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You can't add links to your Instagram post captions (sorry, sales team). However, if you want to invite your Instagram followers to your other resources to increase traffic to your website, promote products and services, and enhance user engagement, all you need to...
Pricing your social media services fairly can be daunting whether you’ve just started your social media marketing agency or you’re a well-established agency. How much should one charge for a social media post? What about a campaign? Or a social media content strategy?
If that sounds relatable, don’t fret. We’ve put together a definitive guide to help you price your social media services accordingly.
We will take you through pricing models, strategies, and tips on designing your pricing around the services you offer. Or you can jump straight to our nifty pricing calculator at the end of the article.
Social media management costs can vary a lot depending on the size of your business, the scope of your work, and the level of experience you bring to the table. As a general rule of thumb, you can expect to charge anywhere from $500 to $5,000 per month for social media management services.
If you’re just starting out as a freelance social media manager, you may have to settle for charging on the lower end of the spectrum. But if you have a successful social media marketing background, you may afford to charge according to your experience.
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Find out how to price your agency services correctly. No complicated formulas. No boring spreadsheets.
Figuring out what to charge for your social media services may feel overwhelming initially, and that’s okay. This article will take you through the basics (and the nitty gritty) and help you create the best social media pricing plans.
assess your social media skills and experience
look at the scope of content creation work involved
come up with a range that you feel is fair
consider the size of the business (each company has a different marketing budget)
The rates you set should reflect your skill, experience, and task difficulty. Managing a few social media pages differs from planning and executing long-term social media campaigns.
Therefore, it’s essential to consider the type of social media management services you offer before settling on a price.
While social media strategy often falls under the umbrella of “social media campaigns” and “social media management,” these three things couldn’t be more different. The fact that they’re used interchangeably might lead to pricing confusion and pushback from clients. On a human level, it’s totally understandable. Would you pay for three different services if, from your perspective, they sound the same?
This goes to show how crucial it is to be clear from the onset what a service, especially one as nebulous-sounding to “outsiders” as social strategy, actually entails.
Identifying target audiences and social media channels; setting objectives; auditing social media pages; combing through droves of data to identify the right topics to tackle. This is some pretty advanced stuff, and the pricing should reflect this.
According to our data, most social media marketing agencies based in New York charge clients between $60 and $190/hour* for social strategy.
*Criteria: project handled mostly by seniors with an estimated time of completion of 30 hours.
Also worth considering:
Justifying prices to clients (more on that later) will always be a part of the agency hustle — so the clearer you are, the less explaining/convincing you’ll have to do.
There shouldn’t be much room for interpretation in your pricing. Since social media management can include everything from creating content, growing reach, and interacting with the audience to monitoring and even strategy, you’ll need to be very specific about what your pricing includes.
Our data shows that most social media agencies from New York charge between $40 and $190 per hour for on-going social media management, with some top-rated agencies charging as much as $350 per hour.
Customer retention and community-building are also part of a social media manager’s job description.” Some companies hire in-house teams to handle this, while others outsource it. Depending on the client, this might require whole teams or just one person.
The nature of the work can also vary, from responding to DMs, addressing customer complaints on social media, organizing events and so on. As you can see, there are a lot of variables here, so you should take all of these factors into account when proposing a price to your client.
After some digging, we found agencies based in the Midwestern United States charge between $40 and $190 per hour for community management (assuming it also involves content creation), with some top-rated agencies charging as much as $320 per hour.
As for social media content creation, the price depends on the scope and size of the project. Some clients might have content producers in-house and hire agencies only for highly-specific work, like providing captions. Producing videos, designing social media assets, writing copy for dozens of posts each week, or any recurring work, for that matter, should be priced accordingly.
For example, our numbers show that average-sized local agencies (outside major U.S. metropolitan areas) charge between $40 and $160 per hour for ongoing social media content creation. Some top-rated agencies can charge up to $280 per hour.
As always, clarity on the project’s scope will help you determine how much to charge for social media management.
Social media campaigns require a lot of legwork and specific skills ranging from analytical to creative. Moreover, the skills and know-how necessary to plan and implement social media campaigns often overlap, muddying the lines between services and complicating pricing. Does your client need an individual social media strategy? Content creation and management? What about budgeting? Can they provide you with numbers or at least a ballpark? Goals, objectives? Preferred social media platforms? Seems like a lot, doesn’t it?
Looking at our data revealed that New York-based social media agencies charge between $70 and $190 per hour for social media marketing campaigns. That range assumes a month-long project where strategy, content creation, community management, design, reporting, and analysis are involved. Top-rated agencies can charge up to $320 per hour for the same service.
There are two ways to price this:
Going the package route comes with the benefit of transparency and clarity. The downside is that “stuff happens,” and your packages might not be as all-encompassing as you thought. Pricing services individually gives you some wiggle room but with the added caveats of flexibility — pricing confusion and potential tensions with the client.
