General Archives - Launchest

How to Hire Your Social Media Marketing Team

Depending on how big you want your social media business to grow, at some point you are going to need to consider hiring a team. You’ll also need to manage that team. It takes time and energy to manage people, so it’s important to know your options and choose the one that best fits your needs.

Here are three hiring options to consider when building your social media marketing team:

Outsource to freelancers. This can be a great first step in building a team. If you’ve never managed people, you will need to learn how to direct them, hold them accountable, and be a productive and positive authority figure. Managing freelancers will allow you to hone those skills on a smaller scale because you won’t have the added stress of managing benefits, hours etc.
Hire part-time contractors to “try before you buy.” While business is growing, you’ll need to delegate tasks so you don’t get overwhelmed or over capacity, but you don’t need the extra overhead, plus cash flow may not be steady enough yet to justify a full-time position. Part-time contractors can be a great solution as they can get a job done, and if it works out you can hire them full-time. If they aren’t a good fit, you can save a lot of hurt feelings and awkward moments by simply thanking them and telling them you’ll call if another project comes up that is a good fit for them.
Hire full-time employees when cash flow is consistent, and the workload justifies it. Don’t hire your best friend because you think it would be fun to work together. That almost never works out. Hiring quality people is critical to success, and also often comes with a higher cost. Only hire when the workload is there to support it, and they are an asset to your business vs. a liability.

No matter what the size of your team, you will need to account for time spent managing them individually, as well as conducting team meetings.

Once you consider all of the costs and benefits of each option, you’ll be able to make a smarter decision about the direction that’s right for your company.

Have you tried one or more of these options and have an experience you’d like to share?

4 Simple Steps to Building a 6 Figure Social Media Agency

by Krista Neher Leave a Comment

I just saw this headline on a Facebook ad. The truth is there are tons of headlines like this.

The reality is that there are no simple steps to a 6 figure business and most of these guys make money selling this idea to people when they haven’t actually built a 6 figure social media business themselves. They record these videos infront of private jets or fancy cars (that they usually don’t own by the way) and sell a dream that doesn’t exist. With almost no work you can be rich.

They sell you the easy path.

The simple solution.

The diet pill.

The truth of the matter is that it isn’t that easy.

Can you build a 6 Figure social media business? YES

Can you do it in 4 Simple Steps? NO

There are no two ways about it – creating and running a successful business takes motivation, hard work and smart decisions.

There are Ways to Accelerate Your Success

Look, there are no easy answers, but there are plenty of ways to accelerate your success. Learn from those who have done it. Get templates and tools that show you how.

We created Launchest to share with you over 30 years of experience in running and working with brands and digital agencies so that you can get started and get results faster. Get templates, tips, strategies, workflows, documents and everything you need to be successful.

It isn’t 4 simple steps. It is proven sales tools, presentations, marketing materials, onboarding documents, proposal strategies, strategy templates, measurement guides and all of the things that go in to executing a social media agency.

Even with 30 years of knowledge I couldn’t launch a new social media business tomorrow and earn 6 figures with 4 simple steps, and I guarantee you that the guy with his photo infront of a private jet isn’t going to show you.

Don’t Buy the Lie

Look – I know it sounds amazing to get simple steps to huge success, and you are probably tempted to check it out. Don’t waste your time. These people make their money selling you systems – not running agencies.

We have spent 30 years running social media agencies, and that experience is bottled up for you to get you better results faster (and save you time and money on costly mistakes we made). We don’t spend our time selling you systems for success – we created this to help you benefit.

8 Time Management Tips for Social Media Marketers

by Allison Chaney Leave a Comment

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.

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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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?
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

by Allison Chaney Leave a Comment

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?

by Krista Neher Leave a Comment

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.