How much should I spend on social media advertising for this event?

June 27, 2022 12:04 PM

I'm part of a non-profit and we're holding an event that starts tomorrow and runs for up to about three weeks and someone said they want to help us out financially (they said they're an accountant and can easily help out economically). Since it seems like money is not going to be a major hurdle as far something like social media advertising is concerned, how much should we ask for without asking for an overly excessive amount? Is it indeed "the more you spend" the better or is there a limit?

Also, should we be just doing over Instagram and Twitter or should we also include Facebook and Reddit?

posted by sounddelalladaya to Media & Arts (8 answers total)

I don’t have an answer but I do have a small suggestion: don’t advertise on Instagram. By the time your followers see it the event will have passed. I don’t see any timely advertising. Mother’s Day? I see it on Monday after. Same with most things.

Good luck.
posted by terrapin at 12:10 PM on June 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Ads can be stopped, so the timeliness thing shouldn't be an issue as long as you remember to stop them.

I'd do ads where you already have the most followers, and target the ads at your followers or people who express interest in the event. (Depending on where you have the event page, you may be able to have a tracker on the page that allows you to target the ad at the people who visited that page. Yes, people hate those ads, and yes, they work.) The latter is kind of a lot of work if you don't have someone on your team who already does that, so it may or may not be worth it to you.

Hard to give you a concrete amount without knowing anything about the event, your org, where you are, etc. But you can do a bit of research by setting up a dummy ad campaign and seeing how much it will cost per click. Then you can math it out from there based on how many clicks you want (for example, if you want 20 RSVPs, you probably want 200 clicks).
posted by lunasol at 12:20 PM on June 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

I'm trying to understand something. Did this person offer to just underwrite your social media spending specifically? Or just offer to donate to the organization to help with the event? If the latter, ask for them 2-3x more than you need. The cost of doing the work of advertising and running an event is a lot more than the pass-through cost of advertising.
posted by Miko at 1:23 PM on June 27, 2022 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Miko, yes the person offered to donate to the organization to help with the event in general. Right on and thank you for that advice.
posted by sounddelalladaya at 1:45 PM on June 27, 2022

I used to own an independent movie theater. For what it's worth, I didn't have much success in paying for Facebook ads. It didn't seem like they had any effect. The theater has a dedicated Facebook page with something like 2,000 likes. Publishing posts on that page worked well. But paid ads didn't seem to bring any extra traffic.
posted by JD Sockinger at 2:06 PM on June 27, 2022

I hope this not a stupid answer but long ago when we wanted free advertising, we'd send a press release to the local paper, preferably with a good quality photo and they'd run a story for free.
posted by b33j at 4:33 PM on June 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

Depending on the event delivery platform - if it is a physical location - information flyers can still be a cost effective form of advertising. In addition, if you do variations across areas, you can see which variants are most effective.
posted by Barbara Spitzer at 4:47 PM on June 27, 2022

I'm sure the event is underway now. I'd love to have given some more thought, but it's tough to recommend the most effective marketing plan without knowing the event type and location. I hope it's gone/going well.
posted by Miko at 6:27 PM on July 1, 2022