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How to start a social media marketing business.

Hire Slow, Fire Fast – Trust Your Gut!

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If you do the opposite, you’re destined to learn this lesson the hard way. When you are building your team, don’t make this critical mistake that could cost you your agency.

Following the mantra of hire slow, fire fast, will guide you through the process of finding the right talent and into the journey of growing and running your business with a great team.

But when businesses forget the importance of taking their time to build the team, and knowing when to cut bait fast when something ins’t working out, everything starts to derail. Consider the following story, where “hire slow, fire fast” would have produced a completely different (and better) result.

A small business was growing at a rapid rate and in desperate need of some experts to add to the team. They needed someone to fill a position fast. Proposals were going out, work was coming in, and the entire team was beyond capacity. So when a seemingly qualified candidate entered their office, everyone jumped on the hire-fast train. They were excited because, on paper, he was a perfect fit. So they hired him, fast.

But it didn’t take long until the red flags started to appear. It wasn’t anything major at first. No seriously unethical behavior. But, it was very clear that it was not a good culture fit. But something like that seems petty and the business wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe it was just a personality conflict, they thought. But then clients started canceling contracts. New proposals were taking weeks to go out. Business was suffering. Red flag!

But the sad part of this story is that the business didn’t fire fast. They did quite the opposite. They took almost a year to make the decision. Despite the mutual “gut feeling” around the office that everyone just didn’t feel like it was a good fit, and then the glaring fact that business was suffering, they just didn’t take action. This happens a lot in business. No one wants to fire a person. It doesn’t feel good and it can have a really bad impact on an entire family. So even if business is suffering, the business will make the decision to protect the individual vs. the business.

What happened in that year almost took down the entire agency. Clients were canceling contracts, proposals were stalling out, new business was dwindling, and employees were quitting because the company culture just sucked.

But here’s the thing, when you are running a business, you have to take emotion out of it. Hiring an employee, while it may seem like the advice is similar to dating (take it slow but stick to your ethics and break up if there’s a deal breaker), this is not dating. It’s business. And you could very well be sacrificing the livelihood of an entire team of people to save the feelings of one person who should take responsibility for their own actions.

So what can you learn from this?

Hire Slow: Check references, make calls. Don’t just go with what looks good on paper. If they are leaving a current job, talk to their supervisor or coworkers and ask for a reference. Look them up on LinkedIn and see if you have any mutual connections who you can reach out to for a reference. Spend some time with them too. Have lunch or coffee with a few members of your team and see how your personalities mesh. One of the best interviews I ever had was one where I sat in a room with the team and we talked about the type of music we like, our favorite foods, and what we like to do for fun. From that experience, we all knew that I was a good fit for the company, and ended up staying there over 10 years!

Fire Fast: Trust your gut. If something seems off, investigate. Don’t fall victim to office gossip, but pay attention to the things being said around the water cooler. Ultimately, the proof is in the results so if you have a sense that someone isn’t a good fit, AND business is suffering as a direct result of their efforts (or lack thereof), it might be time to let them go.

Power Tip! When hiring, begin the relationship with a trial period that is contingent on one project with a solid end date. If things are working out, then you offer them a position. But if they aren’t working out, you simply thank them at the end of the contract term, offer some constructive feedback if you have it, and tell them you’ll let them know if more work comes up.

Here’s the bottom line…

You can’t afford to have someone on your team who isn’t contributing to the overall success of your business and positive company culture. You literally can’t afford it. One bad hiring decision may cost you your business. Leave emotion out of it. Don’t be a jerk, but don’t sacrifice your livelihood to save someone’s feelings, especially if they are hurting your business. We’re only human and we all make mistakes, but know the difference between something that is teachable and something that is not fixable. It’s much easier to train someone who is a good culture fit, than to have a smart person on staff who doesn’t have the best interests of the business in mind.

8 Time Management Tips for Social Media Marketers

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When you are managing social media for multiple clients, efficiency is the key to success. Time is money and the more time you can buy yourself by using efficiency tools, the more revenue you can generate for your social media business.

These 8 tips will help you make smart decisions about the tools you use to manage social media, so you can maximize the results that you get while minimizing your efforts.

