What Does Social Media Marketing Cost? Factors and Tips

Running social media for your business has a wide range of costs. The costs to create content, collaborate with influencers, and run social media ads—to name a few—all add up. 

According to Statista, social media advertising is expected to reach $338.75 billion worldwide in 2026, but that is a small slice of the whole advertising pie. A 2026 CMO survey found that social media spending accounts for roughly 14% of marketing budgets. Spending efficiently means you can get more out of each segment of your marketing budget.

This guide covers what goes into social media marketing costs and factors that impact your costs, with tips from Aimee Dudum Colorado, the chief merchandising and marketing officer of fashion brand Vici, on how to create cost efficiencies in your social media marketing efforts. 

What does social media marketing cost?

How much businesses spend on social media ranges widely and largely reflects a business’s size. Small businesses might run an Instagram account in-house for next to nothing, while enterprise brands can spend upward of $100 million. 

Undefined Beauty Founder Dorian Morris says on Shopify Masters that when she worked for CoverGirl, she had a marketing budget of $186 million. “It blows my mind,” she says. “Now I’m on the very end of it where every single dollar matters.” 

Dorian says that investing more in paid social advertising is in the plans for her small beauty brand, but to launch, she depended entirely on word of mouth. Similarly, Lindsey Carter, founder of Set Active, says on Shopify Masters that she relied on influencer gifting early on. Forgoing paid advertising reduces costs, but you still need to account for the cost of the product and the shipping.

The 2026 CMO survey found that overall marketing budgets as a percentage of company revenue sit at 9%. Of that, 14% is specifically dedicated to social media. According to SoFi Bank, small businesses with fewer than five employees generate an average of $517,000. 

Based on these numbers, small business spending on social media campaigns could look like:

• 9% x 517,000 = $46,530 total marketing budget

• $46,530 x 14.3% = $6,653.79 per year on social media

4 factors that influence social media marketing costs

• Paid ads
• Social media marketing services
• Social media management tools
• Influencers

Every business is different, but these are the most common factors to consider when building out your social media marketing budget:

Paid ads

Social media paid ads are video or still image ads that appear across social feeds. You can create content specifically to be an ad or pay to boost well-performing organic content.

Aimee says you can effectively test concepts with $500 per day on Facebook ads, for example. “If you have a concept in mind you want to test, if you want to see how your audience responds to messaging, or to see if an ad format works,” she says, “then it makes sense to put money toward it.” From there, you can calculate which ad formats bring in the highest return on ad spend (ROAS) and scale your campaign accordingly.

However, Aimee says that may not be enough to make a meaningful difference for a business like Vici, which has more than 2.3 million followers across Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and Pinterest. 

Nik Sharma, known as the DTC guy, said on Shopify Masters that his personal rule is to spend $1,000 a day on ads. “A thousand dollars a day is enough to properly test. You could get away with $500, but it really depends on what the product is you’re selling, how much education is required, and how much that product costs,” he says.

When in doubt, start small with paid social ads, A/B testing different messages and formats. Only pour more money into ads when you can identify a clear winner. 

Social media marketing services

You can create social media content yourself, with the help of freelancers or agencies, or by building an internal team. Aimee found that building an internal team works best for Vici because it allows them to create and edit content regularly and affordably. 

Aimee says one of the benefits of having an internal team is that they know the brand better than an agency would. “Even though our paid agency has a content side you can pay incrementally for, it’s massively expensive, and it would create more work to educate them on the briefing process,” she says. 

If your business is new, explore hiring freelancers like graphic designers or copywriters to help create content and social media advertising campaigns. Those freelancers may eventually become full-time hires as your social media strategy becomes more efficient at generating revenue.

According to data from ZipRecruiter, the average hourly rate of freelancers, including social media marketing freelancers, on the platform Fiverr is $62.54 per hour, while Upwork has an average rate of $34.72 per hour.

Social media management tools

Understanding how your social media content contributes to business outcomes is key to spending efficiently. HubSpot’s 2026 Social Media Trends Report says that algorithms reward metrics like watch time, saves, shares, and repeat engagement. Social media management tools help you create, publish, and track these metrics so you waste less time and money on underperforming content. 

Popular social media management software tools include: 

• Sprout Social. Sprout Social allows you to schedule posts across various social media platforms and provides analytics reports of key metrics, such as likes, shares, and comments. It integrates with Shopify to tie content to purchases. Plans start at $199 per seat per month. 

