03. Booked Out Social Media Series - Part 2: Tapping Into Your Signature Service

Podcast
Written By Jessica Sheehy
 

A profitable social media management business does not stem from offering EVERY. Single. Service. that exists. shrug We’re going to uncover your signature service, a.k.a. what you do best. Then we’ll turn that into what your dream clients know to turn to you for.

Welcome back to Hashtag Managed. Today we are in part two of our three-part series to help you land your first or another social media management client. Today we're talking about how we can tap into our signature service because here's the thing, we don't need to offer every social media management service possible to everyone. If you haven't listened to our first episode of this podcast yet, we dive into the importance of choosing a niche for your social media management business. Go listen to that episode after you finish listening to this one and you'll get a little bit more context as to how you can reach down as a social media manager. When we're marketing to everyone, we are actually marketing to no one. Yes, I said that correctly. We are marketing to no one.

So, for example, you share a general post on Instagram, on Stories, on LinkedIn, in a Facebook group. I'm now offering social media management packages. DM me for more info. Now, I'm not trying to call anyone out. If anyone has done that, I have done that in the past as well. It is one of the first ways that I thought I was going to land a client and more on that story. But if you're hearing crickets, there's a reason why no one is responding. It has nothing to do with who you are and what you're offering, but everything to do with how you're offering it and who you're offering it to.

The truth about it is simple. The riches are in the niches. When we niche down and get crystal clear on the exact person we can serve, we can attract them, we're able to share messaging that speaks directly to them in our own marketing and we are focused in on getting really great results for one audience. And that in return is going to create a portfolio full of highly engaged accounts that we have managed in raving client reviews.

So let's not forget that that also opens up the doors, for your clients to refer you and your social media management services like crazy to their network of similar entrepreneurs. This is how you become known in an industry and get booked up in your social media management business.

Referrals are the best form of marketing and they all stem from providing a really great service and experience to your clients. And we'll dive a little bit more into all of the processes that you need to create a stellar client experience for your social media management clients in part three. Coming next week of this three-part series. So how can we niche down in the audience that we're serving? Let's dive into a few questions that you can ask to really figure out who your target niche is as a social media manager.

  • What do they do for work?

  • Where do they live?

  • Where do they spend their time online?

  • Are they scrolling through Instagram posts?

  • Are they laughing at silly dancing TikToks?

  • Are they reading thought-provoking articles on LinkedIn?

  • What are they currently struggling with in their business?

  • How would outsourcing help their business and their life improve?

  • Where do they consume content themselves?

  • What influencers are they following?

  • Where do they shop?

  • What TV shows are they binging?

  • What movies are they watching?

  • What hobbies do they have?

  • And finally, what do they do for fun outside of business, outside of their industry, outside of their expertise?

Once we answer all of these questions, we are going to know two things which really excites me as a marketer. We are going to know who this ideal client avatar is, so we know who we're going to work with. We know how we can talk to them in our marketing, in our messaging, but we're also going to know how we can connect with them.

And that really excites me because we're going to know what we can say, what we can share, and everything that we can do to connect with them on a personal level. And we'll talk later on in this podcast about best practices for landing clients and of course, closing sales and all of that that comes with actually converting prospects into leads into paying clients in your client roster. But when we know how to connect with them, we are strengthening that know-like and trust factor. And that is so important for people to buy from you, because people buy from people. So when we can connect with our ideal audience beyond everything that there is with them, we are able to truly build a bond in a relationship with them. And like I said earlier in this episode, relationship marketing is so important. It's the best form of marketing for any business.

So now how can we craft the perfect service and messaging to them all in one sweep? With this practice that we've just done, we can start off by identifying our ideal client's pain points.

  • What are they struggling with?

  • What do they deal with?

  • What do they need help with?

You can start by conducting market research. If you don't really know the answers to these questions yet, don't worry, you will. But you can start to find out what it is that they need right now to help make their lives, their businesses so much easier. And a few ways that I love to conduct market research are inside of Facebook groups if they allow for that sort of content to be shared. I love doing it on Instagram story polls. It's super fun. And so easy to answer something on an Instagram sticker. Someone can just easily tap or share their thoughts. Or you can do a survey that you can send out to people that are following you on social media that you've connected with in an entrepreneur Facebook group, or on LinkedIn, or on your email list or wherever they live to do that market research to figure out what they need.

So now that you know what they need, identify the solution to what they're going through and what they need with your product or service that you're offering. So when what you're offering so your product or service offers a solution to your ideal client or customers pain points, problems or struggles, marketing and selling becomes so much easier.

It eliminates all of the mindset around selling of I'm not a great salesman. I can't close sales. I don't know how to do this. When you come from a place of service and offer value, selling is easy. Selling is having conversations with people and figuring out how you can serve them, if you can serve them, and if you can't, offering solutions to help make their lives easier, to bridge that connection, and to build that relationship. So, finally, taking these two steps and writing specifically to these pain points with their messaging.

So, like I mentioned, I love doing market research and figuring out exactly where people are at with the questions I'm needing to know.

