04. Booked Out Social Media Series - Part 3: The 3 P’s to a Profitable Business

Podcast
Written By Jessica Sheehy
 

Packages, Pricing, and Procedures, oh my! We’re covering all of the tools and systems you need to set up to: land clients, get paid for your work, and deliver an exceptional experience that builds lifetime dream clients.

Welcome back to Hashtag Managed for the final part of our three-part series to help you land your first or another social media management client. Now, it's such a bittersweet feeling to finish this three-part series. And if you haven't listened to part one or part two yet, definitely go back and binge. You can listen to those after you listen to this episode. You can pause this really quickly. Go listen to them. But either way, I really want you to listen to these episodes at least two times to grasp the foundation that we are working on creating for building out a booked-out social media management business.

And if you have listened to those previous parts, then you know that I am a big proponent of processes and systems that create a sustainable, scaling social media management business. Because we all want to reach our revenue goals, right? That's probably the first thing that we thought of when we started our business.

We're trying to replace our nine-to-five income. Maybe we're trying to make a little bit more than that to pay for our lifestyle, to pay our bills, to take care of ourselves, our family. But whatever that reason behind starting that business is there needs to be some sustainability to building that. Now, are there tons of resources and tools online to help you find things quickly and achieve XYZ quickly? Of course. Absolutely. But we at Social Savvy, it's part of our mission to really help build sustainable social media management businesses for all of the people who go through our courses, our programs, and more importantly, our collective membership.

To create a sustainability so you can have a lasting business that goes beyond three months, six months, a year, two years, five years, one that can scale to revenue. Dreams that maybe you haven't dreamed of yet. Or maybe you have. Maybe you have big-picture goals for your business, the team that you want to create, the community that you want to cultivate, and the clients that you want to impact. And that's part of the "why" behind this three-part series.

So today in part three, we're covering all of the tools and systems 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 social media management business roster.

So let's dive into it. Last week we talked about how to tap into your signature service. Like I mentioned, if you haven't listened to that episode yet, go back at some point and really listen to that, to really capture your signature service and just to hear the importance of why you need one as a social media manager to help you stand apart from the competition. Your signature service is one part what does your dream client need help with, and the other part what you love doing.

So in this part of our three-part series, we're going to cover the three P's to a successful social media management business that is pricing packages and procedures. So first let's talk about pricing your services. As a social media manager, I know this is one of the no, this is one of the most common questions we get inside the collective and it's how do I price myself?

How do I know I'm pricing myself competitively? So this is an internal conversation that Team Social Savvy is always having because we're always there troubleshooting together, any problems that are brought to us in the Facebook communities or inside the Collective coaching calls. We're always trying to problem solve to create the best solutions possible and we are always going back and forth about all of the external and internal factors that affect pricing.

The main advice that I have to give for this one and we'll go deeper into pricing in several episodes, I make that promise. But it's to make sure that your accounting for every minute that you spend on a client's account and when I say every minute, I mean every single minute. We get wrapped up so much in wanting to create a great client experience and that sometimes we often forget about all the small things that we think maybe we don't need to charge for that, maybe we don't need to add that to it.

One really great way to think about it is every time you are on your computer, you're working on that client, you are working on the strategy, you are doing client communication, you're designing graphics, you're doing community management, replying to comments on their posts. That is going to be all of the different things that you need to account for. So one really awesome tool that I recommend every social media manager and even every freelancer who's doing an online service is to use a tool such as Toggl, T-O-G-G-L.

And that is a really awesome tool that you can organize and track your time by day. It'll time-block everything for you. It will generate reports, you can organize by clients and then you can organize by projects, which is amazing. And you'll probably notice quickly, once you start using this tool or any other tool that you're really underestimating the different services that you are doing within the projects that you're completing for your clients. I also recommend as a side note, to do that for your own business. It's really great to measure how much time you're spending on your business and marketing your business and all of that. And you'll probably underestimate initially the time that you'll get, you'll get better at it. You'll learn everything in business is a lesson. It's not a failure, it's a lesson. But you'll get quicker as you work through your next client and your third client, your fourth client, your fifth client, and you'll get quicker on tasks.

