There is no step in building a social marketing program that creates more fear in the hearts of my students at Northwestern than the thought of building the budget, but actually, it's not that hard. What you want to do is to go at it very systematically, step by step, relying on your professional network, the contacts that you have, for example, digital agencies, as well as using the resources of the participants here in our Capstone, as well as our discussion boards with me, to figure it out. And basically it's just kind of pulling together a really good idea, what it's going to take to move forward. Now, you've already done your Go Viral marketing plan. So, you still have the one year plan there and you would have the pilot program. And now we just want to extend that to the other pieces of our budget puzzle, if you will. When I think about budgets for a social program, I think of them in terms of four major components. First, we have the empowering concept. And that is, what is it going to cost to actually do what we want to do, to make ourselves unique in the minds of our high value market? For example, if I'm doing a quarterly webinar series, how much does does it cost for the webinar software? How much have I got to pay the speakers, if anything? And then, what is going to take in terms of time to run it? Those would be ideas of empowering concept cost. We also have the sites. If I got to build a social site, or I got to build a private virtual community, or a bunch of landing pages for a nurture program, there's a cost associated with them. I also have a technology cost. If I'm running a series of engagement sites, how much does it cost to set those up and run them, on a day to day basis? There also might be cost to run a website, to run our private virtual communities. So there are those sort of technology cost in addition for many of the strategies where you either once we have a database cost as well. So you're going to put those in. Then we have the Go Viral marketing program, we've already done that for our Capstone group. But you do want to take that into account too. So these four components are what we're going to be dealing with. When I think about building a budget, what I do is I think about it in terms of each piece and how to place it together. Now as we do this, I actually have this set up in the template for you to use. But please be aware that it's done in US dollars. If you want to change the currency for the average first purchase, or for any of the components of the budget or the Go Viral marketing program, please feel free to do that. Choice of currency does not impact the calculations and they're easy to adjust as you move forward. So, what we want to do, let's look at a budget and talk a little bit about the pieces that we're going to be doing. So, if we go over here to the template, this is a Go Viral budget. Not a Go Viral budget, it's actually the marketing. As we go over here to the spreadsheet, this is all the four components of a budget. And so let's go through it. At the top here, we have the empowering concept. In this case, we're going to be doing four webinars a year and we're going to pay the speakers 5,000 each, so the annual plan will be 20,000, the pilot will be five. We also want to give them refreshments and certain things, and we're thinking about that as $1,000 per event. So we put that in. These two components become the costs of running our empowering concept. If you're building a mobile app, no matter what you're doing, you put the cost in here. If you're doing something like a mobile app, probably the annual cost and the pilot cost are going to be identical, because they're going to be equal in size. But you want to work that through. And I give you a little bit of an explanation over here, same is true with the next piece. Personnel. One of the things that's hard is that a lot of times when I'm dealing with students, and I asked them to build a budget for personnel, they try to not put in their costs. In other words, if I'm an entrepreneur, I might say, well, I'm not going to put my costs in here for me because I'm doing this. But in reality, the best way to do it is to think about the salary you want to have, think about the salary the other people are going to want, and build it in here. And so for this one I have a content management person and with salary benefits, a tech management individual, the marketing assistant, and I've added some travel, because I'm going to have some events with this particular budget. And what I've done over here is to give you a little way of the way I calculate it, is I start with a base salary. In this case, I got 80, 75, and 50. Then what I do with that is I put in benefits, and I like to use 40% for benefits in the US. Might be different for you. That gives me a total dollar amount that I want to pay these individuals. Then when I think about is, they're not going to be doing this all the time. So what happens if they're doing it 50% of the time, 25% of the time, or 15%? And you can vary this depending on what you're planning on doing and how much it's going to cost. So, when we scroll back over to here. And so, what I've done is, I built those in with different assumptions. Now, notice when I'm doing the pilot, I don't want to have the last two. I don't think there's going to be ever any travel cause, and I don't really need a marketing assistant to me. But you can do that depending on how you want to fund yourself to move forward. The technology costs are basically two things. The first is the cost to build a website or to maintain it, or to maintain your social sites, that's really how much is it going to take to do that. If you're building a website, there are costs. But what you want to do is go out to somebody who builds sites and say, look, I'm trying to do this. What would be some costs that I could put in there? You notice that I don't change it between the pilot and the actual, simply because the one year budget and the pilot budget will be identical because I have to buy the stuff up front to make it happen. You also have a database cost, and what you want to do is go out and look at the price of, say, Access, which is a good database package. There are actually databases everywhere from free to really expensive. But go on the low end if you're a startup. And the key is if you have an IT department, they can probably give you those costs. The final piece is the Go Viral marketing program, which you've already done, so you don't want to copy that over. So if you look at the total for the one year, I, you're looking at an investment of $154,000, for the three month pilot it is 68,000, the reason there's not a lot of difference is the tech costs are all the way across, but those are going to be the costs that I'm going to actually use to justify. And so what I've done is I've taken all the components of my social program, put them into a single spreadsheet. That allows me to see all the different components I can then present this to senior management. And while I didn't do it here, you could take the total price and actually calculate, for example, four webinars, what percent is 20,000 of the total. So you can say, well percentage wise, here's how we're allocating funds. Many companies like to do that. I didn't put it in here but it's an easy addition to your overall budget. So what you want to do is work your way through. Again, talk to experts, talk to us, use the discussion board wisely, and we'll get this thing all pulled together for you. The budget is the key thing because that's not going to be the thing we'd use to actually do the justification of our social marketing program.