  1. Consider ROI in everything
    You must consider ROI in everything you do. Only plan to do things that are likely to give you a good return or good result. Spend time where it counts the most. If you know the potential return then don’t invest more than what you can expect to get back. What is the anticipated value of what you’re doing? You could ask yourself – is this going to lead to more sales? Keep this in mind when you’re deciding what to do. Focus on the things that are the best use of your resources.
  2. Be disciplined
    Schedule the time to manage your accounts each day and make it part of your routine. If you don’t schedule time to work on specific tasks, then you just have a big to-do list that will never get done.Power Tip! Set a time limit for certain tasks and make it a goal to spend less time completing tasks. You could spend 1 hour writing a blog post or 5 hours. But if you spend 5 hours, it’s not going to be 5 times as good, right? Set a limit for yourself and get into a good habit so you spend less time on tasks.
  3. Have a plan
    A content calendar will help you organize content for the next month (or several months). It’s a great way to make sure you’re posting a consistent message across all channels and not missing any gaps. There’s nothing worse than remembering at the last minute that there was an event you should be posting about and then your entire day derails as you scramble to pull content together.
  4. Checklists
    Know what you want to achieve every time you login. Checklists are super helpful because they keep you on track and focused on the activities that are important. Follow the checklist so you don’t get distracted. As part of your Launchest program, you will have access to our library of checklists for all major social media networks and more!
  5. Limit distractions
    Social media and all of the notifications that come with it can be extremely distracting. Turn off the notifications that are distracting you and only keep the ones that are useful. You don’t need to know every time you have a new fan, but you do need to know every time a comment is left on your page.
  6. Integrate Social Media Into Your Other Activities
    Look for opportunities to create social media content with other marketing efforts. What other marketing activities do your clients do, and how can you add a social element? Create content on-the-go with a mobile device, and encourage your team and your client’s team to be proactive in creating content for social media where they are already marketing.
  7. Test, Learn, and Improve
    Test and learn so you can become more efficient and effective. How do you know what works? Set your objective, align all content to that objective, and measure the results. If you want to drive sales did a post about a product get engagement and did sales for that product go up? If you want to generate awareness for a cool new product, is your post about it getting comments and shares?
  8. Use Social Tools
    Tools are a big part of efficiency. You can use efficiency tools to schedule posts, check multiple social networks from one site, setup smart automation of tasks, and create images. Check out our post on some efficiency tools we recommend!

Use these tips to help manage your time and you’ll be on your way to making more time to take on more clients!

4 Efficiency Tools for Social Media Marketers That REALLY Save You Time

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efficiency tools

Managing social media accounts for you and your clients can be overwhelming. You have a lot of choices in tools to help make your life easier and your day more efficient. But some of these tools can actually be a huge distraction.

You can use efficiency tools to schedule posts, check multiple social networks from one site, setup smart automation of tasks, and create images. Here are our favorite tools in each of these categories.

Scheduling Tools
Scheduling out social media posts will save you a ton of time. Once you create a content calendar, scheduling out the posts for a month or more will take much less time than if you had to login to multiple networks every time you have to post something. For social media scheduling, we recommend tools like Buffer or Hootsuite. Both tools are great for scheduling out posts on multiple platforms, and they also offer analytics so you can analyze which posts perform best and spend your time building content that gets better results.

Check multiple social networks from one site
Managing multiple accounts and multiple social networks for a client can create a lot of work. Tools like Buffer and Hootsuite allow you to login to one dashboard and monitor activity on multiple accounts. Think of the time you’ll save in not having to login to all of those sites separately!

Setup smart automation
You probably notice that there are certain tasks that you execute for your clients over and over. Use smart automation to automate tasks and save time. IFTTT (If This Then That) is a site that helps you automate certain processes (called recipes) between apps and devices. For example, you can setup a “recipe” to automatically post a new blog to Facebook.

Create images
There are a lot of talented graphic designers out there, and we love them. But there’s a time and a place for everything and sometimes you need to quickly and efficiently create images without a long process or high costs. Especially with the ever-churning pace of social media, you need tools to help you make great content fast. Canva is a site that allows you to design beautiful images using templates through a user-friendly interface. In fact, most of our blog post images are created in Canva.

Whatever tools you use focus on tools that improve your results or save you time.4

How Much Can I Make with a Social Media Business?

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How Much Can I Make blog post

More and more people are starting their own social media businesses – and it makes sense. Social media continues to grow, social media spending continues to grow and there is still a huge opportunity for people to make money by running social media for businesses.

