How to Scale Social Media Management Services

This post in a nutshell:

What scaling means
Problems with the typical agency model
What to do when you're always at or near capacity
How to not be the bottleneck in your agency
How to optimize your systems and processes
How to use automation in your agency
How to delegate work and use outsourcing to scale your agency
How to fix your pricing model
How to focus on marketing and sales
How to build a portfolio and case studies

Digital agency owners! Answer these questions:

Are you working too much?
Do you often feel burnt out?
Do you have good client retention rates and and income?
Do you want to make more money by doing less work?

If the answer to all of those questions are yes, it might be time take your startup to the scale-up stage by investing in your business growth.

If you’re ready now or just thinking about the future, you're in the right place!

We're delving deep into the whats, whys, and hows of scaling your social media services to help you reach your goals and boost your business' success.

What does scaling actually mean?

We’ve all heard the phrase ‘work smarter, not harder.' That’s where scaling comes in.

Scaling is when your revenue (and hopefully profits!) increase without a big increase in your resources.

In simpler terms, this means making more money from your professional services without much effort to do so.

Is it possible to scale a service-based business?

It’s commonly misunderstood that scaling up is only suitable for businesses with products to sell.

That is not the case!

Like all competitive markets, scaling your social media management company can pose a few obstacles, like retaining talented social media marketers acquiring new clients.

The success of your social media agency doesn’t come overnight, and scaling your business can be tricky too.

But, scaling serviced based businesses such as social media marketing companies and digital marketing agencies is 100% doable, and provides plenty of scope for them to grow massively.

Why your social media management offering is the perfect service to scale

Social media content marketing is a fundamental part of any business strategy - it provides an opportunity for direct and creative communications to target ideal audiences and helps to 1) boost engagement and 2) increase sales.

For now, at least, it’s impossible to think of a world without social media. So all modern businesses are going to need to implement some form of social media strategy for the foreseeable future.

This provides so many opportunities for you to boost your social media services for clients now and going forward.

There's never been a better time to take advantage of this and scale your agency and its digital marketing services by delegating, automating, and outsourcing.

Problems with the typical agency model

There are now over 50 million social media marketing management agencies, companies, and freelance content marketers in the world. As an ever-growing and crowded industry, it can be difficult for newbies to stand out.

But the possibilities of an agency that offers social media management packages are near limitless.

When people set up agencies, it’s easy to get stuck in the rut of trying to be everything - social media managers, digital marketers, community managers, graphic designers, PR pros, copywriters, and web designers to name a few!

Not to mention the other roles, outside of social media marketing efforts, associated with being a startup business owner, like doing all of the admin, finance, and marketing, providing exemplary customer service, and managing customer retention.

Often this means that agencies bite off more than they can chew and offer additional services that they don’t have the capacity for, have interest in, or have the specialist knowledge to do well.

When this happens, it seems like a natural step for the agency to grow the social team and employ more staff in-house to do the work.

But there are other avenues and a large pool of social media talent to explore when it comes to scaling your social media management services - like partnering with an external white label social media agency and their remote teams, or simply optimizing your systems and processes.

What if you're always at or near capacity?

Overworked and always seem to be running on empty?

Whilst reaching your capacity can be the result of multiple client wins, happy clients and projects rolling into the business, running at capacity (or near to) can mean that it’s time to scale your social media service offerings.

There are only so many hours in a day and you shouldn’t be working the majority of them to make ends meet.

Do an internal audit of what exactly is taking up all of your time and effort. This could be:

Engaging on your clients’ social media accounts
Researching hashtags
Searching for external articles to share
Analyzing custom analytics across all social media channels

Whatever is burning up your time, you don't have to do it yourself!

Investing in automation, processes, delegation and outsourcing - although it may come with a cost - will free up a lot of your time.

Don't be the bottleneck in your agency

In an agency setting, this means that you could be the one stopping your agency from scaling and, well, growing.

