How much does a social media campaign cost?

Since the rise of digital in Medical Device marketing, we’re often asked how much it costs to run a Medical Device social media campaign?

This is quickly followed by what’s included in this cost? If you’ve caught yourself asking these questions, this could be the perfect article for you.

In this article we’ll explain each part of a social media campaign and how it impacts the final cost.

In short, the cost of a social media campaign varies depending on the level of service you require, the complexity of your campaign, whether it’s paid or organic and the types of media you post. We’ll look at all these variables below and how they impact cost.

What’s your objective(s)

Before you start any social media campaign, either internally or by recruiting a freelancer or specialist agency, it’s critical you know what you want to achieve.

Are you looking to grow brand awareness, increase lead generation or launch a new product or procedure?

We’ve created ‘A guide to successful Medical Device social media’ that walks you through how to plan this initial stage correctly.

Different types of social media campaigns? Organic or paid?

Once you’ve planned your social media objectives, you can decide if you want to use paid, organic or both. There are clear advantages and disadvantages to each when it comes to costs and outcomes.

Organic social media

Organic campaigns are ideal for speaking to your current community (those already within your network).

There‘s no cost associated with posting, just your time and energy. You may need a copywriter, graphic designer and potentially videographer to create the posts for you if you don’t have these skills in-house. Using a freelance team or agency will provide you access to all these skills, but at a cost.

This can be anywhere from £200 – £5,000+ per month, depending on the number of services needed, the specialisation of your agency or freelance team and the number of posts created. Possible services are listed below.

Organic social media: variables and costs

There are many factors that will affect how much a social media campaign will cost. Will it be run in-house, by an agency or with freelancer support?

Once you’ve decided your strategy and have a clear idea of what you want to achieve in a certain time frame, you can start to map out the tactics needed to achieve this. Included should be:

1. The number of posts each month
2. Content plan creation
3. What type of visuals/media you’ll use to keep the feed engaging
4. Brand / social media guidelines so your posts feel cohesive, on brand and compliant with each country’s regulations
5. Which platforms you’ll post on

You can complete all of these yourself, or if you’re restricted by time, you can hire one or more freelancers (each specialist in the different areas), or an agency.

From a cost perspective, a team of freelancers will probably require a lower budget as you’ll take the role of project manager. On the other hand, all specialities will be under one roof when working with an agency, including a project manager with specialist experience to coordinate all activities. It’s totally a matter of budget and available time to decide what is right for you.

So, regardless of who you choose to work with, what other factors will increase or decrease your cost per month?

The number of posts

This is quite straightforward as the more posts you send out each month, the more time either your freelance or agency team will require.

For each post sent out this will include writing the copy, designing the graphics or recording/creating a video and scheduling it for posting on a platform like Hootsuite.

If Hootsuite is not available, each post may need to be manually uploaded at the correct time, possibly adding to the cost of the project.

Content plan creation

Once you know how many posts you need to meet your objective, the next step is creating an engaging content plan, so your social media platforms add value to your audience and meet your objectives.

You may want to do this yourself, but if you feel you would like specialist help, this will be in addition to the normal posting costs supplied by your freelancer(s) / agency partners.

The cost of the plan will be dictated by the number of posts per week and the timeframe of the planner, but normally this will take your team between 5-15 hours to put together.

Included in this will be a kick off call, background research and creation of the plan, including rough campaign ideas. The first plan is always a longer process as your team gets to know you, but after that they should be more straightforward.

Types of visuals / media to be posted

Do you want to use static images, GIFs or video? Each of these changes the cost of your campaign, but as GIFs often have more engagement than static images, and videos have more engagement than GIFs, it’s worth doing a mixture.

If you want to create a series of videos, you’ll need to include a filming day. Costs for this are discussed in our article ‘The cost of Videography’

Brand / social media guidelines

Before you start posting, you’ll most likely need to create brand and social media guidelines to ensure posts are consistent and also compliant with local country regulations, and more broadly the EUMDR, TGA or FDA as appropriate.

