Here is the promised follow up to my article in Canada Business Review. These are two additional things to consider when making budgeting decision related to social media.
Across the marketing mix
As we mentioned in the article, deciding where to put social media into your marketing budget can be as simple as matching your social media goals with a current line item. If that current line item is weak and you want to use social media to improve your success take money from the current line item. If on the other hand, the matching line item is doing well, then take money from a weaker non-related line item.
But what if you have multiple social media goals? What if these goals share similar goals with other line items? In that case it should n make your decision easier as you can easily justify taking a small percentage from multiple line items to support your goals.
You can decide on the amount you take from each line item using a methods similar to the one presented in the article. But don’t get too excited at the ease of your budget decisions, having multiple goals for social media increase the already complex process, operationally and culturally, of integrating your multi-goal social media effort into an already running marketing team – but that discussion is for another article.
Looking for funding from other departments
Social media is truly as much of a tool for customer service, operations, and product development as it is for marketing; such that departments outside of marketing may benefit and be involved in the outputs and outcomes of a social media effort more than your traditional marketing department. Therefore, when exploring a social media initiative you may ask, ‘does this support any efforts or responsibilities outside the marketing department and if so are there non-marketing budgetary line items that may support the initiative?’ If the answer is yes, then you may want to consider a “partnership” with a benefiting department. This multi-silo effort requires extra considerations that should not to be taken lightly. Nevertheless, going outside the marketing department is viable option, although one rarely ever used.
