Banking on Social: How to Build a Social Media Budget & Spend Smarter in 2025

A whopping 60% of marketers feel that the way they spend their budget — and the ROI it produces — is being scrutinized more now than in the past.

So, it’s no surprise you landed here to discover how you can better optimize your social media budget this year.

As a content pro (and former social media manager), I’ve got you covered. Let’s talk about what a good social media marketing budget looks like, who should be involved, and how you can data-charge your approach.

Table of Contents

• What is a social media budget?
• How to Create a Social Media Marketing Budget
• How to Allocate Your Social Media Budget
• Social Media Budget Template
• How to Measure Your Social Media Budget’s ROI

A social media budget (or social media marketing budget) is a dedicated amount of money that a business reserves for social media marketing activities like content creation and campaign analysis.

The most comprehensive social media budgets cover the following:

• Strategy and planning: This includes setting goals and objectives, conducting audience research and competitive analysis, choosing priority channels, and establishing KPIs.
• Content development and publishing: This includes establishing a content cadence, building a content calendar, writing content and creating multimedia content (e.g., audio and video), and scheduling/publishing content.

• Community management: This includes building and maintaining online brand communities, tracking brand mentions, and monitoring conversations via hashtags, comments, and direct messages.
• Data analytics and reporting: This includes evaluating post-level metrics (e.g., reach, impressions, engagements), building reports, and optimizing content performance.
• Tools and software: This includes publishing, reporting, campaign management, social listening and monitoring, and other social media management tools. (If you want a one-stop-shop option, HubSpot’s Social Media Management Software does all of this for free.)
• Social commerce, sponsored content, and advertising: This includes managing in-platform product sales and promotion, working with influencers or creators, and running paid ad campaigns. (And if you need help planning your ad strategy, this kit is great for that.)
• Learning and development: This includes training new hires, offering continued education courses, and upskilling based on AI best practices or other emerging trends.
• Miscellaneous expenses: This includes social media giveaways, contests, and other promotions that hold monetary value or require additional resources.

Importance of Creating a Social Media Budget

From marketer to marketer, I know our budgets are often limited. A well-thought-out social media budget allows us to set realistic goals, understand our priorities, organize our activities, and, ultimately, spend our money wisely.

Without a budget, you risk overspending on frivolous activities with little to no funds left over to support your core objectives. It’s kind of like blowing your paycheck on clothes and travel before realizing you haven’t paid your mortgage.

A social media marketing budget also makes sure everyone in your organization is aligned with your strategy. And by everyone, I mean …

Social Media Budget Stakeholders

Here are the usual suspects involved in the social media marketing budget process:

• CMO and marketing managers+: Responsible for setting the strategy, communicating the requested budget to leadership, and guiding the execution of activities.
• Social media team (all levels): The do-ers who understand what areas require the most investment and which activities are worth spending money on.
• SEO and data analysts: Provide insights based on previous campaigns and predict trends that may have future budget implications.
• Finance team: Track historical forecasts and spending patterns and enforce budgets across the organization.

Pro tip: It also wouldn’t hurt to run your plans by the sales team. Our data shows that one of the top challenges marketers are currently facing is sales and marketing alignment. Alignment starts with shared data and extends into collaborative goals.

How to Create a Social Media Marketing Budget

Now that we’ve covered the basics, I talked to a few marketing and social media experts about the most important factors to consider when creating a social media budget.

Here’s what they said.

1. Start by understanding what you’re trying to achieve.

John Kawecki, marketing manager at F1 Blast, highlighted the importance of taking a step back and figuring out your goals before crunching the numbers.

Kawecki says, “I‘ve learned to start by asking, ‘What are we actually trying to do here?’ Because if you’re not clear on that, you’ll simply end up wasting time and money.

For us, it was about building a community where F1 fans could connect, talk races, and get news. So, I focused our budget on platforms where we’d actually find those fans, mainly Instagram and Twitter.”

It’s easier to map your budget to categories and activities when you know what you want to accomplish.

2. Know your audience’s social media habits.

Wisia Neo, content marketing manager at ViB, argues that knowing your audience is the single most important factor when creating your social media budget. Kawecki also hinted at this when he talked about how he found F1 fans on Instagram and Twitter.

Neo says, “It‘s easy and tempting to throw money into social channels because they’re popular among other big brands. But if your audience isn‘t engaging on [those platforms], that investment won’t pay off.”

She continues, “Make it a habit to interview your customers regularly. Understand how they use social media in their day-to-day and how it influences their buying decisions. Combine those insights with data like traffic sources, conversion rates, and engagement to ensure your budget is focused where it makes the biggest impact.”