You'll become more proficient when you implement the systems that we're going to talk about later in this episode, you'll get way more proficient and then that is going to help save some time and that is how your business will become more profitable over time, which is our main goal, right?

So our magic Social Media Manager pricing formula that we always share is to take your income goal for the month and divide it by the hours that you want to work in that month. And that is going to help you determine per client the packages that you are working with.

So for example, let's get some real-world numbers in this. And for this instance, I'm going to just use general hours for working in a week versus doing it by client by client. We'll go deeper into that when we cover pricing a little bit more in depth in future episodes. But say your income goal is $5,000 per month. I personally always love to use this income goal as a starting point because this was double my corporate salary when I had left. And for me, it was always really easy for me to think first, OK, I need to replace that corporate salary. It was a little bit over double, but let's make it easy and say double is 5,000. So that's the goal I want to make. I want to make $5,000 as my own business owner and I want to work 40 hours a week. I personally love to work. It is something that I'm constantly working through. But I love what I do. I love the clients we work with. I love our team, I love the community we've cultivated. I love everything about my job and I love that this is my job.

Sometimes it's really crazy to think that, wow, this is what people pay me for. It's really, really amazing. So I always like to just use the basis foundation of 40 hours for a normal working week. Now, can you cut that down? Absolutely. One of the freedoms of being your own business owner is to have that time and financial freedom. So for this formula, we want to make $5,000 in a month. We want to work 40 hours a week for the month. So when you do the math out on that, that comes down to your hourly needing to be at least $30 per hour for the basis of your packages. So let's keep in mind that maybe for one of your clients, if you are doing an Instagram management package, you're spending about 5 hours a week managing a client's Instagram account. Maybe that package is $1,000 a month. You would need five clients to reach your goal. It really comes down to basic math, depending on how much money you want to make and how many hours you want to work. And when we do that math, that is where we'll find our base price that's so different from everyone.

So that's one of the first factors that we always like to highlight when it comes down to pricing. It's always going to be a base price that is different from person to person. If you aren't finding clients who can pay this package price that you've outlined with your revenue per month, how many hours you want to work per week, in the month, and then that base hourly price to build up a package, there's nothing wrong with the pricing you have or the value that you bring. You just need to spend a little bit more time determining the niche you want to work with.

Are they equipped as business owners, as entrepreneurs to outsource their social media management for that agreed upon package? Do they see the value in that? Sometimes it might be a slight disconnect in our messaging, marketing our own businesses, or talking about what we can do to help them. Maybe we're focusing way too much on the deliverables in that package and we're not really focusing on exactly what transformation we're giving to them.

Maybe we need to work a little bit more on building out our portfolio or making our authority a little bit more well-known. There's so many different ways we can do that with marketing and all of that. Maybe we just need to get more referrals and do a little bit more trial work. And like we mentioned in previous parts is that trial work does not need to mean free work.

If you can and have the capacity to do free work to build your portfolio, absolutely do it. Everyone is going through different situations when it comes to finances, and if you have that support system in place to do that, you can. But if you don't, that's okay too. You can do discounted work if you'd like to get people into your leads pipeline much quicker, but don't necessarily think that you are pricing yourself incorrectly or something is wrong.

So don't focus on discounting the package that you've created. Instead, take time away from the package and adjust your package to reflect that less time spent on the account, on content creation, on community management, because less time spent doesn't always equal less pay or less value. It's just making up on the back end of the package. And it's a great way to get started and start signing clients since it's less cost per client.

So you don't necessarily need to create really, really low packages that require a lot of work. Because then when you do the math on what that's going to cost you, then you're probably going to make much lower than that initial base hourly rate that you did in the math. A lot of times we talk about how to charge our worth. We need to be paid our worth. So to me, what it means to charge our worth is to set up our packages, send our proposal, stand by our pricing at all costs. So never lower the package, never discount the package.