To grow your business you’ve got to make decisions and take some leaps.

Making the jump to scale your social media management services will feel a little unusual at first - especially if you’re the one who’s been doing everything for so long. But it’ll allow you to put your focus on other areas of the business and ultimately aid and nurture its growth.

Not to mention the better quality of life that it’ll bring:

Fewer hours to put into social media marketing campaigns, more hours for you
More time to focus on other areas of the business to help you reach your overall business goals
An increase in revenue (and hopefully profits) to pump more money into the business’ growth stage (or just for you!)

Optimize your systems and processes

Your systems and processes need to be up-to-date and streamlined so that they’re not costing you extra money or time.

The main goal for your social media marketing agency is to create and implement effective campaigns that spark positive results for your clients.

Your tools and processes should enable you to do this as quickly as possible to ensure you get more buck for the work you’re doing while spending less time doing it.

Building Systems

To optimize your systems, first you have to build them. When managing clients’ social accounts, there are a lot of responsibilities that come with it - social strategy, social media content creation, scheduling content, posting, engaging, and analyzing to name the main ones.

Each step should have the best possible systems in place to be able to scale your services.

Your systems can be the processes you use for putting the content out there - like scheduling tools - or it can be how you communicate and work with your client.

The way you communicate and partner with your client can massively impact the time it takes to carry out your social media services.

For example, if your clients are taking a while to approve your social posts, make sure that you can always give your clients multiple posts to approve at the same time.

Even better, you can build an interactive dashboard that allows your clients to check and update the posts in one place. You can then be notified of changes and approval straight away so that you can get the content out to its audiences as soon as possible.

Take MixBloom’s approval system as an example.

We’ve built our approval system so that it’s simple, user-friendly and quick.

As a client who has come to us to deliver white label social media management, you are introduced to our interactive dashboard.

Here you’re able to find all of the social media posts that your dedicated social media manager has created and you can review and provide feedback and amendments straight from the dashboard, where our team will pick them up and action.

Use automation (where it makes sense)

From grocery stores to smart speakers in the home and everything in between, AI tools and automation have become a prominent part of all of our lives.

In terms of social media management, this is when the application of technology performs or guides a process with minimal human input.

The benefits of automation:

Efficiency - automated social media management software is extremely efficient. These tools can free up your time to focus on other areas of the business or social media services - such as the strategy - which will always need human input. More automated software may mean you will need less staff to do a certain job - reducing staffing costs and increasing revenue.

Accuracy - while people and their creativity are at the heart of what social media marketing should be all about, sometimes humans make mistakes and human error gets in the way of accurate social media analytics. Most social media scheduling tools have an analytics feature that will automatically pull out the analytics you need straight away - saving a lot of time while being 100% accurate.

Scalability - using automation will give you processes that will enable you to scale your business. Being efficient and cost-effective - while freeing up a lot of yours and your team’s time - will help you heavily when it comes to scaling your business.

Automation Examples

There are so many social media automation tools and platforms to choose from.

Scheduling

The most popular are scheduling tools, such as Buffer, Hootsuite, and SocialPilot. There are lots of other scheduling tools out there with different plan levels to suit your needs.

Instead of manually posting social media content, you can use scheduling software.

You input the content all at once and let the tool automatically publish the posts when they need to go out. This means you only have to set aside a certain amount of hours in the week to schedule the content.

You then only have to worry about posting reactive content manually!

Content curation

Spending too many hours searching the internet for articles to share? Content curation tools make life just that bit easier!

SocialPilot’s ShareIt is a good example of this. By adding a keyword, it will bring up relevant articles that you can share directly across social media. A winner when it comes to educating and entertaining your audiences, without putting in too much effort. It's also completely free!

Analytics

Most scheduling tools will also give you social media analytics and insights. For example, Buffer will track performance metrics, create in-depth reports and give you engagement recommendations.

You can also link Shopify to Buffer so you can see sales insights too.

