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Social Media Management For Small Business
Today, I’m going to share 4 ways you can making social media management for small business easier and help your SMM get the results you’re looking for.
If you’ve ever worked with a Social Media Manager, you probably hired them hoping to see major growth on your social media channels that would then lead back to your website and result in higher sales and inquiries. You hired them with such high hopes, and couldn’t wait to stop needing to worry about your social media. And yet, I’ve heard over and over again how disappointed various other business owners have been with their SMM, for numerous reasons, but the underlying current is always that they weren’t seeing the results they expected and thought they were paying for.
And even though I’m not a SMM – although some people seem to think that’s what I do, and we’ll get into the difference later in this episode, I can very easily see 4 different reasons that your SMM isn’t getting the results you’re hoping for, and spoiler alert – none of them are the SMM’s fault.
Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode:
- Simplify your content creation with the Chasing Simple Content Planner!
- Are you looking to improve your content without spending a ton of time and mental energy doing so? Whether you’re looking for help knowing what to talk about, setting up content systems, or improving your launch strategy, the Chasing Simple Shop has something for you. From A Year of Content Prompts broken up by type of content, to my Launch Strategy Mini-Course – the Chasing Simple Shop is the quick and simple way to take your content to the next level. And you can get 10% off any item by using the code LISTENER at checkout! Just head to amandawarfield.com/shop/ and again, that code for 10% off is LISTENER!
- This week’s action step: Head to https://amandawarfield.com/service-strategy and let’s get your strategy together for 2023!
- This week’s book recommendation: Troublemaker by Leah Remini
- Find me on Instagram and tell me you completed this week’s action step: @mrsamandawarfield
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Rather Read? – Here’s the Transcript!
*Just a heads up – the provided transcript is likely to not be 100% accurate.
If you’ve ever worked with a social media manager, you probably hired them hoping to see major growth on your social media channels that would then lead back to your website and result in higher sales and inquiries. You hired them with such high hopes and could not wait to stop needing to worry about your social media.
And yet I have heard over and over again how disappointed various other business owners have been with their social media managers for numerous reasons, but the underlying current is always that they weren’t seeing the results that they expected and thought that they were paying for. . And even though I’m not a social media manager, although some people seem to think that that’s what I do, and we’ll get into the difference later in this episode, I can very easily see for very strong reasons that your social media manager may not be getting the results that you were hoping for.
And spoiler alert, none of them are the social media manager’s fault. So today I’m going to share those four things, and then I’m going to share four ways that you can help your social media manager get the results that you’re looking for. You’re listening to episode 132 of The Chasing Simple Podcasts, and I’m your host, Amanda Warfield, a content marketing strategist, not a social media manager.
Let’s dive in.
The first reason that your social media manager may not be getting you the results that you’re looking for is simply because you’re expecting them to do more than their job description. Here’s the thing, marketing and sales are not the same thing. Marketing is simply bringing awareness to your brand and to your business.
It’s meant to attract and then build relationships with potential customers, but it’s. Meant to convert those customers into sales. That’s what the sales process is for. So while, yes, sometimes we can throw up a post on Instagram and say, Hey, I’ve got this for sale right now. Or, Hey, this is in my shop, or, Hey, here’s my one-on-one offer, whatever.
And we can see conversions that way most of the time. That’s not going to be our end all, be all. You need to have a sales process that’s going to convert those potential customers into buyers and doing your sales and running your sales process. That is not the responsibility of your social media manager.
The responsibility of your social media manager is to market your business, to bring awareness to your brand and to attract your people and build relationships with those people through your content marketing. So if you have. someone that is running your marketing. You have a social media manager, and you’re upset because you’re not seeing more sales because of it.
Well, maybe what you should be taking a look at is your sales processes. You wanna make sure that you have sales systems in place for wherever it is that your social media manager is driving your traffic. So let’s say you have a one-to-one offer and you have your social media manager creating your content so that it’s driving people to your.
one-to-one offer? Well, you wanna make sure that you have a workflow set up that takes them from inquiry all the way to new one-to-one lead. A really simple way to do that is to make sure that you use a CRM tool like Honey Book. That’s what I personally use and love. I have quite a few episodes on Honey Book already that I can list in the show notes, and I also have a.