What you can do is pivot and change the package. Okay? There's a big difference between discounting and taking away things from the package because you're changing the amount of work that you're doing on the back end of the package. Now, are you necessarily changing the value? It just really depends on what you're kind of adding and subtracting from that. So always start with your base rate that you've calculated that you need to take home hourly, that is a nonnegotiable for your business, and raise your pricing as soon as you get a client until you're at your desired hourly level and you're going to hit your guaranteed goals, that can change over time.

So there's a lot of ways that we can work on to grow our income without growing our client base. And that will have to be a topic for another time because there is a lot of different ways that we can do that with our existing client roster to help boost our bottom line in our business. Now, let's talk about building out our social media management packages.

In my opinion, and I will always say this, packages are the best way to go versus hourly. If you work on an hourly basis with clients, you really have to make sure that it's worth your while, because the quicker and more proficient that you get, the less time you're going to be billing the client for. So you really have to keep that in mind. So I really think it's important to use your hourly to build your packages and then to stand by those, because instead of delivering time to a client, which is what you do when you bill hourly, you are delivering results, you are delivering transformation for their business. You are delivering value, and of course, you're delivering that in multiple different ways. It can be time spent, community management, time spent engaging, time spent on building out XYZ in their social media strategy.

But those are things that we will keep internally as social media managers to know how proficient we are, how much money we're making, and how it's going to help our bottom line for our business. So it's really important to consider that what you're doing for your clients businesses is extremely valuable. And a lot of times it's going to be a big question that clients or prospective clients will ask is about the return on their investment, their ROI.

They're hiring you to complete a task or complete a project in their business, and you're delivering those services. And so we don't ever want to add time to that to really have them associate time with results. Because as I mentioned before, you'll become proficient. Things will change, algorithms will change, strategies will need to change. And going with the hourly model is just way too easy for clients to want to back down because they're looking at it of time per dollar as an equation where it really needs to be looked at as a service completed for a package price.

So the other reason why packages are so so important is because packages equal boundaries, expectations of deliverables and like I've mentioned before, but it's so important to really really, really go in on is higher profits as you get faster and proficient. And that's what we want as a business owner. That is how we are going to make more money and have that sustainable income to support our dream of a booked-out social media management business. But here's the deal if you charge an hourly rate for your services, the more experience you have, the less you get paid. So a quick example of this is a new social media manager may take 10 hours a week to create, schedule and engage on a social media channel. As they become more experienced and get in flow with their work, update their processes, get more proficient, it would only take them 5 hours a week to create, schedule, engage and do all the things that they were once doing before, but they've cut it in half. I only recommend having two packages in your portfolio when you're starting out.

One is going to be a starter or base package and one is more in-depth or advanced. The best way to set this up is having the bottom package or the lower package in the tiers be the most profitable. Because of just honestly buyer psychology, people are drawn to getting the best deal and if we can prevent it in a way that it's more valuable to them, more profitable for us, that's the best deal and it's a win-win for both parties.

So package up your offer and how you can get paid the most for doing the work and have the second package include more deliverables and less of the access to you with taking up a lot of time in your day or your week to consider that you're getting really good at something and getting really quick at something. So this could be adding in, you know, more content creation such as more posts and video editing, story creation, doing more hashtag research, doing more community management, lead generation versus tacking on more hours of something else.

So we want to be really clear that we're not necessarily adding something that's time consuming that we have to take a whole hour to complete, but something that we can complete in less amount of time and is going to be the better package for them and for you, because it's not going to take a lot of your time. Because let's face it, we're definitely talking in this series about getting your first client or getting your next client. But your business is going to grow. Your client roster is going to grow. And as it grows you're going to feel a tight squeeze at first of your time and your time management, your capacity, your workflows, your processes. Things will be squeezed a little bit, but if you go at it with a strategic approach and make sure you're being paid correctly for your time and everything is being accounted for, then it's going to be alright.

