How to ask for more paid social budget

By Michael Brito
Best practices

In this post, we will discuss strategies on how to ask for more paid social budget. There are three ways to do this, aside from begging and pleading to the CMO or finance department.

Deliver on social ROI

ROI is a financial metric and stands for Return on Investment. It basically accounts for any marketing contribution to revenue divided by the amount of money invested or risked. In the case of paid social, it’s simply the amount of revenue or conversions received specifically from what you are spending on social media.

There are a lot of factors that contribute to poor performing paid social campaigns. It could be that the creative is weak or doesn’t tell a strong story. The post copy may not be compelling enough to get someone to want to click through and learn more. Or, the targeting may not be as precise as it should be. In all these cases and regardless of the reason, when your paid social campaigns are not performing well, it’s not smart to ask for more budget. The answer would usually be no anyway.

On the other hand, when you can deliver ROI and quantify your investments in any paid social campaign, very rarely will you get any pushback when asking for more budget. In my experience, the higher the return, the more money you’ll get.

Position new social campaigns as a pilot program

There are times when you can get more budget if you position a new campaign or initiative as a pilot program. This method only works when you are testing a new creative approach, landing page, or new capability like video ads. The goal is to get “key learnings” to better inform the spend of future programs. You should use this approach sparingly and not as an excuse just to get more budget.

Evangelize your paid social performance

Delivering a strong ROI for your paid social campaign won’t mean a thing if no one else in the company knows about it. It’s important to publicly celebrate your paid social success for several reasons:

  1. If your CMO is data-driven, they will take notice and throw more money to your campaigns.
  2. Others in the company will help support or finance your campaign, especially those who work in product groups that you are supporting.
  3. ROI is good for the company. And, when you are responsible for it, it makes you look good, too.

In each of these cases, you won’t even have to ask for budget. It’ll be given to you proactively. 

It's important to remember that throwing more budget at your campaigns may not always be the right answer. You must ensure that your campaign is optimized for maximum performance first. Once that happens, any increases in budget will only make that campaign that much better. 

Additional reading:

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