• Hootsuite. Hootsuite is a social media management platform that allows you to create content, publish it, and keep track of its performance. It comes with tools like design templates and a content generator to help with speed and efficiency as you scale. Plans start at $99 per month to manage up to 10 social media accounts. 

• Dash Social.Dash Social is the social media management platform that Aimee says Vici uses for scheduling, tracking engagement metrics, and seeing how their content ranks against competitors. Plans start at $999 per month for one brand profile per social platform. 

Shopify also has a suite of marketing tools that allow you to reach specific customer segments, grow your subscriber list, run paid social ads, and track performance all from within your ecommerce admin dashboard. Ecommerce plans start at $29 per month. 

Influencers

Influencer pricing is based on how brands negotiate directly with creators or their managers, and rates can vary even within the same follower tier. Influencers are categorized into the following tiers:

• Nano influencers: 1,000 to 10,000 followers

• Micro influencers: 10,001 to 100,000 followers

• Mid-tier influencers: 100,001 to 500,000 followers

• Macro influencers: 501,000 to 1 million followers

• Mega influencers: More than 1 million followers

Within those tiers, pricing for sponsored posts can range wildly depending on the influencer’s average engagement rate, what kind of content you’re looking to sponsor, and whether their primary audience is on Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok. A nano influencer may charge $25 to $150 per Instagram post and $200 to $1,000 for a YouTube video, for example. 

As with paid ads, start small. Try influencer gifting, a strategy also known as product seeding, in which you send like-minded influencers product samples with the intention of getting their attention and starting a working relationship.

Tips for lowering your social media costs

• Batch your content production
• Test organically before spending on paid
• Prioritize speed over perfection
• Stay focused

Since launching in 2012, Aimee has used social media to generate sales and build a loyal following that keeps coming back. Here are her top tips for minimizing your social media costs and maximizing results:

Batch your content production

Aimee says her number one tip is to batch content production. “We have what we call a Studio Content Creation Day,” she says. This entails pulling together a month’s worth of concepts and executing them all at one time. From there, their team edits the content for each social media platform they’re on.

Aimee says that having everything shot in a studio with a production team in LA lowers booking and travel costs and saves time. If your budget doesn’t allow for studio-level ads, you can use Shopify Sidekick, Shopify’s AI assistant, to create ads. Sidekick includes modes like Designer, Photo Editor, Writer, Tech Support, and Marketer to help you create content and write social media captions at no additional cost.

Test organically before spending on paid

Aimee says Vici doesn’t put media dollars behind a concept until it’s proven itself organically first. “I use organic social to test concepts with different content creators before we start to put any type of paid spend behind anything,” she says.

Aimee says her team looks at views, shares, and high engagement to determine what’s working. “They will look at new users the content is reaching. Creating shareable content is a really big piece of our social media strategy at Vici,” she says, adding that shares help the most with getting the most reach.

“We want people who follow our brand or come in contact with our brand to be sharing the content that we create. That’s helped us with follower growth and engagement rate,” Aimee says. 

Once they put budget behind any content, Aimee says they wait a few days to make sure it’s performing well. “You need to allow a little bit of breathing room,” she says. “Pausing something after 24 hours is not something we would normally do, but you do need to be watching closely to make sure you’ve got learnings and understand whether it makes sense to keep spending toward a certain asset in a certain channel, or to pause and let other ideas bubble to the top.”

Prioritize speed over perfection

Aimee says the brand has evolved because she’s been able to let go of perfection in lieu of creating relevant content when it needs to be made. “When there were trends that popped up, we just wouldn’t be fast enough,” she says. Now, when something is time-sensitive, the team moves fast rather than running it through extensive revision.

One recent successful example that comes to Aimee’s mind is an Instagram post referencing the popular Amazon Prime show Off Campus. The simple, text-based post reads, “New week, same problem: still not dating a fictional hockey player.” With more than 5,600 likes and 8,500 shares, it hits Vici’s KPI goals and shows that a simple, text-only post can yield significant results.

Stay focused

It can be tempting to try to appeal to everyone, but that means having no distinct voice or tone, which makes it harder to build a loyal, engaged audience at the lowest possible cost. Vici posts around six times a day, but each post ties to a specific content pillar, such as new arrivals, entertainment, community management, styling education, or a teaser for what’s next. 

Invest the time in fleshing out your brand guidelines before pouring money into paid ads, social media management tools, and creative services. Having a clear vision can pay dividends in the long run.