Let's put some solid processes into place to help go hand in hand with our pricing and our packages in our social media management business. So processes are sometimes known as systems and these are procedures that you are going to do to help make your business more profitable, retain clients and honestly take the headache out of the day to day work.

A couple of processes that you need and the four main processes that we recommend creating. The first one is lead acquisition. Now this is where you are going to find prospects online who are looking for social media management and this is how you're going to go through that process of doing a discovery call of talking to them in closing the sale.

Next is onboarding. This is how you have closed the sale and now you're getting them ready to become a client. The third process is monthly maintenance. Now this is how you are going to work with your client to help alleviate the headache of the DayToday work.

That can happen because a lot of times what I see is people create their social media management business and sometimes they just feel like they have been creating another scenario where they're the employee and their clients are the employer. So we want to create a really solid process from month to month and this is also going to make a better experience for them and retain them as a long term client. And finally, as important as onboarding and starting the project off on a right foot off boarding is so, so important.

Let's talk about the first system. Let's automate your lead acquisition in your social media management business. You can do this by creating a service guide. You can create this in, canva download it as a PDF and send it to people in exchange for their email and their first name so you can add them into your email service provider.

A couple of great ones are FloDesk or Convert Kit or ActiveCampaign and these are great email marketing platforms to where someone can put in the information you need. I really recommend getting a little bit more than a name and an email.

Figure out their website, their business name, and it's good to know also the title they could possibly be the owner of the founder. But sometimes you might find that maybe their Executive Assistant, Virtual Assistant Marketing Manager whomever might be hiring for the social media management role and it's just really great to have that clarity from the start. So email them over that service guide and in that is going to have a breakdown of your services, your portfolio, what it's like to work with you, what your process is, who you like to work for, and then a button to book a consultation call with you. This can be a consultation, a discovery call. There's so many names that we can name it, but ultimately it's a sales call. I love to use a tool such as Calendly or if you're using a CRM such as Dubstauto, you can have a scheduling link inside of there.

So a really great way to prequalify these people is to have an application form. This is something that I like to include just to make sure that I'm on the same page with what this client needs and if we can deliver that for them. I want to ask them a couple of questions like, how soon are you looking to outsource?

Let them know my packages. Have them choose a package. I want them to know my pricing so that doesn't come as a shock at any point during this process. I want to know a little bit about their business, their audience, how they're currently marketing their business, and a few other questions that I just like to get before I book the call with them and jump on Zoom and chat about their business and see for a great partnership for each other.

Then the other thing that you can do to kind of continue your lead acquisition process is you can have a couple of emails in a sequence that follow up with this lead. If they haven't booked a call with you yet, you can introduce yourself, you can remind them to book that call. You can answer any FAQs about working with you, you can share your portfolio, some reviews, and always don't forget to put a call to action to book the call with you because that's how we're going to move the project along if they are ready to outsource with you at that time.

All right, now that we have gotten the lead to go from prospect to client to a little celebratory dance, because it's always exciting to onboard a new client at any stage in business. Four years later and I celebrate every single client we have because it's so exciting to start a new journey in partnership with any new business in social media marketing. So now that they've turned into a client, we need to onboard them.

When we onboard a client, we are setting them up for success in working with us. We are building that trust and really nailing that in so they know that their accounts are going to be handled with proper care. I love to start it off with having that discovery call or consultation. Then I'll send them a proposal after the call, they can choose their package right there.

I use Dubsado as my CRM, so it links my proposal, my contract, and first month invoice to book the project all in one, making it super seamless for them to choose yes and to start the project. And it's all automated, so all I have to do is push one button to send the email to them, which is amazing. So after all of that has been accepted and signed and paid, from there, they'll get their onboarding email with a questionnaire that gets all the information I need about their brand, their details or guidelines, their brand voice, goals of the company, goals of the social media campaigns, their ideal clients or customers.

