Should I even bother with Social Media?
How much you focus on social media, and on what platform, largely depends on your business model and industry. But on the whole, social media is a part of the modern business world.
Social media isn’t just about likes and comments. Each post is an opportunity for your brand to connect with your customers. Of course, you want to generate leads through your efforts, if not even make sales. But where it shines is in the opportunities it brings for building your brand and it’s worth sticking around for the long game.
Alongside site clicks, you want to be developing genuine relationships with your customers. Each post they read from you affirms that your vision is theirs too and you’re part of the same tribe. Come the time they need your product/service, they’ll know who to come to.
How will my business benefit from Social Media?
Social media is a long game of compounding interest. You’re not going to see immediate results, but the care and consistency you put in will give you a high return on your brand positioning in the long run.
Social media platforms give you ready access to a lot of your customers all in one place. You want to be where they are so they can find you. You want to be visible and credible, so they can trust you. You want your content to speak of the purpose, vision, and values that resonate with them, so they can love you.
Reinforce your brand values to customers who share them with each post.
Establish credibility and expertise in your field as a thought leader.
Nurture customer relationships with real-time human interactions.
Identify potential leads from people who express interest in your posts.
Drive traffic to your website or landing page and convert interest to sales.
Collaborate with others who share your purpose, vision and values.
Provide added value to your customers by sharing great content.
Manage crisis communication at scale and protect your brand.
Provide accessible customer service that showcases how you care for clients.
Stay abreast of industry news for competitive advantage.
Establish your platform to make use of targeted ads for market testing.
Create a playground for testing concepts at low cost and excellent analytics.
Alright, how do we tackle this then?
A lot of businesses adopt a ‘scatter gun’ approach to social media. They’ll do a bunch of things, to varying degrees of success, hope something sticks, and go with that for a while until the algorithm changes and then they’re back to square one. We take a much more strategic approach, focusing on three key aspects of social media management.
Social Media Strategy
It’s important that we know what we’re doing and why we’re doing it! Fundamentally, your social media strategy must be aligned with your brand strategy. There are a number of components to a useful strategy:
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Executive Summary – What is it that you’ll be focusing on for the next ‘x’ amount of time? Which platforms? What message are you wanting to push?
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Goals and Objectives – Derived from your business/brand goals (see Brand Strategy) what measurable outcomes do you want out of your social media efforts? How will you achieve them? How will they be measured.
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KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) – Remember: KPIs work for you, not the other way around!
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Strategic Challenges – What overall business challenges can be addressed directly/indirectly by your strategy?
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Target Audience – Derived from your brand’s target market, but may be segmented more usefully within your social media strategy.
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Competitive Analysis – Who else is in the landscape who might be in competition with your brand? What are they doing? How can you position yourself so they are no longer a competition? Perhaps they can even be a collaborator?
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Deliverables – Once all the above has been established, what do you now require to fulfil on those objectives?
Content Creation and Scheduling
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Generated Content – Graphics, Imagery, Videos, Blogs/Articles etc. All this can be generated in bulk and ahead of time. This structure helps ensure that you stay aligned to your brand and that each piece of content is of high quality.
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Evergreen Content – Some content are one-off – images from a big event or conference, advertising materials for a time-bound event or product, an article about one-off current affairs. But some content are relevant forever, like a beautifully illustrated map of a tourist hotspot, or a well-written article on long-standing industry issues.
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Content Curation – Sometimes, there’s no need to re-invent the wheel. There are plenty of external resources that are producing content that’s relevant to your brand and industry. Careful curation and publishing of outsourced content can help you join a bigger conversation that’s already happening, and position your brand’s views on the topic in an arena that already has an audience.
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Content Calendar – There are scheduling tools and applications that make light work of ensuring that your social media channels remain active and relevant. A calendar is an indispensable tool in this venture – you can create, plan and schedule your content to go out at the optimum time/day, thanks to built-in analytical tools available in a lot of these applications.
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Email Marketing Integration – Depending on where you are in the maturity of your brand and business infrastructure, it’s also a good idea to integrate social media activity with your email marketing and website activity. You may be targeting a completely different audience on mail shots than you are with social media, but there will inevitably be some overlap in relevant content and you want take the opportunity where you can.
Housekeeping and Management
Whilst we love our scheduling tools… you can’t fall asleep on your social media channels either. There’s ad-hoc work to do!
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Copy Writing – Each caption is an opportunity to instil your brand, and you want them to be crafted and aligned to your brand so it speaks of who you are.
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Customer Engagement – You also want to stay responsive to people commenting and sending you messages. You don’t want to leave them hanging on the query for too long.
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Trolls! – They might not need feeding, but they do need managing. The manner in which you do that must also be aligned with your brand – are you a friendly, witty and comedy-driven brand? A bit of banter may work for you. The same approach may not work for a different brand!
That sounds like a lot to do…
The main challenge with managing your brand’s social media is time. It is just time-consuming, even with the aid of AI software and tools. So we offer packages at various levels. With the most comprehensive package, you get to be completely hands-off so you can focus on other areas of your business. At the most basic level, you will get everything you need to run the show, with a little bit of support.
All of our packages can be customised to suit your particular needs and constraints. They also work excellently alongside our SEO and content create packages.
Tier 1
Guided DIY
Our most basic package that gives you everything you need to manage your own social media, plus a little extra support to make sure you stay on track.
- Social Media Strategy – a 2.5 hour facilitated session where we co-create an action plan that’s aligned with your brand strategy and business goals.
