Welcome back to the last social media management for beginners episode, at least
for right now, if you've been enjoying this series, please do let me know by
commenting down below what some topics are that you'd like me to talk about.
And I will continue adding to this playlist as I can.
Also, if you didn't know, I normally post a video podcast on Fridays.
We're doing an.
Exclusive today.
And it's actually going to tie in really nicely with the topic of today's
video, which is how to get clients.
I interviewed Morgan Overholt, who's made over $500,000 on the
Upwork platform and she shares a ton of gems about getting clients
and most importantly, keeping them.
So I'll leave a link for that episode down in the description.
If you'd like to check it out.
All right, today, we are talking about how to get clients, particularly
when you don't have experience.
This is one of the hardest places to be, at least when you're first starting.
How do you get experience when you don't have experience and the experience that
you want to get requires experience?
Okay.
So my first tip is you do need to get some kind of external.
The first place, a lot of people's minds go is to doing work for free and
you can do some portfolio projects.
That's what I call it on tracks that maybe last for a short period of
time, or maybe it was just kind of a condensed version of what your full
service offer will eventually be.
You can ask around, you can ask friends and family, maybe they
have a business that you can create some social content for.
You can draft up a content calendar.
You can run it.
Keene and use that as portfolio work, but you can also charge for a portfolio
work and want to make that clear.
You don't need to just work for free.
I very much consider my first social media copyrighting job, a portfolio project.
I was getting paid, not a ton, but I was getting paid for my time.
So they are out there.
You can browse job boards.
You can ask around, like I said to friends and family, another thing that I
like to do as portfolio work is charity.
If you have a cause that you believe in volunteer, Volunteer your time
to help out the local animal shelter and manage their Facebook lives
or something like that, because it feels a little bit less exploitative
when it's going for a good cause.
At least that's how I always felt.
No, you can also build your own portfolio content, for example.
I manage an entire editorial strategy for a podcast and a YouTube channel.
And that totally is portfolio work for myself.
So you could do something similar.
Maybe you have a.
Or my original portfolio project for myself, way back in the day when
I was in college is I created an Instagram account for my hometown.
And I just took shots of, you know, cool architecture in my city
and cool things that were going on in town and posted about it.
And I built that Instagram account up to.
I don't know, maybe 500 or something like that.
It wasn't huge, but it was enough to show that I know how to manage
an Instagram account from scratch.
I know how to take photos.
I know how to engage with people, and I know how to build up a
small following step two is you want to actually track the data.
From that portfolio work.
So you don't want, just want to create a podcast and then let it go out into
the ether, make sure that you're taking snapshots of cool content that you
come up with, that you're measuring your analytics and the true actually
seeing how many people are coming over to your podcast site from social media.
Or whatever the case may be, whatever the portfolio content is, you should
also treat it just like a client, just like a normal client and pull KPIs
every single month or key performance indicators put together a spreadsheet so
that you can monitor the growth over time.
It's really exciting to be able to say, Hey, I grew an account from zero
to 500 in a month versus zero to 500.
Six months, or I spent six months on an account and I don't
even know where we started at.
So I can't really report on our growth that really doesn't
tell an interesting story.
So you want to make sure to tell stories with whatever it is that you're doing.
I like to create a little simple one sheeter that has a sample of the
different content types that I've created and what my abilities are.
I can bring that with me.
When I'm meeting with prospective clients, I can send that through in emails.
Pitches.
And so on now, before you get out to applying for jobs and pitching
yourself to people, you want to really understand your motivations
and what your value proposition is.
A unique value proposition is something that you uniquely bring to the table.
It's sort of.
The stand out offer.
For example, if I was a social media manager who exclusively worked with
law firms, maybe I would say I help lawyers turn their social media
from boring into high converting lead machines or something.
That if you worked with animal rescue organizations, you can say, you know, I
am a social media manager who specializes in taking high quality photos of cute
pooches and finding them homes that they deserve or something of that nature.
It's really important that you are speaking to your
ideal client and also your.
Specific skills.
If you remember back to episode one, we talked about how some social media
managers may be really comfortable and may really enjoy taking photos,
creating videos and things like that.
So it's important to call that out if you're a trained videographer, if you
went to school for video and that's something you're doing now in your.
Definitely put that into your unique value proposition, make
that known if you already trained photographer, make that known as well.
And maybe you don't like those things, and you're just really good with words
and you're a really great copywriter, then make sure that that is in your
unique value proposition as well.
It's important to understand that there really are different
social media managers.
For different projects.
You're probably not going to be the right fit for every
single open position out there.
But if you're honest about what your unique value proposition is
and what you uniquely bring to the table, you're more likely to find
projects that are completely in line.
With what you want to do and what you're good at.
And you're not being thrown into situations that you don't really
know how to handle your unique value proposition is something that you can
put on your website on a business card.
You can put it on your Upwork profile.
You can put it on your Instagram account pretty much anywhere where clients
are going to be interacting with you.
