As we begin 2016, most marketers have started looking miles ahead to predict what kind of budget should be allotted to social media marketing in the new year. There are a number of considerations, including how much social media is instrumental in achieving your business goals. Most companies plan social media spend with their clients well ahead of time. So, here are some tips to help you in planning a 2016 social media marketing budget.

1. Compare the ROI with spend: The first consideration for any budget allotment is to determine the benefits that the campaign is going to bring about. While every item may not be effective in achieving the social objectives, it is a good practice to analyze the costs and fully understand the benefits that you are receiving from them and expect to receive. While considering the spend, do not overlook the costs involved in tools. It may seem to be essential to run any social media marketing campaign, but the costs should be checked by your social media marketing agency if there is less efficiency recorded from them.
2. Diversify the spend between various social media platforms: You may have multiple social media platforms to target, and in this case you need to act wisely while allocating the budget to each of them. In addition to Facebook and Twitter, which have been the dominant social media marketing platforms for years, there are other vital ones like LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, and more that could be highly effective for your business based on its type and the type of audience that relates to your business. As the campaign grows and so does the response on the social media platforms, it will be important for marketers to think ahead and allocate enough money to test the new platforms and determine which ones are going to be more effective.
3. Invest in shareable content: This point has been beaten to death by most of the marketers, but the fact will remain that when you feed shareable content into your social media pages, they tend to get shared more as people value great information and compliment the same by sharing it, liking it, or commenting on it. Analyze the current content on your social media platforms. Look at it from your prospect’s perspective. Do you find the content shareable? If you haven’t been getting a boost for the social stats, the odds are that the content is not up to the mark. Creating a highly shareable content is a huge process that requires you to identify your personas and their online behavior to craft content that would manage to garner the targeted persona’s attention; engaging them, delighting them, and compelling them to share it with others.
4. Keep a check on the rising costs: While it may be highly efficient, the costs involved in the various tactics of social media are always rising. With the competition being cut-throat and content being the main tool for communication, it becomes more difficult to maintain the costs that occur from social media and content. As far as working on social media is concerned, here are some of the key considerations that will result into high costs:

• Developing and promoting video content
• Working with influencers
• Dividing work and efforts between social networks
• Adopting new tools
• Content development
• Spending on ads on various social media platforms

Conclusion:
Social media marketing is a mixed bag with numerous elements into it. It is not possible to carry out the promotional stuff without the help of an expert. So, while considering the costs incurred by your social media marketing campaign, you will also need to know how much you are going to spend on the team as well. No matter how much you try to decrease the influence of social media in your online marketing campaign, somehow it is going to make its way in your marketing mix and prove its potential by promoting the brand to relevant prospects.

Daniel Clark is a blogger and works with Clickmatix, a social media marketing agency helping clients achieve their business goals through the help of the best social media marketing company. Follow him on twitter at @DanielClark123.