- Social Media Audit – of what you already have and recommendations built into the strategy.
- Digital Templates – so that you can create your own content aligned to your brand identity.
- Training and Tutorials – tutorial videos and PDF guides so you can use the digital templates and scheduling tools. We can also arrange a video training session if necessary.
- Monthly Check-in Calls – we will have a 20-minute call with you each month to see how you’re doing and if you need any further support from us.
- Quarterly Strategy Review – every 3 months, we will take a look at your analytics and create a basic report, and make recommended adjustments to your strategy. You will get this as PDF, and we’ll have a 30 minute review call to make sure you’re able to implement everything
Initial Investment: £850
Ongoing Support: £175 per month
ADDITIONAL PLATFORM: £60 PER MONTH
Tier 2
Bespoke Partnership
A middle-of-the-road package that gives you the flexibility to manage your social media with hands-on support from us.
- Social Media Strategy and Social Media Audit – as per ‘Guided DIY’
- Content Creation – We will create all of the graphic content, captions, and copy. We will put all of this on a spreadsheet ready for you to edit, copy and paste into your scheduling app.
- Content Curation – We will create a shared spreadsheet where we will input other content we find that we think you can share (6 pieces of of content per month). It will be up to you whether you do share it or not.
- Training and Tutorials – you will get tutorial videos and PDF guides so you can use the scheduling tools we work with. We can also arrange a video training session if necessary.
- Monthly Report – we will send you a monthly analytics report detailing what activities have had a lot of engagement and what hasn’t, as well as a summary of any algorithm changes relevant to your platform.
- Monthly Review Call (1 hour) – we will go through your report and align on any changes we want to make for the following month.
- Quarterly Strategy Review (1 hour) – we will review all reports from the previous three months, and agree on any changes to your core strategy for the next quarter.
Initial Investment: £850
Ongoing Support: £475 pcm
Additional Platform: +£175 pcm
Tier 3
Full Works
Our most comprehensive package essentially gives you an in-house team. We will take care of everything, report regularly, and make sure you have a point of contact who can integrate with the rest of your sales and/or marketing team.
- Social Media Strategy and Social Media Audit – as per ‘Guided DIY’
- Content Creation, Curation and Scheduling – We will create all your graphics, captions and copy and schedule everything in for you. This includes Curated Content.
- Thought Leadership – We will work with you to write thought leadership articles and content to establish your credibility in your industry.
- Housekeeping – We will respond to all comments and direct messages on all your platforms, and filter any customer-service enquiries directly to your team.
- Leads Tracking – We will track all engagements on your posts and DMs, and input them into a shared spreadsheet that you can import into your CRM. This will allow your sales team to connect with everyone who engages with your content and identity potential leads to follow up.
- Monthly Report, Monthly Review Call and Quarterly Strategy Review – as per ‘Bespoke Partnership.’
Initial Investment: £850
Ongoing Support: £675 per month
Additional Platform: +£275 pcm
I just want to ask a few more things…
We’re all ears! 👂🏽…
We have put together some FAQs below, but if we haven’t answered your questions feel free to shoot us an email.
I'm not sure which package is right for me.
That’s understandable! Book a call with us, and we can make our recommendations based on your business’ unique circumstance.
How will you make sure the content fits my brand?
Before we take on any social media work, we want to make sure that we’re 100% clear on your brand strategy. We will also make sure that we have all the necessary assets from your identity system, and have a clear understanding of your identity guide.
If you don’t have a brand strategy or identity system, we recommend that we start the process at the beginning of your brand journey.
Prior to setting anything live in the first month, we will ask you to review all of our draft content, and make sure you’re happy about the direction we’re taking.
What social media platforms do you work with?
All of them. We will make recommendations on which platforms your business should focus on, depending on your brand strategy, target audience and long-term business objectives.
For example: if your are a small start-up entering the fitness and nutrition market, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and TikTok are the ‘obvious’ platforms for you. However, if your target audience is ‘women aged 40+’, you may prioritise Facebook over TikTok.
As part of your sales strategy, you may be looking to create partnerships with corporate businesses who are keen to support their employees to take care of their health. So, you’ll also want to build a presence on LinkedIn.
There are many variables, and we will work with you to make sure that you’re channeling your resources in the right platforms, based on your brand’s overall goals.
Would my social media strategy include paid ads?
No. ‘Pay-per’click’ advertisements on social media is a separate deliverable.
However, we recommend that you have a strong social media strategy alongside any social media advertising that you do to help protect and build your brand’s credibility.
If you were to put out an ad on Instagram, and someone clicks on to your profile to see that you have 17 followers and 1 post from 3 years ago… you will hurt your brand more than you would help it.
What's the investment?
The prices packages above are a good estimate of the budget you’ll want to put aside for this activity. Depending on your business – where you are in your brand growth, your business objectives and the nature of your product – we can help you decide which package is right for you.
You can book a call here and we’ll be happy to chat 💬.
Are you ready to get started?
I’m ready and rearing to go!
And we’re born ready! 🎉
We’ll get going with our first call so we can find out a little more about your business and what you want to accomplish with social media. Go ahead and book a call on the button below.
Not for me right now.
We hear you. 👍🏽
Whenever you’re ready, you know where to find us. If you’re looking for something else completely, take a look at our capabilities and let us know if we can help! Or ping us an email and we’ll see if we can hook you up with someone awesome 😉.
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