When you started your business, you probably didn’t think about all the day-to-day marketing and promotion you’d be doing. You’re not a marketer but you know you need marketing. Outsourcing your social media marketing is a great way to establish consistency in your online presence, while allowing you to focus on what you do best — your business. However, a company’s marketing strategy should be integrated into every part of your business to be more effective.
Let’s learn how to bring marketing in-house and build a social media team that can thrive over time.
Why Social Media?
According to Sprout Social’s State of Social Media Report, eighty percent of business executives think it is very important or absolutely essential for their company to invest additional resources in social media marketing. Additionally, 91% of companies report that over the next three years, their company’s social media marketing budget will increase; over half say it will grow by more than 50%.
And yet, businesses of all shape and sizes struggle to effectively manage social media. Sprout Social’s report also shows that companies’ top social media challenges are:
- Building a presence across multiple platforms
- Little-to-no communication between departments
- Not seeing the immediate value of investing in social as a priority channel
Whether you’re a small business or a large organization, chances are your process for managing social media needs work.
How Did We Get Here?
Misinformation can spread quickly on social media, but there’s also a lot of misinformation about how to use social media for your business.
It’s often talked about as a free, easy-to-use marketing solution that creates instant engagement and grows fans and followers over night.
It’s so easy, my __child/cousin/intern/neighbor’s dog sitter__ can do it.
But as any social media marketer knows, social media isn’t magic. It’s both art and science. It requires a keen eye and listening ear to understand trends, consumer insights and contextual clues to help create and curate engaging content and cultivate audiences.
Large companies often fail to invest in an infrastructure designed to support social media or a company culture that really understands the role social media plays in the consumer marketplace.
Small businesses don’t always have the resources to support a full time social media team, never mind the tools that can help streamline workflow processes — and wouldn’t know where to start if they did.
Social Media is an Integration, Not an Add-On
Fifteen years after social media’s debut, it’s clear that social media isn’t a fad or something that’s nice to have. Rather it’s an essential part of any business marketing strategy. It doesn’t mean all you need is a social media presence, but it does mean that a social media presence can greatly benefit your overall marketing strategy.
But many companies approach social media like it’s an add-on to their existing marketing efforts. It’s something to be done after you’ve done everything else. When in fact, it has to be integrated into your marketing workflow — at every level, across every department.
When you are first getting started, it’s okay to outsource social media marketing and management. You want to sell widgets — not specialize in widget marketing. It’s good to bring in other perspectives to help support your marketing efforts, especially as you establish your presence online and in the global marketplace. It’s helpful to have others hone your voice and persona, create content and build awareness and cultivate a community around your brand. This type of support doesn’t happen right away — it can take years to grow your brand, your audience, and find your voice.
However, it should be a goal to bring social media back in-house so you can build upon that foundation. After all, it’s your business. You know it better than anyone and after working hard to establish yourself, social media marketing can greatly benefit from your insights, while helping you to cut costs, and optimize workflows so you can work smarter, not harder.
And yet, many businesses don’t see building an in-house social media team as necessary as other business investments. They think it doesn’t need to be as robust as other parts, even though research shows us business executives think social media is a critical part of its growth and success.
Why Bring Social Media In-House?
Your job as a business owner is to refine your processes and grow your business. It’s important to make money, efficiently and effectively.
At first, it might be cheaper to hire an outside agency to establish and manage your social media presence — it’s something you don’t want to or know how to do, so it’s money well spent. Until it isn’t.
Social media consultants, like myself, are not fully integrated into your business. We are not living and breathing it like you and your employees. We’re often consulted after decisions or mistakes have been made. And when we are a part of the decision making process – we’re not always aware of or have access to all the different elements at play, like product development, inventory management, or sales data.
There’s a lot to be gained by bringing social media in-house. It allows you to have a 360-degree view of social media’s role in amplifying your brand and meeting your business goals.
Here are four benefits of bringing social media in-house
- Develop a Hive Mind: When you hand over social media to your employees they take an active role in promoting the business. They become more in-tune to what types of content perform best and are most effective in attracting customers or building strong customer relationships. Taking a more active role in managing a company’s social media makes them more accountable. It makes it easier to see the connection between sales and marketing, product ideation and development, public outreach and customer service. The more your team knows about how things work within your company, they more helpful they can be in ideating, creating, publishing and managing content over time, which makes it so you can be creating messages that are more relevant and engaging to your audience.
Further more, when employees see how social media marketing impacts business, they can take ownership in their efforts as well as contribute more meaningfully to the business-decision making process.
- Leverage your Data: Your business generates a lot of data. How many sales are needed to sustain your business; how much it costs to produce and ship your product; how much time it takes for customer service representatives to answer questions on the phone or via email. All of this data can be helpful in understanding the role social media plays. What is the ROI? How much time can a strategic informational social media post save customer service? And how might your social media posts expedite the sales process.