It's important to just keep that top of mind and make it be known next.
I know you probably think it's time to start cold pitching, right?
But I want you to do one thing first and that's choose an inbound pillar plot.
What does that mean?
It means choose a platform that you can dedicate to creating content and investing
in the content marketing strategy that might not have payoff today or tomorrow
or even next week or next month.
But it's something that you can really work at, dominating the SEO and building
a solid presence on, so that eventually you start attracting your ideal clients as
opposed to having to go out and hunt for.
So I'll give you the example of myself.
I personally have the pillar platform of YouTube.
It's where I put the majority of my time, my energy, my effort, and my resources.
And I posted on YouTube for a long time without getting paid at all.
And I also posted on YouTube for a long time without generating
any leads for my business.
But now it's responsible for a whole lot of.
I would say over half on any given month.
So make us smart commitment to your content marketing platform.
Realistically, if you're just starting out becoming a freelance social media
manager, you're not going to want to post every single day on Instagram reels or
YouTube or LinkedIn, because you're going to need to go out and take part in some
of those outbound strategies as well, which we're going to talk about next, but
you can make a goal of, Hey, I'm going to post once a week on my podcast or.
Twice a week on Instagram reels, or I'm going to do one webinar
a week or maybe one a month.
Something like that, that you can just continuously invest
in and do on a schedule.
And over time it will lead to more engaged people.
People who are.
Loyalty you and people who have really built up a relationship with
you through your content and are ready to buy, as soon as you put
the right offer in front of them.
Now, if you're investing in a content marketing strategy, which I think
you should be, you should also have a website that's optimized for leads.
If I put my website in my YouTube description box, it better be optimized
for people to be able to fill out a form and get in touch with me, or I
should, at the very least have my email.
Listed somewhere on my YouTube profile or whatever remain platform
is going to be something I really like to use for this is HoneyBook.
HoneyBook is a tool that I use to allow people to book discovery calls with me
and fill out lead forms to let me know what stage they are in their business
and what they really need help with.
You can do everything from create scheduling.
That allow people to instantly book discovery calls with you to creating
brochures that give a little sampling of what types of services you offer.
And it also acts as a customer hub.
So once people fill out those lead forms and book, those calls
you'll have their information.
Readily available for you and you can set up automations and workflows and all
kinds of cool things all in one place.
So I'm a huge HoneyBook fan.
I'll leave a 50% off link for you down in the description box.
If you want to get started, it's a very affordable tool and it's
one of the best investments I've made in my business ever huge fan.
Okay.
And again, before you go out and start aggressively hunting for leads, there
might be a lot more right under your nose that you hadn't even thought about.
Just talk to your network, talk to people who you talk to you every day, whether
that's your mom, your aunt, your cousin, your best friend, the person who cuts your
hair, the person who makes your coffee.
Those are all great people to say, Hey, I'm starting a new business.
Can I leave a couple of cards with you?
Or do you know anyone who may be new in business and wants to
work with a social media manager?
I know it sounds really simple, but you never know who people know and also
keep in touch with your old college.
If you're still at a day job, you might not be comfortable telling them that
you're starting a business, but if you're leaving your day job or you're
not currently working right now, if you have any professional connections that
you've really enjoyed working with, and that really could vouch for your
professionalism, be sure to add them on LinkedIn and just kind of give them a
heads up about what you're doing now.
You don't want to come off as too aggressive or too houndy, but
just simply say, Hey, how are you?
They hope everything's going well.
I haven't seen you in a while.
I started.
A couple of weeks ago, I'm really excited about it.
Hope we can catch up soon.
I mean, just something simple like that.
Okay.
Lastly, let's talk about the cold outbound stuff.
I got my first gig on Upwork personally.
I think these job boards are really great places to get your first gig at
the very least, they can also be good.
Long-term lead sources depending on how you use them, but that's
another video for another.
Right now we're just talking about getting started and people have a lot of
criticisms about job boards, because they do take a small percentage of what you get
paid and use it or their platform fees.
But the reason why I think they're a great place to start is because
they're full of people who actively are looking for people to work for them.
It's a lot easier to convince somebody who already knows they need a social
media manager that you're the right social media manager for them than it
is to convince somebody who doesn't even know what a social media manager is or.
I think they need one or doesn't think they can afford one
that they actually need one.
And that you're the right person for them.
There's a lot of hoops to jump through.
And if you're not super comfortable with sales, that can be a tall order
when you're first starting out.
You'll definitely get there.
You'll get more comfortable with talking about it and also targeting
the right customers who do know what a social media manager is and do
have the budget for one, et cetera.
But anyway, in the beginning, that can be kind of.
So I like the platform Upwork.
There are certainly other freelance platforms out there too, though.
There's fiber there's freelancer, there's guru, there's even
LinkedIn, which has some freelance capabilities on there as well.
I say, use whatever resources are available to you when you're first
starting out, the first client is the hardest client to get.
