According to eConsultancy, three in five companies planned on spending £10,000 in their social media marketing (SMM). This can be considered as big and small budget for a marketing activity; big for small and medium enterprises and small for corporations especially those with a worldwide presence. The problem lies in convincing the top management to invest more on SMM. Here’s how you secure an SMM budget by properly persuading the company’s key stakeholders.

1. Business objectives

As a social media marketer, you have to show the board what objectives the SMM campaign are intending to achieve. The proposal should include more sophisticated social media metrics. A cost-and-benefit analysis of the reputational opportunities that social media presents as well as how the social media can minimize reputational risks will definitely get the attention of the top management.

Make sure it is clear to the receiving panel what business objectives SMM will target and how the social strategy can contribute to achieving them. Discuss both social and business metrics during your presentation. Budget conversations usually revolve around these topics.

2. Reputation

Every brand is subject to reputational vulnerabilities. The social media can increase and widen reach and influence, which are critical as you slowly build your company’s reputation. Show them that your social platforms are the consumers’ gateway to your company. Correlate these on your margins and how these can bring in more customers in the process.

Simply put, make reputation projections based on social activities the SMM team is planning to implement. Include KPIs and timeframes in the proposal. Hard numbers are also hard to ignore.

3. Return on investment (ROI)

ROI cannot always be effectively measured when it comes to SMM. Now is the time to change that mindset. Given the right metrics, you can quantify almost all aspects of social media, and the CEO and the rest of the board want to look at hard facts. They want to see how SMM will contribute in obtaining the overall goal.

Finally, perform an ROI projection. Your goal must be establishing the real value of SMM. In most cases, this could mean showing the board the role of various social media activities in the sales cycle. Include diagrams and other illustrations if you must.

Any company’s budget agenda highlights the strategies that the business should prioritize. Oftentimes, the SMM budget is not even considered as a priority. Outlined above is what marketer can do in persuading the key stakeholders in investing more in social media. Bottom-line, the marketers must be able to demonstrate the true value of social media marketing to secure the budget the team needs for the year.