How to Be a Social Media Consultant

As social media marketing has grown over the past few years (and is projected to continue to grow) more and more business professionals are asking how they can be social media consultants.

Social media is projected to continue to grow – studies suggest that social media budgets will double and almost every business (95% to be exact) will become active on social media. This means that there is demand for social media consultants.

If you are thinking about starting out as a social media consultant, you are probably wondering what steps you should take to become a credible social media consultant and build a business. Importantly, you probably want to know how to get clients!

1) Get Educated in Social Media Marketing

If you’d like to be taken seriously as a consultant in anything, take the time to educate yourself and get some qualifications or credentials. A social media certification helps. Even if you don’t want to get certified, you’ll need to make sure that you really know your stuff. Clients will be paying you to be an expert, so a passive interest probably isn’t good enough. That being said, there are tons of social media training programs that can get you up-to-date.

2) Create Business Assets

You’ll need some basic business assets – like a business name, a logo and a website. Ideally, you’ll also be personally active in social media, although it isn’t necessary. To be taken seriously as a consultant (outside of people who already know you) you’ll want to have business assets to look legitimate.

3) Determine Specifically How You Can Help Businesses

Have a clear idea of how you can help businesses and what value you bring to the table. Will you run their social media? Advise them? Create assets? Figure out the services that you can offer and how your services impact the bottom line of the businesses that you want to reach. You should have a very clear value proposition.

4) Target Clients

The more targeted your approach the more likely you are to be successful. It is best to start with something that builds off of your existing background or experiences. From there you can build a list of the types of businesses that are likely to hire you (and that you can really help)!

5) Prospect, Pitch and Land the Client!

It sounds easy when you write it out, but it isn’t. You’ll need to develop some resources to be effective here like a sales pitch, a presentation and a proposal. Generally it will take a few meetings to make it through all of these steps.

6) Build Out Workflows

Have a clear plan around how you will work with a business. What happens when? Who is responsible for everything? Create processes and workflows so that things don’t slip through the cracks.

7) Execute

Execute with excellence and continue to bring value back to the clients. Remember, you always want to continue to build on a good impression and keep your clients happy.

There is huge demand for social media consultants and experts – get started now so that you can be on the leading edge. Discover exactly how you can start your social media business with Launchest.