Affiliate link that’ll give you a discount if you wanna check out Honey Book. But making sure that you have a workflow set up in your CRM tool that will welcome them in as soon as they inquire and they say, Okay, here is everything you need to know about what working with me is like.
Whatever that looks like. I’m actually gonna have an expert coming on in a few months in January or February I believe, and she’s gonna share all about how to set up a great. New client inquiry system, but you wanna make sure you have some sort of workflow set up, and then come February you can update it based on what she says.
Okay? So you wanna make sure you have some kind of workflow set up in your CRM tool that takes people from inquiry to signed client Now. Another thing to look at. Let’s say that is your thing and you’re saying, Okay, well I’m not even getting inquiries. Well, maybe let’s look at how much traffic is going to that page.
Maybe let’s see, set up a heat map and say, Okay, how far down the page are people actually getting? There are so many moving pieces to running a business and trying to figure out what’s working and what’s not, and it’s highly likely that it’s not just your social media manager. . It could be that.
People are coming to that sales page that says, Hey, this is my one to one offer. But then they’re not clicking the button. Maybe they’re not even seeing the button. Maybe it’s too far down the page. Maybe the copy, you know, it could be 1,000,001 different things. And I really want you to check out what those different things could be if it is your one to one that is not converting.
Also be aware that not. , every single person that comes to that page is gonna convert. We’re looking at percentages here right now. Let’s say that what you’re trying to drive results to is your shop. You’ve got a digital product shop or a course or something like that, that is very digital, and that’s where you’re trying to drive traffic.
Well, Are you telling your social media manager just to drive to the sales page, or are you nurturing your people first? Yes. Sometimes driving straight to the sales page will work, especially if you’re using your content marketing to build relationships with your audience. But also, sometimes people just need to be nurtured first.
Are you showing up and saying, Here’s a freebie, and making sure that freebie leads directly into that offer, and then sending them through a welcome or a nurture sequence. Do you have that all set up so that people are really getting to know you in their inbox before you’re even pitching to them? If you need a welcome sequence, I do have a welcome sequence template in my shop that I will link to in the show notes.
That will make it really easy for you, or you can just go to amandawarfield.com/shop. Also, if you were listening to the ad, you know that if you use the Code listener, you get 10% off. So go head over to the shop and grab that if you do not have a welcome sequence set up. But if you are selling digital offers, you need to make sure that you are using your email marketing and you have a welcome sequence That is going to help nurture your people before you really try to sell to them. There are systems that you need to have in place sales systems, whether it’s a one-to-one offer, whether it’s a digital, more quote unquote passive offer. Each one needs to have a sales system, and you can do that through workflows, through set up automations, but they need to be in place because driving traffic to no sales system isn’t going to get you those sales that you’re looking.
The second reason you may not be seeing the results that you’re really looking for is that you’re not doing any outside marketing or networking. If your idea when hiring a social media manager was that you were going to be able to just completely remove yourself from marketing , you are expecting too much. Content.
Marketing is an incredible way to market your business. Obviously, I’ve built my entire business around it and around teaching people how to do this, but. Social media and content marketing alone will not grow your business. Hiring a social media manager should be meant as a way to free up time for you to pursue other marketing tactics unless you plan to hire enough contractors or employees to take over multiple marketing aspects.
But there’s so much more to growing a business than just content marketing, and I like to look at content marketing as that starter phase. where you’re starting to understand your messaging and starting to understand your ideas, and you’re starting to grow a platform and have a place to send people back to.
And then once they get there, you can nurture them really well, but you have to network with other people. You have to use other marketing tactics to bring people back to your content. It is not a build it and they will come type of thing. That’s not how this works. You have to build. It is so important.
Content marketing is incredible for building that space for people to come to, but you’ve gotta bring ’em there. You’ve gotta give ’em a reason to come, and they have to even know that you exist. So there are a ton of different marketing tactics and techniques that you can dive into outside of content marketing.
But personally, I think the number one way to really grow your business. Is simply by building relationships with other entrepreneurs, being human, taking the time to connect with them, get to know them, send business to other people in your space without this, Oh, I sent it to them so they’re gonna send it back to me.
Kind of mindset. Just truly supporting other entrepreneurs in her space. And over time you will see support come your way as well. And you know, supporting other entrepreneurs can look. . Hey, I have this topic that I think your audience would really benefit from hearing about. I’d love to share more. Could we hop on your podcast?