When you can start to see what is needed in real time, you can start to see how you can leverage social media to help meet your goals. Have a lot of left over inventory — let’s promote it on social media! Have an opening in your schedule, share it with your audience online. Social media can be integrated into real-time decision making to help offset issues or optimize opportunities.
- Build Transparency: Social media isn’t magic and it takes time to develop your workflows to better serve your business. When the people on the ground understand how much goes into creating, mapping out and scheduling content, they’re likely to be more supportive and knowledge sharing becomes more effective.
The comments and suggestions collected from your social media audience can help your product development team create products that speak to your customer’s needs. The questions received during the purchase process can help your website content evolve to answer questions so customers don’t have to call or email, making it so more time can be spent addressing in-depth customer issues and concerns.
Additionally, when employees know the role social media plays in helping them work more efficiently, they’re incentivized to share information more freely because they can see the direct impact.
- Train the Trainers: When social media is shared by employees within a company, knowledge is shared, rather than hoarded. Employees can learn from each other and efforts don’t have to stop because someone leaves the organization or gets promoted. Professional development becomes more attractive and useful because it can be tailored to their level of experience and job responsibilities.
When new people join, they can be trained by existing staff, making it so that institutional knowledge is preserved and actively maintained within the organization.
How to Make it Happen?
Hopefully it’s more clear how bringing your social media in-house can benefit your business. But how do you make it happen? Here are a few things to keep in mind:
Define your strategy: If you haven’t developed and articulated a clear social-media strategy, now is the time to do it. This ensures that your team has a directive and a purpose, which means they’re not wasting time that would be better spent on other parts of the business. If you’re managing more than one social channel, you should have a strategy for each one.
When creating a strategy, it’s important to articulate what is your social presence is trying to achieve. Is it simply to stay top of mind with your current customers? Are you looking to build credibility in a new niche? Do you want to drive more sales during peak season?
Once you know what you’re trying to achieve, you can tailor your approach accordingly — and this will help employees to understand what they should be focused on. Sit down with your social media team and discuss the best way to achieve your goal. Then determine a few key metrics that will help you measure your progress.
Identify the employees who be involved and identify their roles: You can designate someone as the manager of social media and identify those who will have supporting roles. Editors, Advertisers, Content Creators can contribute meaningfully, without having access to everything. Also, it’s nice to have people who have access so that when employees take vacation or are out sick, there are people who can help manage in their absence.
Focus on one or two high-impact channels: With a small team, you need to start small. It’s far more effective to choose one or two channels and get to know them well. Otherwise you’ll spread your team too thin and they can get overwhelmed. Choosing two channels can let teams see their impact quicker, which will help to keep them motivated. Also, it help the team optimize their workflows, so that when it’s time to add another channel, it can be integrated effectively into their current process.
Stay organized: Consistency is the key to social media success. Many companies fail at social media because they can’t sustain their efforts overtime, because they lack the people, resources or fail to see the value of social media. When employees’ priorities shift away from social media, it’s harder to maintain a schedule. Social media management must remain a top priority or else risk not having enough people or resources to support it in the long-term.
If multiple people are sharing the responsibility of managing social media, it can be difficult to keep track of who is posting when. Keeping everyone organized on when content needs to be planned, created, reviewed, and published can re-emphasize workflow transparency, while allowing people to understand the role they play and to keep them on schedule.
A social-media calendar doesn’t have to be fancy. Even a simple spreadsheet will work. Whatever helps your team work well together, will help make it so you can stay on track.
Work Smarter, Not Harder: Use your calendar to see what content needs to be created and what content can be repurposed or reused. Chances are there are promotions that happen around the same time each year. Prioritizing content development opportunities lets you plan ahead, saving time, money and stress!
I recommend that businesses fill out the content calendars for the year ahead — identifying milestones and events where new or personalized content is needed, so you can understand how many resources you’ll need ahead of time to prepare. Teams work much more effectively when they can create content ahead of schedule, rather than at the last minute. Also, it helps keep your team focused on the way ahead, rather than becoming frustrated by last minute requests or time off! It’s also a great idea to revisit the workflow process to ensure that it’s meeting everyone’s needs and that it’s not slowing anyone down (especially other departments) or overwhelming anyone.
Show Value to Get Value: When social media helps your business, shout it from the rooftops! Let people in the company, as well as those on the social media team, know that they played a role in your social media success. The more people see its value reinforced, the more people will start to trust its role in the company.
Did social media help identify a new brand ambassador? Did your efforts help customer service representative better respond to customer inquiries? Did your sales team identify a new customer segment to sell to? Did your content get shared by an influential source, resulting in positive press or increase in traffic?
When you can show value from your social media efforts, you can help get more out of it. Employees become more empowered and motivated to continue their work. As well, take opportunities to discuss the ways that social media might not be adding value, so your team get refine and evolve their strategies over time.
There’s no magic formula to bring your social media in house and make it thrive. But these are a few things you can do strategically to help build a strong foundation so your social media marketing efforts can align with your business goals and integrate into your employee workforce.
This topic was presented at Seattle Interactive 2022 on October 26, 2022.