Market Plan Updates: Budgeting for Social Media

It’s the last quarter of 2010 and for those of you that are getting ready to plan for 2011, you’ll be heartened to know that we’ll be featuring timely content so that you can start planning for 2011.

You can count on social media being a component of your marketing mix.  While you may not have much of an investment in dollars traded for service, you can expect to invest time.  Maybe your organization will hire a social media manager?  Maybe you will have to carve out time for someone in your group to manage social media.  Be sure to invest time for planning on what information you will listen for and how you will collect market research information from the social media chatter.  For more information, read this outstanding article about how to manage social media information for research by Angela Lauria.

If you’re looking for a benchmark around how to budget for online marketing, check out this article on Marketing Sherpa that shows that social media is expected to be about 11% of the marketing budget.

A survey of American business leaders shows that 72 percent of the respondents had a social media strategy and about a third of the respondents expected an increase in overall marketing budgets specifically toward social media.

Another survey showed that 86% of the companies surveyed in the BigMouthMedia study said that they would increase their social media budgets and 13% will keep their spending the same.  This same study showed that only 10% of the surveyed companies had no social media efforts at all.

What’s the message for market researchers?  By the sounds of it, some of your budget may be going toward social media.  If you haven’t quite figured out how to leverage that social media activity for more research information, now would be a great time to start looking for ways to harvest and mine all that data.