Business owners are busy running their business. They know social media is important but they don’t know where to start.

A lot of people considering starting their own social media business want to know how much $$ they can make by starting their own social media business.

The answer (as always) is that it depends….. That being said, let’s review a few scenarios.

Part Time Social Media Management:

Let’s say you start part-time while you still have your day job. Realistically you can probably handle 2 clients in your evenings and weekends. The monthly retainer for social media management will probably range from $500 – $2,000 (especially if you are just starting out), so for this example let’s use $1,000/month.

Monthly Retainer: $1,000/month X 2 clients X 12 Months = $24,000

In your first year managing social media part-time you could make $24,000… your part time business could make as much as some people make in a year.

Full Time Social Media Management:

If you are ready to dive in to social media management and have time to actively solicit new clients and manage clients you can make a big impact. If we still assume that your average retainer is $1k/month, an average social media manager can easily hand 5 – 8 clients. Many businesses have clients paying more than $1k per month.

Monthly Retainer: $1,000/month X 8 clients X 12 Months = $96,000

If you simply add one new client a month, at the end of your first year you’ll be making $96k – and you can continue to grow from there.

As you can see, creating your own social media business can be very profitable. These are simply guidelines or scenarios – how successful you are depends on how much work you do.

5 Things I Wish I Knew Before I Started my Business

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5 things before starting my business

I’ve been in business for 6 years now (time flies) and since we work with so many social media entrepreneurs through Launchest, I wanted to share 5 things that I wish I’d known as I started my business.

When you start a business you’re aiming in the dark, and it can take a lot of trial and error to figure out exactly what to do and how to do it to successfully grow your business.

As I think back, here are 5 things I wish I’d known when I was just starting my business:

1. Sell Packages and Avoid Custom Quotes

When I first got started I spent a TON of time creating proposals for people – and EVERYTHING was customized. This created a few problems. First, businesses don’t know exactly what they want or need – they are looking to me for leadership. Eventually I packaged what I sold into a few different “packages” – they could do social media management, social media coaching or a strategic plan. Each of these had a clear scope, price (although I sometimes adjusted it based on the client) and I saved a ton of time.

I still did custom quotes for high-value clients, but 90% of the time I sold packages.

Seriously, this saved tons of time and improved my quote rate.

2. Build Processes

When you get started you need to have processes and systems for handling new clients so that things don’t fall through the cracks and you look organized. I’m not naturally organized so it took me a long time (and lots of missed opportunities) to build processes around both managing my business, managing clients, managing my sales process.

As I think back I missed so many opportunities because I didn’t have the right processes in place.

3. Follow Up and Do What you Say You Will

The biggest complaint that most people have when trying to do business with someone is getting quick, timely responses. I’ve had companies come to us for recommendations for social media execution because they already talked to 5 people, and none of them sent the quote when they said they would! I had this experience when hiring a contractor for my house. The guy I hired was the one who gave us the estimate on the spot – the others were days (or weeks) late!

I’ve lost lots of business and credibility over the years to poor follow-up. Now we have a system (see #2) that tracks followup and manages this process. We are often complimented on our speedy turnaround and followup process 😉

4. Qualify Prospects Early

At the beginning of my business I wasn’t very good at qualifying prospects. I just didn’t know if someone had the budget and would spend money. I remember spending 2 hours on the phone with a guy who wanted social media for his Real Estate business. We happened to be running a special social media for real estate agents workshop, so he could get the advice he needed for only a few hundred bucks (instead of thousands in consulting). He said he didn’t have that kind of money. What a waste of time!

Here is a tip: Throw out a “ball-park” figure early on. This allows you to see if you are even in the same ball park and will quickly end conversations with people who simply don’t invest in their business or have unrealistic expectations.

5. Focus First on What Matters Most

It is really easy to waste time on things that are either fun or more interesting than what you really need to do. When I first started out I spent tons of time on things that didn’t matter, and not enough time on the things that would grow my business quickly. You have limited time. Use it wisely.

Focus first on getting PAID CLIENTS. Nothing else matters. You don’t need to set up an LLC (I’m not a lawyer, but you technically don’t need an LLC to start a business). You don’t need endless research. You need to get out there quickly with a credible business and a good value proposition.

Don’t waste time or make excuses. Make money.