This can be quite time consuming to create, but a great way to ensure you fully understand the regulations. If you need your agency to support you with this, they’ll most likely have templates that they can adapt to your requirements, reducing the overall cost and time needed to create each of these pieces.

Which platforms will you post on?

Finally, you need to decide which platforms to post on. Adding certain platforms may only have a small impact on cost, especially if you’re posting the same content, whereas others will add more work for your team having a bigger impact.

For example, adding Facebook feed posts to a LinkedIn campaign will use the same sized images so will not have a big impact on cost, unless you change the content, however, Instagram will require resizing of each post which will take time for your team, increasing costs.

To understand more about each platform the following article may be of interest – Which platform is best for Medical Device marketing?

Key takeaways

In short, the cost of your social media campaign will change depending on how many services you need from your freelance team or agency and the size of your campaign.

Think about each of the factors above before engaging a freelance team or agency, so they can provide an accurate estimate for your project and provide you with the support you need.

Paid social media

Paid ads are an excellent way of targeting demographics that are not currently in your community (contacts, followers etc).

Paid social media adverts will charge you either by the number of impressions (brand awareness) or clicks (lead conversion) that you receive.

The cost of running paid ads will be heavily skewed to adverting fees charged by each platform, which can vary depending on your keywords and their competitive score. You also need to factor in agency costs which can be as high as 30% of ad spend.

All this is broken out in more detail below.

Paid social media adverts – variables and cost

Although costs can escalate quickly with paid ads, the final cost is often limited by your audience’s size, so if there’s only 10,000 in your audience that will limit the total potential spend on any network. However, each platform has different cost-per-click rates, so this is worth considering when putting your paid advertising campaign together.

Facebook – average costs

The average cost per click of healthcare advertising is $1.32 (£1.07) on Facebook.

This was published in 2017 and costs have risen since then, so it is most likely around $2 (£1.63) per click in 2022. This is quite low in comparison to other platforms, particularly LinkedIn but the target audience is different along with its targeting algorithms.

LinkedIn – average costs

The typical cost per click (CPC) or per 1,000 impressions differs by the type of ad on LinkedIn. Adverts on LinkedIn are normally more expensive than other platforms, but they do offer a different level of targeting around job title and industry, amongst other things.

Costs-per-click (CPC) or per 1,000 impressions are:

• Sponsored content: $8 – $11 (£6.51 – £8.96)
• Text ads: $3 – $6 (£2.44 – £4.89)
• Dynamic ads: $6 – $8 (£4.89 – £6.51)
• Sponsored messages: $25 – $60 (£20.36 – £48.86)

Instagram Ads – average costs

Instagram is much more targeted at a younger consumer demographic and its costs also tend to be lower than other platforms. Here is a summary of average costs by post type:

• Cost-per-click – Link clicks, likes, reactions, comments & shares: $0.40 – $0.70 (£0.33 – £0.57)
• To a URL destination: $0.50 – $0.95.
• Cost-per-engagement: $0.01- $0.05 (£0.01 – £0.04)
• Cost-per-thousand-impressions: $2.50 – $3.50 (£2.03 – £2.85)

Agency commissions – Average rate

The other cost to consider with paid ads is your agency or freelancer fee. A freelancer may charge a fixed fee to set up and manage your paid ads, however, a more traditional scenario is a % of ad spend. This varies between 15% – 30% depending on your agency’s experience, size and proven results. This fee normally includes design of your campaign, with a minimum spend to ensure your agency’s efforts are covered if you decide not to move forward with the ads in the longer term.

Successful social media with a specialist agency

Do you want to communicate more effectively with HCPs and patients? Do you want to be able to deliver high-quality social media campaigns as part of your larger multichannel marketing strategy? You’ve come to the right place.

Podymos is a healthcare marketing agency, specialising in downstream Medical Device marketing.

We’re more expensive than non-specialised agencies and freelance teams because we only work in the Medical Device space so we have specialist knowledge and experience that other agencies may not be able to offer you.

If you want high-quality, compliant campaigns that help achieve your business goals, we’d love to hear from you. Simply leave us your contact details below and we’ll get back to you very soon for a no obligation chat.