How to create a budget for social media marketing: The complete guide

Key points

• Lead with business goals. You’ll get buy-in if every line item in your social media budget aligns with the company’s financial goals. Use SMART goals. Tie them closely to financial outcomes.
• Calculate your total social media budget as a specific percentage of the overall marketing budget, usually 10-25%.
• Follow the 70/20/10 rule. Spend 70% of your social media marketing budget on proven strategies and channels. Spend 20% on growth opportunities that are at least partially proven. Spend 10% on higher-risk experiments.

In recent years, CMOs and other marketing leaders have allocated a growing share of their budgets to social media marketing. From 2019 to 2024, social media’s share of overall digital advertising spend increased by almost 24%. 

As marketers allocate more budget to social media, the pressure to deliver measurable ROI is rising. Guesswork is no longer an acceptable strategy (if it ever was one). To get budgets approved, marketers need to up their social media budgeting and analytics chops. 

This guide serves as a blueprint for creating a social media budget – from planning and allocation to justifying social media spend. You’ll learn how to tie your social media budget directly to business outcomes, prove financial impact, and secure budget buy-in. Let’s get started. 

What’s the foundation of an effective social media marketing budget?

A social media budget is a document that specifies how much you plan to spend on social media during a specific time period (usually a fiscal year). The foundation of that budget is the business goals you aim to achieve with your social efforts, such as acquisition, retention, pipeline growth, and revenue growth. 

To get executive buy-in, every social media goal – and budget line item – must ladder up to a specific business outcome. If your B2C business aims to increase online sales by $1 million, for example, your social strategy should focus on shoppable posts and other social commerce tactics. If your main goal is customer retention, prioritize community management, social customer service, and engagement initiatives​.

If you ensure your social media goals are SMART, you’re much less likely to find yourself struggling to prove ROI later on. 

SMART goals are:

Specific: They target a clear outcome, ideally one that ties directly to business outcomes, such as “increase qualified leads by 15%.”
Measurable: They use trackable KPIs that ideally show direct financial impact.
Achievable: They are aligned with the marketing team’s current capacity and tools.
Relevant: They support top-line objectives, such as revenue, retention, and market share.
Time-bound: They are tied to an end date, i.e., “increase qualified leads by 15% by EOY 2026.”

How do I calculate a social media budget?

The standard approach for calculating a social media budget is to allocate a specific percentage of the overall marketing budget, usually 10-25%.

You can use these benchmarks as guidelines:

• In 2025, social media spend represents an average of 11.3% of total marketing budgets, according to a survey of 11,000+ CMOs.
• At B2B companies, social media accounts for 10-20% of the overall marketing budget, according to a different CMO survey by Deloitte and Duke University.
• At B2C companies, social media accounts for 15-25% of overall marketing budgets.

Here’s how to do the calculation:

1. Determine the total marketing budget. 
2. Determine the percentage of the budget you will allocate to social media marketing. 
3. Calculate the budget using this formula:

Social Media Budget = Marketing Budget × Social Media %

What expense buckets should I include in a social media budget?

Your social media marketing budget should cover more than just your paid ads. It should include all costs involved with creating organic and paid content. Let’s dive into the categories to consider including.

In-house talent

Accurately calculate the cost of employing your social media team – or risk having to cut into other areas of your social media budget to pay staff. If you’re looking to hire new social media managers or upskill current marketers, factor their salaries and training costs into your budget. You’ll also want to consider recruitment and onboarding costs. 

Content production

Your social media strategy won’t get very far without content creation, which is likely to represent a large chunk of your budget. The more customized and high-quality your social content is, the higher these costs will be. 

Consider these line items related to content creation:

• Photography 
• Graphic design
• Copywriting
• Custom images or access to image libraries
• Video production costs, including location and editing (often the highest cost but also the highest ROI)
• Actors and models
• Equipment, such as microphones and lighting

Paid media and advertising

Social ads bring people into the sales funnel. They are especially important for brands that don’t yet have an organic following. In that circumstance, without a paid budget, the social content your team works hard on will likely have low engagement (a.k.a. crickets). If your brand is just starting out, boost the posts you are most proud of to give them necessary visibility. 

Social media software and tools

Social media tools can make or break the effectiveness of your campaigns. You’ll want to factor in their costs – usually in subscription fees that recur monthly or annually. A comprehensive social media management platform is a must for marketing teams of any size. The more features it includes, the less you will need add-on tools in this portion of the budget. 

Here are some categories to consider if they aren’t already baked into your main platform: 

• Design tools
• Video editing tools
• Social commerce software
• Social media analytics tools
• AI chatbots for social customer service
• Influencer management software
• Social media scheduling tools
• Social customer care software
• Social listening software
• Social engagement tools
• User-generated content (UGC) platforms
• AI content creation tools

Influencer campaigns

Influencer campaigns are a critical bucket for brands aiming to expand their reach and drive authentic engagement. When planned properly, these campaigns can drive higher engagement rates, boost average order value, and meaningfully increase conversions by leveraging influencers who resonate with your audience.

Budgeting for influencer marketing includes costs such as influencer partnership fees, product gifting, and influencer campaign management. 

Social customer care

Social customer care should be a dedicated expense bucket in your social media budget, reflecting the growing expectation for timely, empathetic support across social channels. 

Costs here include social customer care software, team training, workflow automation tools, and often specialized support staff. These investments can significantly reduce average handling time and increase resolution rates, building stronger brand loyalty and delivering the speedy CX today’s customers expect.

Agencies and freelancers

Most marketing teams need at least some outside help to execute social media strategies successfully. Agencies and freelancers are often hyper-specialized in an area of expertise within social, allowing you to branch out into different content types or onto new platforms.

