them across all of your hero, hub and help content.

If you choose to allocate them to activity, you will need to decide the fairest way to do this. For example, if you only apply them to the help and hub activity, your hero activity will be reported with reduced costs and will appear to have disproportionate success.

Your budget spreadsheet

As you have seen in the video, the budget spreadsheet tells you how to record the costs if broken down by activity. In fact, each hero or campaign activity is listed so you can attribute a proportion of the costs.

If you decide not to attribute these costs to activity, you can exclude them from your ROI calculation and record them on your budget on just one line. This is a simpler approach but does not provide a genuine reflection of the return on investment.