A question about social media marketing that is thrown around on the regular is the price of it all.
“I pay $40 a month for someone to sit on my social media and do everything.” Mmm… yeah, I’d be surprised.
“I’m not willing to spend more than $300 per month on someone doing my social media, can’t you just do it for that much?” … no comment.
Social Media really does take a lot of time to do right. And if you aren’t doing it right, then it’s considerably harder to go back to a client and justify your ROI. With less time spent on an account, fewer elements of core social media marketing can be maintained at an acceptable level. This is where the problem lies for many social media marketing and management firms.
If you are having trouble justifying your role, or are looking for collateral to help grow your business and educate your clients, then see below what we consider the top 6 areas of social media marketing and management.
Planning
Planning is the most fundamental part of your social media marketing and management requirements. Without it, you are a headless chook who may be missing out on very lucrative opportunities.
Above is how Knackmap is set up. It is a social media calendar which is set out like an editorial calendar. You can create live and draft calendars and send calendars for approvals.
Whilst Knackmap is able to streamline a large amount of work, there is still a lot to it. Tools can streamline a lot of tasks, but you, as a social media manager or marketer, still need to:
- Meet with clients regularly to hash out various opportunities, editorial calendars and past performance.
- Spend time thinking about the best way to frame a message, communicate, or solve a business problem for positive results on social media.
- Creating copy and artwork, videos etc.
- Getting sign off/approvals on your work and tweaking as per client requirements.
- Encourage your clients to join your ideas vault. That is, ensure that everyone is contributing to one content hub in order to make future content creation easier.
Case in point – this is no small feat.
Never underestimate the time it takes to plan. This is an area which needs to be utilised to it’s full potential, as this is what the clients sees. By guiding your clients through your un-rushed creative and strategic processes, they’ll better understand what you really do and what they are paying for.
Remember, planning can easily take 10+ hours a month. (Normally saving quite a few hours through use of a tool like Knackmap).
Price for your proposal: $700 minimum.
Publishing and Scheduling
Once you’ve got all posts approved, it’s time to schedule.
When it comes to publishing, you can cut some serious time with Knackmap, in that you can publish and schedule posts to multiple channels as well as altering the text on each channel from one place! This is particularly useful if you are trying to promote a video everyone and want to alter the text for each channel (it avoids the waiting time in uploading large files like videos), or if you are promoting one image to 3-5 different pages.
However, in transitioning an editorial calendar to a tool or direct to social media channels, you still have to ensure that your content is formatted correctly. Luckily, Knackmap has both plan and publish transition features so that there is no human error in between these phases.
Publishing without a tool like Knackmap could easily take 5+ hours.
Price for your proposal: $200.
Monitoring
Once your social media calendar is scheduled and starting to go live, it’s important to be around for the engagement.
Push notifications through your phone or computer, using a tool like Knackmap, or managing all of your social media channels on different tabs are a couple of ways that you can monitor your engagement. It’s important to make sure that you are around to listen, and to answer questions if needed or just get involved with a conversation.
The time that this can take for brands varies, but certainly not as a direct correlation to business size. A small community following for a cafe could receive just as many enquiries as a national brand. It all depends on how engaged the audience is and how well the brand is catering to that audience.
As a result, you could find yourself trapped in an unprofitable relationship with a client because you underestimated the amount of work required to engage their community.
10 hours across a month could easily be spend monitoring and engaging with a social media pages community. REMEMBER: it’s not just the time to write a response, it’s the time to speak with the brand around difficult questions, building up pre-approved responses lists, identifying new conversations to get involved in and ensure that your client is happy with your involvement in it on behalf of their brands page.
It truly is customer support to a new level. Instead of waiting on line for a phone call to come through so you can service a customer, you have the unique opportunity to monitor feeds in real time and ensure your brand’s page has it’s finger on the pulse.
Price for your proposal: $500 minimum.
Promotion/Advertising
Ok, here is an interesting point. What clients often forget is that the creative for your content calendar doesn’t necessarily include the ad copy and creative required to run other advertising. Facebook has one of the best advertising platforms in the world in terms of transparency, targeting and results. This, however, requires a lot of time manipulating the offering available to match the needs and goals of your clients.
It takes time.
Furthermore, this promotion and advertising work also requires liaising with front of house staff, internal marketing staff or web developers to make sure that everything runs smoothly once you direct traffic elsewhere. If you are managing the total digital campaign, then you will also need to make time for creating landing pages and other collateral to make sure that your ads are running as well as possible.
Finally, creating things like UTM tags, pixels and goals on your various digital assets (websites, social platform,s etc.) to make sure that all data is stored along the funnel for a campaign, takes more time and then analysis and communication to the client at the end of it.
It’s a whole different ballpark, and could be anything from a couple of extra hours for set-up to $10,000 in additional spend required for creative, web development and other collateral.
Price for your Proposal: $500+.
Reporting
Finally, the end of the month/campaign has approached and it’s time to assess your performance.
Reporting is not about spitting out 100 graphs and trying to prove your the best. It’s about providing transparent results on past actions, and learning how to better improve in the future.
To ensure that your reporting is on point, you’ll need to ensure that the goals you set at the start of the month and at the start of the financial quarter/year are as clear as day. From here, you can work out which metrics are required to quantify success and ensure that they are tracked from the get-go.
Now that your month or campaign is at it’s end, you’ll need to look at pulling these metrics together and comparing them against your goals. Regardless of whether things go well or need improvement, it’s still an absolute necessity to dig deeper into the data and work out why. Why did things go well? Why did you not get the goals you aimed for? Without seeking the answers to these questions, you will be unable to learn for future work.
Knackmap is soon to release its own analytics feature – keep a look out!
Price for your proposal: $400.
Cost of Tools
Another area often not considered when looking at social media budgets, are the tools required to do your job.
For example, Knackmap is an incredibly affordable solution that starts from $35 a month. There are many other softwares out there, which when combined to cover all of your social media requirements can complete your tools portfolio for a price of around $100 – $1,500! This is a cost that needs to be incorporated into your fees. Of course many of these tools have pricing for all of your requirements no matter how you scale, and then others have a cost per account set-up.
And the total bill comes to…
Total price for your month’s social media: $2,300.
Of course:
- all prices are indicative
- all clients are different
- all campaigns are different
There are many reasons why charging less is perfectly fine for everyone, or why you may not need to cover all these areas (for example, your client has some internal resources to manage elements of social media like engagement). However, in having a proper look at what is required to manage social media for clients, it’s clear that there is a lot more work than what is often planned for. Make sure that your client understands how much work goes into what they are paying for – and the return they are getting!
We hope that there are a few good nuggets of information here to help you with your client education and new business!
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