You know, pitching yourself, putting yourself out there so that you can show up in front of other people’s audiences and serve those audiences really well. This is not about you, this is about the audience, but by getting out there and by showing up and networking and serving other people really well, that’s how you’re gonna bring people back into your space.
I personally think that’s the best way. I think it. The way that’s going to make us feel. I know it’s the way that makes me feel best. If I’m connected with other entrepreneurs, I feel so much better within my business. And so get out there. Try different marketing techniques. There are a lot of other ones that you can utilize, and I actually talk about a ton of them in my book and all these different ways that you can combine other marketing and networking techniques with your content marketing to have this symbiotic ecosystem.
but you cannot just do content marketing forever when you’re first getting started. Absolutely. You have to start somewhere, and a lot of times you don’t know your messaging well enough, and so alls you can really do is put your content out there and just try to engage with other people, but. Once you have your messaging down and you are feeling ready to really seek growth in your business, you have to network with other people.
You have to build relationships with other people in your space. So if you’re not doing anything outside of your content marketing, well, you’re not setting your social media manager up for success. There’s only so much they can do to grow your business if you are not also working on growing.
I just wanna reiterate, I cuz I kind of glossed over this, but that point of, you know, hiring a social media manager. Is not meant to say, Okay, I’m ready to wash my hands of all of my marketing. No, it’s meant to help you offload some of the marketing so that you can focus on other marketing things.
You are always going to have your hands in marketing, unless you have a giant team and you just have an entire marketing department. But a social media manager is not an entire marketing department. Okay. Okay. . Third reason why your social media manager may not be getting you the results that you’re looking for is that you haven’t given them enough guidance on your brand voice.
What I hear from a lot of people that have hired a social media manager is that their social media manager will create some content and they look at it and they go, This is not me. This doesn’t sound like me. It doesn’t feel like me. And then they immediately fix it and change it and send it back to be scheduled or uploaded whenever the time is right.
But here’s the thing, if you are doing this, you are not giving them the opportunity to learn. And improve. So one, realize that them learning your brand voice, it’s probably gonna take some time. Okay? It could even take months and months of time. And that is normal. That that’s not abnormal. It’s not abnormal to be six months in and still kind of being like, Man, I still feel like they don’t know my brand voice super well.
Some people will pick it up really, really quickly, but it is a skill. , and so some people have to hone that over time. Two, if you’re making those changes without explaining what it is that you want and why, and giving them the opportunity to make those changes, you are robbing them of the room to improve. If they don’t understand what they’re doing wrong, they have no idea how to fix it moving forward.
So if you’re just making changes really quickly because it’s quote unquote faster, all you’re doing is prolonging this process and harming yourself and giving yourself unrealistic expectations for your social media manager, which in the long run may lead to you letting them go, hiring someone else, running into the same problem, feeling frustrated, so on and so forth.
You have to take the time to be a leader with the people on your team. Let them know what you’re not liking and why, and how to improve it and help them make those changes. So when something comes across your desk and you say, Mm, this doesn’t really sound like me, suggest improvements and explain why.
Tell them what feels not correct to you and how you would like to see it changed. You can also something that I think would be really, really great if this is something you struggle with. Try to send them voice memos. Not always just emails and slack or however you’re communicating, but send voice memos so that they can hear the way you talk
when they hear the way you talk, they’re gonna be able to pull your brand voice out much more easily. And along with that, don’t be super formal in your communication with them, unless that’s just part of your brand voice, right? If you have a super formal brand voice, then that you know by all means, be super formal in your communication with them as well, because that’s your brain voice.
But when you’re going back and forth with them, even through email, I know for me personally, a lot of times email can feel like I need to be a little bit more formal. Even when you’re emailing them, speak to them as you would speak to them through a text message or in person so that they can again, pick up on that brain voice a little bit faster.
Now, the fourth reason that your social media manager may not be getting you the results that you’re looking for is that you’re robbing your content of cohesion. You want your content to be as a whole, a cohesive unit, and by that I mean that your long form content should dictate what your email marketing is, and it should dictate what your social media marketing is.
A lot of times entrepreneurs will hire social media manager and will give them free reign to do whatever. Because it’s easier. They don’t wanna think about it anymore. And a lot of times we see social media as a separate thing from the rest of our marketing. But the problem with this is that it’s unlikely that your messaging is going to be cohesive between your social media and your other marketing channels.
