From the Social Desk: How to Develop a Budget That Supports Great Content

When it comes to strategic planning, it's easy to love the dreaming phase – those blue-sky sessions that crystallize your goals and aspirations – only to dread the follow-up actions: aligning big ideas with bandwidth and budgets.

But here's the reality: Strategic planning only works if you consider every phase from ideation to implementation. And it doesn't have to be painful if you come to the table prepared with the right questions to ask.

Here's our list of the top items to address with your team. Reviewing them together will help you develop a budget that supports great content – stuff that looks great, sounds smart, and performs well in 2026:

✔️ Are we carving out enough budget for our social team to jump on opportunities in real time – even if they’re brand adjacent and don’t directly support the bottom line?

✔️ And we allocating enough dollars for our team to create a meaningful series or original content - including social-first short-form video? Think about stock imagery licensing and original footage fees, production costs and spends for paid campaigns. Also, if budget is REALLY constrained, consider ditching some of the higher priced pro tools in favor of visual suites like Canva, which can do a lot more than they used to – just sayin'.

✔️ Do we have the infrastructure and organization to produce content in a frictionless way? A digital asset manager like CleanPix can help you keep your photos and videos organized and ensure that you don't run into usage issues like expired creative licenses or copyright challenges.

✔️ Have we thought about emerging platforms – whether they're right for us and how we'll prioritize them in 2026? And, if we're going to use them, how will they’ll impact our projections? Experimentation still requires time and money.

✔️ Do we have the right level of support for our community management and audience engagement needs? This is an area that can make or break your customer retention.

✔️ Are we using the right tools to plan, schedule and publish our content, or do we need to upgrade? Nothing wrong with OGs like Hootsuite, but there are other tools like Later and Sprinklr that offer a variety of features. Choose one that's right for your team size, platform usage, social goals and performance measurement requirements.

✔️ Have we updated our content strategy to reflect our goals for next year and beyond? Think about how you answered all of the questions above, and whether your plans need some tinkering before the tactical phases begin.