Then I share a little bit more about working with Social Savvy, all of the different key parts that our team plays, how they can communicate with us when I need them to submit content, really anything that's going to pop up over our month of working together, I like to include it in this onboarding process. Then I have them share any content and branding that they have in Google Drive and start creating a basis of our strategy. I always like to book a kickoff call with clients to go over everything in the onboarding, make sure everything is filled out. I've got all the information that the team needs to start creating the strategy and then the content. And then from there, we'll work on creating the overall cohesive social media strategy with the client and then the project will start.

Then, as part of my onboarding process, I like to create the strategy, set up their client portal and click up to that we share with them to see their content calendar, see the status of the project, find any quick links, anything that they need. And when I have that first batch of content for them to review and approve, I will send that over with a Loom screen recording.

Loom is an amazing tool that I probably use multiple times in the day to communicate with clients, to communicate with the team about different things that are going on. It's a great way to provide verbal feedback and show my computer screen. So it's a really great way to set up the project and really make your clients feel comfortable if they're not familiar with the project management or scheduling tool that you're using for their project.

So now that they're fully onboarded, we want to work on maintaining their monthly contract and making the experience so seamless. So I like to call this the monthly maintenance process. This is how you will manage your social media management clients month to month to make the process seamless and to make that experience great. So it's great for them. A couple of tools that I love to do. This is the project management tool we used to be in Asana.

We made the move earlier in 2022 to ClickUp and we have not looked back for our team and for the type of experience that I want to give clients. ClickUp is just the best way to invite clients in, let them see the strategy, see the content, review it, approve it, and it makes the process so, so seamless. There's a lot of automation with ClickUp and there's a lot of different things that go with that. We will definitely have an episode on ClickUp in the future.

But it's a great way to choose some sort of project management tool in your business to really keep track of all of the tasks you need to do, all of the content you need to create. And it's a really great way to help clients know that their accounts are being handled, they're being taken care of. It eliminates any questions that they might bother you in an email about and it makes it so, so much easier. That is the biggest piece of our monthly maintenance process. And we like to make sure that we keep all messaging in one spot, so a lot of the messaging is done back and forth in Click Up and also with regular strategy calls. That way we are just doing a quick 20 minutes check in.

We'll do a little bit longer if there's something launching, if there's an upcoming holiday that we need to put more focus on, if there's something new, if we're trying something new out with content and need to brainstorm a little bit more with them, we'll do a little bit longer than 20 minutes. But it's a great way to answer any questions, go over analytics and cover the strategy and any needed content for the next month. Now, with all projects, they do come to an end. Some might come to an end sooner than later. We'll talk about all of this in future episodes. There's so much more that I am so excited to dive into over the course of this podcast.

But let's talk about offboarding clients because it is so, so important. I know so many people put an emphasis on onboarding, but offboarding is crucial. It's how you end the project on good terms. And when we end on good terms, great things happen. I always love to send an offboarding form, super simple, in-depth, auto. It's all automated.

The follow up is automated if they don't fill it out the first time. But it's where I like to gather feedback on the project to help improve my systems and processes of working with clients, with any of our content, with any of the team structure that we had in place. And it's a great way to get a testimonial from clients to help build up our case studies and our portfolio as an agency. Then I'll send them anything that they need to close up the project. If I need to send any additional content over, any additional logins or passwords or Canva files or anything at all, I always love to send that over just so they're equipped moving forward with whatever route they're going with their social media management. It's one of the best ways that I love to end a project, and a lot of clients really do appreciate it.

Then finally, I'll send a final analytics report, a 'thank you' email, and I'll let them know that we do have a referral program and it's the best way for our business to grow, and we appreciate it so much. Once you've put these systems in place, you'll notice more freedom in your schedule from not having to do everything manually, and you'll have a better client experience.

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