In this section, we will take a look at two broad categories — pricing models and pricing strategies. As you’ll see, these two things are quite different. Understanding where they differ and overlap is essential to implementing them correctly.
Cost-based pricing is one of the simplest pricing strategies out there. To turn a profit, you must sell more than you spend.
In simple terms, the agency owner calculates the services’ costs and then adds a percentage (profit) to that price. That results in the selling pricing.
This method is often used by agencies with limited knowledge of the client’s willingness to pay for the service provided. Most agencies use a cost-plus pricing structure and mark up 20% to 50% of their cost, whereas top agencies go much higher.
As an agency owner, the highest risk you’re looking at with cost-based pricing includes losing clients from the get-go. Why? Because clients might find the price too high.
Competition-based pricing is the most natural approach for a social media management agency because it uses competitor prices as a benchmark. There are three ways to go about this:
Additionally, while you could go with a competitive price, if you’re a low-cost agency might, competition-based pricing might severely impede your agency’s business growth and scaling potential.
However, matching the competition’s social media management cost brings differentiation dilemmas. As in: “What sets my agency apart from the other players?” And a higher price should always be paired with additional benefits and higher-quality services.
Value-based pricing involves the value your agency brings to clients with products and services. Your customers’ perception of your agency’s worth is essential to this pricing strategy, as it dictates how much to charge for social media management.
With value-based pricing, negotiation is key in obtaining the best price for your services. The upside is that, unlike competition-based pricing, value-based pricing is more flexible.
Additionally, your agency’s perceived value can increase through various initiatives — marketing campaigns and awards, for instance.
Sounds easy, but there’s more to this. There are some things most social media managers should consider before adopting this pricing strategy.
For one, analyze the market and how your competitors influence the perceived value of services. This will help you determine the highest price a customer would be willing to pay. You should account for the fact that every client is unique, and any piece of feedback will ultimately help you reach the best possible outcome.
The hourly rate is one of the most popular models among agencies due to its straightforwardness. You simply determine an hourly rate, and the client pays for every hour of labor spent on that project. One big caveat is that not all hours are billable, so the rate should account for the time spent on admin work.
Since it’s in the agency’s best economic interest to have as many billable hours as possible, efficient time-tracking and smooth client management and communication are a must to avoid any conflicts with the client.
This social media marketing pricing model is best suited for prolonged, research-intensive projects that involve identifying target audiences and building social media strategies.
Sometimes, companies commission agencies for simple, specific tasks — and this pricing model is perfect for those situations. Still, when considering the pricing, you should look at the required time, the estimated delivery time, the number of people involved, and their seniority.
A retainer-based pricing model is one that many agencies aspire to, and for a good reason. Essentially, clients pay in advance for work performed on an ongoing basis. It’s a very common pricing model as clients often prefer delegating the day-to-day operations of their social media accounts to specialists — ideally long-term.
A few examples of deliverables that clients could request are:
Since client retention is one of the most important factors influencing an agency’s long-term success, agencies often prioritize landing multiple clients looking for this type of collaboration.
As some services are not clearly outlined from the beginning and can evolve, clients often pay for a specific number of hours of labor in advance at the agency’s rate. In this situation, be clear about what happens with leftover monthly hours. Do they expire or roll over to the next month? As always, communication is key.
Last but not least is performance-based pricing. As the name suggests, the social media marketing agency is paid based on the performance of its services. It’s prevalent in the advertising industry, as agencies get paid based on achieving specific pre-defined marketing goals.
Pricing packages are very popular in the agency world for one vital reason: they streamline and transparentize client-agency dealings and social media management costs as a whole.
Agencies typically price their packages according to the droves of data they’ve gathered over the years. Of course, you don’t have to run an international agency to package your services — on the contrary. Social media agencies of all sizes can find a lot of value in this approach.
For one, a custom package attracts a wide variety of clients because they can pick and choose whatever’s relevant for them.
Secondly, social media packages standardize your offering, making time and money investments easier to predict.
Bonus: social media packages allow you to lock in contracts and ask for payment upfront.
That sounds great and all, but how should one make those packages? Don’t fret — we got you covered.
For simplicity’s sake, we’re going to focus on one school of pricing packages: the tiered model.
There’s a reason why this pricing model is so popular: it’s great for attracting new customers and for retention. That’s actually two reasons, but you get the idea.
Let’s assume you’re going for three tiers. In that case, it should look something like this:
It might seem very basic, but tiered pricing is actually deceptively effective for several reasons:
It’s important to remind non-social-media-savvy customers that everything is quantifiable.