To assess how much you’ll need in your agencies and freelance budget, evaluate the capabilities of your internal team and see where there are skill and bandwidth gaps. Then, search for agencies and contractors who specialise in filling those gaps and request pricing information. Alternatively, you can use rate resources such as a popular rate database from the Editorial Freelancers Association. 

How do I allocate my social media marketing budget?

Two trusted models for allocating a social media budget are leading with your goals and using the 70/20/10 rule. 

Goal-based allocation

Allocate your social media budget based on your goals.

• Brand awareness: Focus on top-tier creative production and reach (paid ads, awareness-driven influencer partnerships). Invest some of the budget into social media management tools, especially tools for content publishing and social listening.

• Lead generation: Spend on targeted ads and campaign-specific content. Invest in a unified social media analytics software to track the quality/quantity of leads.

• Sales conversions: Prioritize paid media, social commerce strategies, and both organic and ad creative production. Ensure there’s enough budget for top-notch customer service on every social channel.

• Engagement: Prioritize ongoing content production in your budget, including UGC campaigns, interactive posts, and social media contests and challenges. Invest in social media engagement tools and ensure you have dedicated staff to respond to comments and engage with customers. 

• Follower growth: Allocate spend to account/page promotion and to recurring creative content production that hooks and retains new followers. Influencer partnerships also help accelerate organic follower growth.

The 70/20/10 rule

The 70/20/10 rule is a framework for allocating your social media budget to maximize both immediate results and long-term growth. This model breaks your budget into three strategic categories:

• Proven strategies: 70%: Allocate 70% of your social media budget to proven strategies and platforms that consistently deliver results for your business. For many B2B and B2C brands, this includes channels and tactics with a clear track record – such as high-performing ads or content formats that reliably bring traffic and conversions. This core allocation ensures stability and supports continuing growth from known channels.
• Growth opportunities: 20%: Set aside 20% of your social budget for promising channels or initiatives that have shown positive early results but aren’t yet your primary revenue drivers. Examples include increasing your influencer spend and exploring new paid social channels (like TikTok if most investment is currently on Facebook or LinkedIn). The goal is to scale these initiatives with measured investment as they evolve and show more promise.
• Experiments: 10%: Allocate the final 10% of your social media budget to testing high-risk, high-reward initiatives and platforms you haven’t tried before. This can include experimenting with new ad formats, utilizing AI in content production, producing interactive or immersive content, or testing new networks. These efforts might not pay off immediately, but they can reveal new opportunities or become key drivers of future growth.

Using the 70/20/10 rule helps you strike a balance between amplifying what already works and staying ahead with constant small-scale innovation.

What social media channels should I prioritize?

To prioritize the best social media channels for your brand, start by auditing your existing audience data. Analyze both quantitative metrics and qualitative insights across platforms.

When auditing your audience data to decide which social platforms to prioritize, focus on these critical metrics:

• Audience demographics and behavior: Analyze where your target audience is most active, including their age, location, interests, and online behavior patterns.
• Performance indicators by channel: Measure your engagement rate, reach, impressions, click-through rate, watch time, and conversions for each platform. Compare these metrics against industry benchmarks to identify which channels deliver the strongest results.
• Content format effectiveness: Evaluate which content types (i.e., carousels, Stories, Reels, Shorts) perform best on each channel. 

The 70/20/10 rule discussed in the previous section will help you allocate from there. The right analytics tool will also help you understand where to focus your efforts. Look for a platform that consolidates data across all social channels into one centralized hub, tracking engagement, reach, and audience demographics. 

How should I prioritize paid vs. organic content in my social media budget?

Organic reach on social channels continues to decline due to saturated platforms and evolving algorithms. Even brilliant content often needs some paid support to cut through the noise. 

Plan to earmark a portion (at least 20%) of your budget to paid distribution tactics such as boosted posts, sponsored content, or targeted ads. This will ensure your core messages reach the right eyes and drive the outcomes you want – from awareness to conversion. Relying solely on organic is no longer enough.

How do I justify my social media budget and get buy-in?

Translating social media spend into measurable business outcomes is the way to get executive buy-in. Let’s explore some methods of doing so. 

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

Calculate CAC by dividing total ad and campaign spend by the number of new customers you expect to acquire through social sources. 

This approach allows you to set clear targets: “We invest $X to acquire a customer, and our data shows social channels deliver that acquisition for $Y.” When you can trace conversions back to source, you empower executive teams to make budget decisions driven by real performance rather than gut feeling.

Lifetime Value (CLV)

Beyond acquisition, it’s crucial to track the ongoing, high-value impact of social engagement and retention. Consider not just the initial sale, but the customer lifetime value (CLV) that social nurtures. True ROI emerges when you connect social activity – from engagement and advocacy to repeat purchase and brand loyalty – to tangible financial results over time. By prioritizing long-term metrics, you build a compelling case for sustained investment in social as a strategic growth engine.

Unified analytics

Achieving budget alignment demands robust, unified analytics – not siloed data that yields fragmented insights. To accurately attribute sales and leads to their original social media touchpoint, rely on integrated reporting that pulls together all campaign, engagement, and conversion data. 

Powerful, all-in-one social media analytics platforms like Emplifi’s make it effortless to present clear, actionable dashboards and tie social activity directly to pipeline and revenue. This clarity enables marketing leaders to justify spending, defend budget proposals, and focus investments on areas that deliver the greatest impact.

Learn more about how Emplifi’s unified analytics platform can improve your social media strategy and buy-in today.