And when that happens, it’s also likely that you’re going to have a different strategy and lack cohesion, and when someone jumps from your social media to your other content, it can be really jarring for them, which means they’re less likely to stick around, they’re less likely to invest in you. They’re less likely to take those next steps.
They might just hang out over on Instagram or TikTok or whatever social media platforms you’re on right now. They might just stay over there because that’s what they came to like, and the other stuff doesn’t feel the same. So a way to fix this instead of putting so much pressure on your social media manager to create a perfect strategy.
Think about hiring a marketing strategist who can come in and give you a cohesive content strategy for all of your marketing channels. Then you can take that strategy to your social media manager and give them the parameters to go crazy within to really make a huge impact on driving traffic to the rest of your marketing.
So earlier I mentioned that. Social media manager is not an entire marketing department. Right? And if you really wanna step back from your marketing, you have to have a department. What some of my clients will do is they hire me simply to do the strategy. That’s what I do for my one to one clients. We do, We create their content marketing strategy.
Some of my clients, it’s just me and them, and then they go and they create based on the strategy that we’ve come up with. But some of my clients also go, Okay, here’s the strategy. that we’re gonna use to have cohesion that we are going to use to have parameters with, and then they hand it off to their VA or their social media manager and they create the content within that, or repurpose content within that.
And post to those parameters, they post to that strategy and everything feels more cohesive. And the ceo, the business owner, is able to say, Okay, alls I have to do is record my podcast episode or record my YouTube video or outline the blog post. And then I hand that. And the strategy that my marketing strategist has come up with, and I hand all of that off, and that is as much marketing as I’m doing right now outside of networking with other people.
Right, right, right. We’re not totally giving up on it, but. , having someone that can give your social media manager the strategy, so the social media manager can really focus in on their zone of genius, which is, you know, following trends, staying on top of your specific data engagement. There’s so much that a social media manager does, and it’s honestly pretty unfair to them to expect them to also come up with a strategy and also make sure it’s cohesive with the rest of your content.
It’s way too much. Those expectations are too unrealistic. But if you hire a marketing strategist, you’re able to say, Okay, here’s what my marketing strategist came up with. Now you get to take it and run with it, and it really creates some beautiful magic. So those four reasons again as to why your social media manager may not be getting the results you’re looking.
First, you’re expecting them to do more than their job description. You’re expecting them to not only market, but also sell. Two. You’re not doing any outside marketing or networking. You are letting them stand on their own on an island and shocking no one’s coming over to the island. Three, you haven’t given them enough guidance on what your brand voice actually is.
You are taking away the opportunity for them to learn. And four you’re robbing your content of cohesion because you’ve left them on an island with just your social media content and it is really jarring to try to cross the ocean. There’s no bridge from the island over to the mainland where your long form content, your email marketing lives.
If you are interested in hiring a marketing strategist either to just help you take the strategy section off of your plate, or to be able to hand things off to your social media manager or your va. Go ahead and head to amandawarfield.com/service- strategy and you can learn more about my one to one ongoing service that I have where I work with my clients each and every quarter to create the marketing strategy behind their content for the upcoming quarter.
And let’s get your strategy together for 2023.
As this is being released, I will be opening up whatever remaining spots I have to the public for one-to-one strategy, but they’re likely not gonna last very long. So if that’s something you’re interested in, go ahead and head to that website again, amandawarfield.com/service-strategy, or send me an email or a DM on Instagram and we can chat about whether or not you’d be a good fit for this ongoing one-to-one service.
But those, those spots will not last long. They never. now, this week’s book recommendation is Troublemaker by Leah Ramini. I hope I said that correctly. I obviously grew up hearing about Scientology all the time, but I didn’t really, and I knew, you know, I knew enough.
To kind of understand, but to really hear what she went through in her own words. Man, the, the book is so good and she’s so vulnerable and raw and real, and. . It’s incredible. I didn’t think I was a memoir person, but it turns out I’m definitely a memoir person. I loved this. I devoured it. I immediately told my husband, Oh my gosh, you need to read this.
And he was like, I’ll watch the documentary . But if you haven’t watched the documentary and you do enjoy reading, highly recommend that. And I will link to that in the show notes as well. All right, my friend. Until next time, I hope that you will go out and uncomplicate your life in biz.
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