For that, you’ll need to consider how to scale your offerings. Let’s take the skeletal pricing structure exemplified above and put some meat on it:
Here, you can include services such as strategy, monitoring, community management for each social media account, and so on.
The idea is to bestow the feeling of progression and incremental value on your social media marketing package.
NB: When naming your packages, ensure the lightest packages don’t look bad compared to the others. Clients should never feel bad for not choosing the highest tier.
Different industries require different skill sets, tactics, strategies and approaches to content creation. While you may have some wiggle room for experimentation with media and entertainment clients, pharma, government and NGOs have different requirements (including legal). As a social media agency, you should consider whether your team has the know-how to navigate industries that are more restrictive with the social media content they produce.
Most businesses go on one of two routes: they either don’t factor in all costs and underprice or factor in all of their expenses and overcharge. So, you’ll need to find the sweet spot. To do that, you must assess your costs realistically and build your pricing around them.
Here are a few factors to consider when assessing costs:
The customer’s first impulse will be to scan the competition — so why shouldn’t it be yours too?
The best approach here is to use your competition’s pricing model as a point of reference and put your spin on it. Consider drawing inspiration from the pricing models of industry leaders like Hootsuite. Pick it apart and ask yourself: “What could I do better?” or “What are the gaps I could cover?”
Word to the wise: don’t try to one-up the competition if you lack the foundation to sustain those prices. Always consider your costs first, and then figure out the finer details — services offered and pricing structure.
Bonus: A few miscellaneous things to take into account:
Want to figure out how much you could charge for your social media services with little to no effort?
If you’re a marketing agency, this social media pricing calculator will help you price your social media services accordingly.
Developed by Planable and the pricing experts at Soft Fight, this pricing calculator is powered by a complex algorithm that determines the ideal pricing range for your business.
We’ve based this calculator on the following assumptions:
To make the final result as representative as possible, we fed the algorithm data from 3 high-quality sources and handpicked 16 variables.
Broadly, this social media pricing calculator considers your costs, the quality of your work, perceived value, the market, and competition.
Specifically, the calculator accounts for these variables in an easy 4-step process:
NB: All of these variables count towards the final result.
Find out how to price your agency services correctly. No complicated formulas. No boring spreadsheets.
Despite all your best efforts to make your pricing as clear and transparent as humanly possible, there will come a time when you’ll have to justify prices to clients. Again, don’t fret. It’s all part of the game, and we have just the thing to help you level the playing field.
Here’s what to prepare if (or rather when) that moment comes:
Some projects take more time than others. Fortunately, this can tip the scales in your favor, especially if you charge by the hour. To use this as justification, prepare data showing how much work can be done in a certain amount of time.
Going in, your clients should know that there’s more to a Christmas social media campaign than flooding timelines with Mariah-Carey-defrosting-jokes in November (as funny as that may be). Time is of the essence, and if you’re dealing with the sort of client that asks for a lot of edits and revisions, it’s best to present realistic project timelines.
Your expertise will obviously weigh heavily with clients, as social media managerial and logistical experience can make or break their exposure, conversion rates, and goals. Agencies with proven track records building communities around brands will always gain a competitive edge.
In those cases, portfolios and data are (co-ruling) kings. Portfolios to give rundowns and provide historical context for your experience and data to show results. For extra clout, reach out to current and former clients and start building video case studios.
Creativity, writing ability, content curation, project management, design, strategic thinking, community management, and analytical skills are just a few of the elements that can influence your pricing. Ensure your clients understand the value your agency’s employees and collaborators provide to their business. Explain each skill’s role in the bigger picture.
While clients are fully aware that they need your services, they might need help understanding the value of fulfilling that need.
That’s why you’ll have to justify your prices. And in most cases, it’s not a convoluted scheme to get you to lower the numbers. All it takes is explaining the price with facts, logic, and numbers. Long-term, this helps with building trust, and it will show that transparency and constructive communication are the tenets of your agency.
A standard social media marketing package costs around $700 per month. Use our pricing calculator to get a range.
Monthly packages can start from $500 and can go upwards to $2500/month.
The standard rate for writing a social media post starts from $50.
Anywhere between $30 and $140/hour.
This pricing assumes the following factors:
This range is based on the assumption that you manage content for multiple social media platforms. For managing a single Facebook page, you can halve that range.
By now, you should have a better understanding of the basics of social media management pricing. Consider all the factors, do your research, and talk to other professionals in the industry for advice. And remember — always make sure that your client understands why you are charging what you are asking for. That way, everybody will be on the same page, and you can ensure that you’re both getting the most out of your collaboration.
Content marketer and aspiring YouTuber, in no particular order. Expertise in content writing, social media copywriting, and neo-noir graphic novels. Used to run a music webzine in the 2 seconds in the early 2010s when blogs were hot. I tweet very badly on Twitter.
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