I think I can speak for all marketers when I say we’re not in the business of throwing away money. Make sure your efforts are actually meeting your audience where they are.

3. Set realistic spending milestones.

There’s no point in creating a budget that’s impossible to adhere to. (I have to tell myself this any time I create a personal budget, too.)

Mushfiq Sarker, CEO of LaGrande Marketing, notes that being realistic about your budget involves understanding that each objective requires a different allocation of resources.

“If my goal is to boost brand awareness, I might invest more in ad spend for platforms with broad reach and engage in content creation that highlights my brand’s story and values,” says Sarker.

“On the other hand, if my focus is on lead generation, I prioritize my budget for targeted ads and landing pages designed for conversion.”

If you have a limited budget, prioritize the most important activities with an understanding that you can’t do everything. And if you have some wiggle room, add some cushion to the budget categories you tend to overspend on based on your spending history (or future predictions).

Pro tip: Social media trends change with the wind. When determining your spend breakdown, consider setting a pot aside for what I like to call “unpredictability funds” — basically, a budget that allows you to be flexible as consumer needs and interests change.

How to Allocate Your Social Media Budget

According to the latest CMO Survey, marketing budgets as a percentage of company budgets have continued to fall over time, and businesses are allocating roughly 10.1% to marketing on average. Looking at marketing budgets as a percentage of company revenues, that number drops to 7.7%.

With that in mind, marketers are spending 17% of their total budget on social media — and this is predicted to increase to 26% in the next five years.

Let’s drill down even further. We also asked 1,400+ global social media marketers how their budget is allocated. The image below shows a breakdown of their top five priorities:

That said, depending on your business type, target audience, and goals, you may choose to allocate more money to certain areas over others.

For example, when I moonlighted as a social media contractor for a national public health organization, our ‘Super Bowl’ was Healthy Vision Month each May.

We set aside a large chunk of our social media budget for the planning, execution, and evaluation of that specific campaign because it was a big community builder for us. We also focused most of that allocation on our Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) tactics to get the most ROI based on our audience.

The rest of the budget was used to maintain our regular publishing and reporting schedule throughout the year.

How to Use Data to Inform Your Social Media Budget

If you’re still trying to figure out what to allocate where, let the data speak for itself.

I mentioned using historical data to inform your future activities. For example, if you spent a big portion of your budget on holiday campaigns last year, you’ll probably want to leave room (or add resources) for that this time around.

Another way to leverage data is to see what’s trending in your industry among like-minded social media marketers.

We did some digging for you, and our latest social media marketing report tells us this:

• • 50% of marketers plan to increase their investment in social selling.
  • Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube are the top social media channels used by brands in 2024, with 23% of marketers citing that YouTube had the most engagement.
  • Increasing brand awareness and reaching new audiences is a top goal for social media marketers.
  • Sales/revenue and website traffic are tied for the top metric that marketers use to measure social media success.
  • 87% of marketers say using AI tools is crucial to a successful social media strategy.
  • The overwhelming majority of marketers rate long-form videos, expert interviews, temporary content (e.g., Instagram Stories), and VR/AR as having high ROI.

Poke through the full report, watch the expert social trends report panel below, and use insights like these to inform your budget.

Social Media Budget Template

The example below is a general marketing budget template, but you can easily tailor it to your social media plan.

For example, your line items may include “strategy and planning, content creation, and monitoring and reporting” instead of buckets like “public relations.”

Download This Template for Free

Regardless of how often you track your spending — monthly, quarterly, annually, or all of the above — this template can handle it all.

How to Measure Your Social Media Budget’s ROI

Luckily, my colleague Flori already wrote a fantastic piece detailing how to measure your social media marketing ROI, so I won’t go into too much detail here.

However, the most straightforward measurement is the social media ROI formula:

(Total Revenue – Total Investment) / Total Investment x 100

• Total Revenue: The amount of money generated from your campaigns
• Total Investment: The amount of money you put in when creating the campaign (resources, labor, etc.)

So, if my total revenue from social media campaigns for the year is $15,000, and my total investment is $5,000, let’s calculate the ROI:

(15,000 – 5,000) / 5,000 x 100=200%

That means I made $2 for every social media marketing dollar spent. Love that for me.

I’d also recommend trying out our marketing ROI calculator for a big-picture view of your social media returns.

It’s Your Year to Become a Better Budgeter

We’re doing more with less, but the expectations for marketers are higher than ever. The payoffs for good social media marketing are huge — so create a social media budget that allows you to meet business demands and keep your priorities in order.