  • Again, what are they struggling with?

  • What do they deal with on a daily basis?

  • What do they need help with?

  • What are their desires, their dreams, their vision?

And when I get that market research back, when I read what people have submitted in a survey or in a form, or have messaged me, or have shared in a sticker on Instagram stories, I'm able to see exactly the words and the phrases that they use. And I want to say for any market research that you do for your business, or if you happen to ever do it for clients in the future, save a folder. Save a folder specifically for market research.

It can be screenshots on your camera, roll on your phone. It can be a Google Drive folder. It can live in your project management tool, but have a folder to save those screenshots so you know what to specifically say in your messaging to make your marketing become so much more impactful.

So now that we've really developed our ideal clients and who we're working with, we've really delved into exactly what they're dealing with. How can we serve them? Let's craft your signature service. This is one part, what does my audience need? And another part, what do I love doing? What can I get results for? What do I have past experiences with? What am I passionate about? And if you're new to social media management, I want to just say that it's completely okay to not know the answer to most of those questions. What do you love doing? Do you love the more creative work? Are you more analytical and data-driven? Do you have experience with customer service? Because when you're creative and you have those skills, you're going to excel at content creation.

If you're analytical and data driven, you are going to really understand how to hack growth on social media, create really in-depth analytics reports to find trends and to know what's happening in your client accounts to create a great strategy for them. If you have experience and skill sets with customer service, maybe you are going to shine when it comes to community management for the social media channels that you are working in with engagement and lead generation and all of those different skills and the services that come from them are so, so valuable. This can go even deeper into what social media platforms you love. You don't have to necessarily take it out of the experience, you have, especially if there's a new platform that pops up. We all know that happens. Or if there's a platform that you want to dive into, you can definitely do that.

So a few different signature services that you can have are Instagram management. You can focus primarily on full Instagram management. You can focus on Reals management, you can focus on Instagram Stories management and content creation. You can go the other side and go into lead generation and become an engagement specialist. You can forget Instagram entirely.

You can focus on Facebook, group marketing, community building for your clients. You can turn to Pinterest and offer Pinterest management. You can offer TikTok management, content creation for TikTok or you can dive into LinkedIn, YouTube, and with all of the platforms that exist there are three really great signature services that you can niche down into or create a really great package for your signature service that would be content creation, management and strategy and community engagement. And you can focus primarily on one or you can focus on creating a package that combines all of them. And of course you can focus on the platforms that you know your ideal audiences on. Remember we did all of the market research. We figured out what they're on, we figured out what their audience is using, where we need to market their business. We know the platforms we love and the content we love to consume and the content that we love to create and we're going to figure out the service that we are going to offer.

So now of course, when we go into figuring out exactly what we're going to offer, that is when we are going to create a unique selling proposition. So that's a fancy marketing term. The acronym is USP for what you offer to your clients. It's otherwise known as the unique value proposition that your business offers to the industry and this is how you are going to stand apart from the competition. If you've ever thought before I don't think now is the time for me to start my social media management business. Or maybe I need to throw in the towel.

I want to say there are so many clients out there. There are so many different social media managers out there offering different services. They are different creators than you are. They're different business owners. They are different marketers than you are. And what you have to bring to the table, who you're specifically bringing that to the table for, and the signature service that you're doing that with is your unique selling proposition. And I want you to own that and create that.

So let's circle back to our example from the beginning of this episode. Instead of saying, I'm now offering social media management packages, DM me. For more info on wherever you're trying to market your business, we can now say I have two spots open for female Squarespace website designers who want to get out of the weeds of managing their Instagram account and back into designing scroll-stopping websites for their impact driven entrepreneurs. I don't know about you, but that was an amazing eye health statement within a statement of I have spots open in my social media management business.

You know exactly who I was talking to. I'm talking to Squarespace website designers who work with impact-driven entrepreneurs. And I am saying specifically that I know they're tired of being in the weeds of managing their Instagram account.

If I want to get even deeper and I know more about this person, maybe they're tired of showing their face on Instagram stories. They don't feel comfortable doing it. They don't like doing it. They'd rather be coding and designing beautiful converting websites for their clients. Maybe they don't want to dance on reels or do anything crazy, but they have a portfolio of beautiful work that we can showcase on Instagram to promote their business and grow their impact. So that's what we're going to do. It's a complete 180 turn from what we were sharing in that previous statement to try to find what we are going to offer our clients and to help us in our lead generation to help find our next or first social media management client.

I hope you enjoyed this episode. Next week, we are diving into packages, pricing and procedures to close out this three-part series. We'll be covering all of the tools and systems that you need to set up to land clients, get paid for your work, and deliver an exceptional experience that builds lifetime dream clients in your book out social media management business. Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of Hashtag Managed.

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Thanks for listening!

Jessica Sheehy
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04. Booked Out Social Media Series - Part 3: The 3 P’s to a Profitable Business
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02. Booked Out Social Media Series - Part 1: Becoming an In Demand Manager