Once you get one, your brain tells yourself that it's possible and
it makes it so much easier for you to repeat what you already know.
So just get the first client focus on whatever resources are available, whether
that's Upwork, whether that's a friend of a friend or whatever that might be
optimize your profile on those platforms, make sure that it's inviting, make
sure that it's completely filled out.
Make sure that it has examples of your work.
And a pro tip that I have is to always include a little video.
Just simply record a quick webcam video of you introducing yourself saying, Hey,
I'm Latasha, I'm a social media manager.
I love to work with chefs or the restaurant industry or
whoever it is that you work for.
Pop a couple of examples of your work up on the screen.
I know when I'm on the other side and I'm hiring people, anyone who includes
a video or has a video on their profile.
Always automatically moves to the top of my list because you know,
people buy from people and people want to hire people that they can
see themselves enjoying to work with.
And if you come across as very professional and very nice.
Chances are you're going to move up in the ranks.
Now the other secret to job boards for me is filtering.
If you just go to upwork.com and type in social media manager,
you will probably be overwhelmed.
But if you use the advanced filtering options, like filtering to intermediate
level, Freelancers or filtering by budget so that you're not seeing any $10 projects
and you're only seeing, you know, $200 and above projects or something like that.
That's gonna really help narrow down the playing field and
present you with a lot more.
Options that seem more fruitful.
Now, of course, you probably don't want to aim too high here though.
Either.
You probably won't want to filter for expert level projects.
If you don't even have an Upwork profile built up yet, I would recommend
starting with a short term beginner or intermediate level project, even if
that means it's a little bit under the rate that you would normally check.
If it's short-term meaning it's Hey, could you create five social posts for
us, or could you just audit or a social media profile or could you have one
consulting call that is going to have a quick turnaround so they can give
you a good review and reviews are sort of like currency on these platforms.
Good reviews.
Lead to more.
So get that good review and then apply for more jobs and just kind of up your rate
with every single new client that you got.
And if you do that and you complete the jobs and you do a good job and get
good reviews, you should be at a place where you're making a decent amount or
the target amount that you want to be making in just a little bit of time.
Now, lastly, you can also make cold introduct.
This is something that I did a lot of when I was first starting out.
And I just started with a list of dream clients.
Now, if you're not sure where to start about finding dream clients, well,
one, if you're looking for a local strategy, a lot of the times you can
look up best of business awards or best places to work type awards in
your local area and see what some of the companies are that come up.
Usually those are companies that have decent budgets, and that
might be good places to work.
If you're like me and you like to do.
Startups and people in the tech industry.
Here's my little secret.
I love this tool.
I love this website and I feel like people just don't talk about it a
lot, but it's called angel list.
There is also another one called Crunchbase that I like to look up
different startups and it gives you some information on their funding
levels, which is really helpful.
It also gives you information on who their executive leadership is
and what I do with that once I find who their executive leadership.
As I add them on LinkedIn and say, Hey, I just heard about
your startup, blah, blah, blah.
It looks really cool.
I'm a social media manager in the area, and I'm always keeping up with new
startups would love to connect some things to Blake that you don't need to go and
send your HoneyBook booking link for them.
You don't need to send your portfolio through, just make
an introduction, play it cool.
And if you have a LinkedIn content strategy where you're posting, at least
once in a while and your LinkedIn.
You filled out completely and is representative of your experience level
and the jobs that you've done in the past.
Hopefully they'll check out your profile and click over to your website, follow
that funnel, book, a call with you.
And so it goes, you absolutely can also send out an email pitch.
Best luck that I've had happened after LinkedIn connection.
If you add them on LinkedIn or even on Twitter, just depending on
the company and where they're most active, they'll start to kind of
develop that name recognition for you.
So if you do send them a cold email later, they're more likely to actually open it.
If they've seen your name on LinkedIn or seen that you connected with them
on Twitter or whatever the case may be.
So I would recommend doing.
And lastly, another tool that'll help you out.
If you are sending cold emails is a tool called video card.
Actually it did a whole video about them awhile back.
It's a really cool browser based video capture tool, really simple.
It's just a browser extension that you use in Chrome, and you can record
your screen or record your face and just do something very similar
to what I recommended on Upwork.
Give a personalized introduction, have kind of a virtual
coffee meeting with them.
And again, Whenever somebody has sent me a cold email like this, and
truly put in the time and effort.
And given me a customized video message, I've pretty much always
at the very least replied to them because I know that takes a lot of
time and effort to put that together.
Oh.
And video is free, so I'll leave the link down in the description.
Okay.
So let me know if this series has been helpful so far, leave me a thumbs up.
If it was and subscribe to the channel, I'll be adding to this series.
If you all like.
If you did be sure to leave me a comment, let me know what you'd like me to talk
about next, but in the meantime, I'll be back with regular videos next Monday.
I hope you enjoyed this one and I'll talk to you then.
Bye.