At Social Media Pro, we celebrated Social Strategy Day on June 29th with our extended Social Strategy Webclass.
If you missed the webclass, this is your chance to learn some of the key topics that I covered to shift your mindset, land your dream clients, and increase your income.
In this blog post, I’m sharing three takeaways from our Social Strategy Day webclass that have the potential to radically transform your business and your bank account.
If you want to level up your social media game, these takeaways are a must!
Here are the 3 key takeaways from my extended Social Strategy Webclass:
- Takeaway #1: Are You an Expense or Investment?
- Takeaway #2: Be Your Own Best Client
- Takeaway #3: Selling Strategies
Takeaway #1: Are You an Expense or Investment to Your Clients?
Expense or Investment… Which are you?
As a social media professional, it’s important to think about how your clients view you. Are you seen as an expense, or as an investment?
This distinction may not seem like much to you right now, but the difference between these two mindsets is significant and can seriously impact your income and bottom line.
If you’re seen as an expense, your clients are likely to be focused on minimizing your costs. They may try to get you to work for less money, or they’ll be reluctant to invest in your expertise at all.
On the other hand, if you’re seen as an investment, your clients are going to want to pay top dollar for your services. They understand that your expertise can help them grow their business, and they’re willing to invest in that growth.
So, do your clients see you as an expense or as an investment?
Let’s find out.
Expense or Investment: Which Are You?
How can you tell if your clients view you as an expense versus as an investment?
Start by asking yourself some questions about where you’re at with your business and how your clients treat you.
Do they treat you like an employee or like a contractor?
In other words, do you have designated hours you’re supposed to be on Slack, online, or available to them in some way? Do they give you the exact processes that they want you to follow – how to do your tasks and when to do your tasks? That is an employee mindset.
If any of those actions are happening, that means your client is relating to you as their employee rather than their contract, even if they’re paying you via 1099 (which is technically illegal…)
Do they treat you like a vendor or like a consultant?
A vendor is somebody that a business outsources specific tasks to. They’re someone that a business has to pay in order to get a certain task done, so they’re seen as a cost of goods.
A consultant, on the other hand, is somebody that a business leans on and utilizes for advice and expertise. They’re viewed as a resource to the business that is there to advise on their overall strategy and help with their overarching digital marketing plan.
Do they think of you as support staff or as a strategic advisor?
When your client is stuck in a certain area, do they think of you more like support or like an advisor?
Are you the social media ‘support’? Even if they’re calling you their social media manager, are you in a role that supports their marketing team? Do you have somebody else in the client’s business that you’re supposed to report to?
Or, do they consider you as a strategic advisor – somebody who has their finger on the pulse, who is guiding and leading them? A strategic advisor is someone who’s proactively coming to the table and saying “here’s what’s working right now online and here are the changes we need to make to your marketing plan in order to stay current and relevant.”
Take a look at each of these areas.
If you found yourself falling into any of the ’employee’, ‘vendor’, or ‘support’ categories, then you are currently an expense to your client and not an investment.
Shifting The Mindset
When you take on the role of a consultant or a strategic advisor, it changes the mindset and the energy dynamics between you and your client.
With expenses, we’re always trying to minimize. We want to spend less money because we want to keep more of our money.
But what about when it comes to our investment accounts or our retirement accounts? When we think about investments, we want them to grow. We know that if we’re investing our money in the right places, we can grow our money.
If we want to increase our rates and grow our business, we have to shift our clients’ mindsets from thinking about us as an expense to thinking about us as an investment.
Takeaway #2: Be Your Own Best Client
‘Be your own best client’ is a concept I’ve been driving home to my students for quite awhile now.
Simply put, this means you need to market your own business as if it were one of your clients, with the same level of care, strategy, and attention to detail that you give to your clients’ marketing.
YOU need to be an example of your own work so you can attract high-ticket clients.
If you need some inspiration on how to get started with being your own best client, take a look at our Be Your Own Best Client blog post that’s dedicated entirely to putting this concept and mindset into action for yourself.
Bottomline: Carve out the time for yourself in your calendar for your own marketing. Do your own strategy for your business and create your own content.
Takeaway #3: Selling Social Media Strategy
It’s time to transition from solely being a “done-for-you” social media manager to selling social media strategies first, BEFORE offering your done-for-you services.
This is the number one thing that all social media professionals can do to solve the ‘expense vs. investment’ dilemma that so many of us face.
When you begin your relationship with a client by selling a social media strategy as your initial offering, you immediately establish yourself as a strategic advisor. By providing them with a well-thought-out plan and strategy, clients will naturally see you as their trusted strategic advisor from the start and view your services as a valuable investment.
You can see how all three of these takeaways come together to level up your business.
By positioning yourself as an expert in the field and doing your own marketing with the same skill you would for clients, you will be viewed as a Social Media Strategist.
Now when potential clients book a discovery call and express interest in working with you, they already know that you’re an expert and they’re willing to invest in that expertise. You can now sell them your strategy as the main benefit that you offer to your clients.
Of course, after the strategy period, you can discuss further options for helping the client implement the social media plan that you’ve created for them, but this is no longer your primary function, role or service that you provide.
You’re now a social media strategist first, and other services can follow after.
Level Up with my Extended Social Strategy Webclass!
Those are the 3 key takeaways from my extended Social Strategy Day Webclass.
If you want to dive deep into these topics and learn how to implement them for your own business, I highly recommend you watch the entire 90-minute webclass replay.
With the webclass, you’ll learn my tried and tested strategic method to elevate your social media and marketing game, and you’ll gain invaluable new insights and actionable steps that you can implement IMMEDIATELY, including:
- The #1 way to position yourself so clients want to pay you for advice, over getting it elsewhere
- How to get your next 1-3 dream clients paying you ‘high ticket’ for a stand-alone audit & strategy
- How to never ‘pitch’ your full service again (you’ll see how my paid Social Media Strategy does all the selling for me!)
- How I was able to ‘rinse & repeat’ Strategy creation in under 60 minutes, for over 300+ businesses (and counting)
- How to automatically increase your current fees 2x-3x for your full DFY social media services as a result
You’ll also find out how to get access to my audit & strategy template for repeatable results that will impress clients, guaranteed!
Say goodbye to writing proposals for free and hello to this game-changing opportunity.