Resharing content

Another main player when it comes to social media automation is MeetEdgar. It can generate, curate and reshare content straight to your social accounts - saving you time while regularly engaging your audience.

Direct message responses

Chatbots are also helpful to answer FAQs that come through as direct messages. Some messages need a human response, like complaints or customer service questions. But having a bank of questions and answers that a chatbot can directly respond to is an easy way to save labor and time.

While automation can be a game changer when scaling your social media services, it's important to only use it where it makes sense. These tools can do pretty impressive things, but human creativity and input is crucial in social media.

It's all about delegation

One of the best ways of being able to scale your marketing agency and social media services is by delegating and taking a step back to allow others to do the work.

Here are a few ways you can do it.

Build a team

So you can continue delivering top-quality social media results for your business and your clients, it’s a good idea to start building your team to help deliver your social media management services. A good alternative is to build your team in other areas of the business - such as an accountant to look after your finances or an admin assistant to take care of inquiries, proposals, and reports.

We’re not saying building a team comes without its costs but we are saying it’s worth it if 1) you have the resources to do so and 2) your social media business is ready to scale.

The Covid-19 pandemic has completely changed the landscape of the modern working world. The silver lining is that you can hire people from all over the world to work remotely. So, when your social media marketing agency is in a position to hire people to take on the projects, there’s a very large talent pool waiting!

Delegating the work will ultimately help you earn more while doing less. And with a good team behind your company, you will be able to grow your business, such as by offering more services or within more niches.

Outsourcing and partnerships

A big part of running a social media marketing agency is deciding which areas and services you can do in-house and which areas could benefit from using third-party tools and agencies.

Why not consider partnering with a white label solution?

White label social media agencies provide a custom content creation service that you can resell as your own, without the need to hire more people.

Hiring a white label social media agency is an obvious choice when it comes to saving you some dough. The cost of hiring an in-house social media manager can rack up a hefty bill, yet it still gives you a limit on the amount of client work you can take on.

With a white label social media management agency, you can scale your clients without having to worry about scaling your team - giving you ultimate flexibility to add or drop clients as and when you need.

The first step is to do your research and choose a white label social media marketing agency that is reputable, like MixBloom.

MixBloom's white label social media marketing solution helps agencies handle scheduling, approvals and feedback, with a platform they can brand as their own. All feedback and requests for changes get directly to our team, who take care of all edits.

Free up time for more important tasks by letting MixBloom handle your social media needs. Discover how our white-label solution can help scale your marketing agency.

Start your free 14-day trial now!

Fix your pricing model

To nail your pricing strategy, you’ll have to define what social media packages you’re going to offer clients and at what cost.

Check out our guide for tips on how to package and sell social media management services!

Focusing on marketing and sales

The reason you’ve set up your social media agency is to help other businesses reach their goals by growing their online presence, right?

Clients aside, your own agency will need its own social media marketing too.

Your social media profiles will be a go-to hub for potential and prospective clients to have a snoop to see if you’re really the professional company that you claim to be.

While you should be treating your business as a client when it comes to the social media marketing side of things, getting caught up in client work - and constantly being at high capacity - can let your own socials slip.

If you delegate your clients' social media efforts, it should free up some time to focus on your own marketing and sales strategies.

Building a portfolio and case studies

Without a showcase of the work that you can do, customers don’t have a lot to go on when it comes to choosing an agency to look after their socials.

This could be a display - on a page on your website - of some of the social media work that you’ve done for past clients. It could be from previous roles or freelancing gigs or a case of mocking up some examples of the services you offer.

You can then incorporate these case studies into your business’ social media content for all of your target audience to see just how good you are.

Check out our guide on how to create a social media management pitch deck, and download our template!

Scaling your social media agency is an exciting endeavor but requires careful planning.

By investing in skilled professionals, adopting scalable processes and technologies and maintaining strong client relationships, you can position yourself for continuous growth and success.

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