If there’s one takeaway worth stashing in your social media management agency’s back pocket, it’s this: make a reasonable promise and over-deliver.
As a new social media management agency, you need to consider a practical and realistic service offering. You’re one person with a finite amount of time, resources, and attention.
This isn’t to say you shouldn’t want to do a good job on behalf of your social media clients. On the contrary, that’s all you should want to do in an effort to build trust and drive retention.
Just make sure that you’re taking into account time constraints and unpredictable future challenges.
These might include:
- An influx of new clients
- New requests from current clients
- Timely social opportunities for current clients
- A delay in deliverables from new or current clients
- Personal time off and unplanned events
- Other operational needs on behalf of your business
As you familiarize yourself with the client model and nuances of running a social media-based business, you will begin to share your capabilities.
You’ll want to propose a clear, goal-oriented approach that allows you to showcase your high-quality work and value.
Consider this 30-60-90 day action plan template for all new social media contracts.
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The 30-60-90 day plan is a structured way of laying out goals and expectations. It’s commonly used by businesses to help guide new employees and ensure a smooth transition.
The reasoning behind why this method applies to social media management agencies is two-fold:
- Orientation. There’s the newness factor. While you might not be an employee of the client, you’re still representing them. There will be plenty to learn about the business before you can make all of their social media dreams come true.
- Setting expectations. Think of it as a client communications best practice. Growing a community of engaged followers on social media takes time — more time than most clients account for. The client doesn’t necessarily understand that coming into the business relationship. You do.
Make sure you’re able to define how you plan to achieve a client’s goals with a clear course of action:
Goal: Drive X new customers to the client’s business in X days.
- Action: Optimize the client’s social media listings with a link to the most important page on their website.
- Action: Designing social media posts with a link to a client’s website content.
- Action: Design and implement social media advertising campaigns to deliver sales.
Goal: Build a community of X brand ambassadors with X amount of engagement per post.
- Action: Choose the right platforms that match your client’s business.
- Action: Develop a social media posting schedule when that audience is online.
- Action: Engage with social media comments and mentions.
Doing so will be more reassuring than simply telling them to hand over the social media keys.
Use this 30-60-90 action plan template to drive success.
30-day plan for a new social media contract: Learn
Once a new social media contract is signed, it’s hard not to want to hit the ground running. Your client may even encourage it — sending over a long list of login credentials to their social media accounts.
In these moments, remember your “reasonable promise and over-deliver” tagline.
No matter how thoroughly you’ve defined your ideal client profile, every business has its own set of nuances to understand.
For every new client, you have to consider the following:
- Brand voice and tone
- Visual aesthetic
- Product or service details
- Mission and values
Your client may have developed these business tenets on their own, but if they haven’t you’re going to tease it out with instinct. You’re not necessarily being hired to deliver a new brand. Your job is to build on the existing brand.
All of these points will factor into your approach to their social media channels—assuming your client has worked to define them already. If community management is part of your offering, which we assume it is, you’ll also need to get up to speed on how they handle customer service.
Assuming your agency covers basic social media services (e.g., community management, scheduling, content creation, social listening, and reporting), here are some goals you might want to factor in for the first 30 days:
- Conduct a complete social audit of client and competitor channels.
- Create a social media editorial calendar.
- Create a reference document for community management detailing answers to FAQs that surface on social.
- Create a deck of social media best practices relevant to the client’s business.
- Mock-up the first two weeks of potential content, including both copy and visuals, for the client to review.
- Mock-up a monthly report (like the one below) that highlights relevant social media KPIs for the client to review.
60-day plan for a new social media contract: Implement
After the learning period of the first 30 days has come and gone, you should find yourself in a better position to take action.
Even though your 60-day plan will focus on implementation, remember that perfection is not the end goal. Learning and tweaking are always going to be a part of your social media management agency’s process.
But in the first couple of months, you should have a foundation of both documentation and posting activity to continue building upon.
Consider focusing on these types of goals leading up to the 60-day mark:
- Launch reviewed and revised social media content.
- Launch new social media channel(s) — if applicable.
- Update current social media channels with relevant company information, brand voice, and website links.
- Plan and launch a social media campaign (e.g., a contest, giveaway, or something that works in tandem with the client’s other marketing initiatives).
- Report on the first 30 days worth of metrics.
- Set monthly and quarterly goals going forward based on the first 30 day metric benchmarks.
90-day plan for a new social media contract: Optimize
With social media channels up and running under your supervision, your 90-day plan should provide wiggle room to optimize.
It’s easy to set yourself on auto-pilot, especially when a client doesn’t check-in often. Many businesses are happy to outsource social media management to you in its entirety and would prefer to be hands-off.
But by the end of your first 90 days with this client, it’s important to show the difference made by your efforts.
Here are some goals to work towards by the end of 90 days with a new client:
- Identify opportunities for new types of content (e.g., video or visuals).
- Create a spreadsheet of potential influencers (micro and macro) to engage.
- Explore Facebook boosting potential. If ads are included in your service offerings, your 90-day plan may also include pre-launch administrative tasks like setting up a Facebook Business Manager account, gathering email lists for retargeting, and creating lookalike audiences.
- Report on the first 60 days worth of social media metrics and suggest next steps for what’s working and what can be improved upon.
Final Thoughts: Executing your 30-60-90 day plan
Anyone can post to social media but if your ultimate goal is to grow a brand’s following, you have to be proactive. You have to keep the lines of communication open with a client and show your attempts to continuously improve.
After all, you never know when a better outside proposition will come along or the budgets will get cut.
Executing on a 30-60-90 day action plan template helps keep both you and your client on track and accountable. It’s a map guiding your efforts forward with an eye on long-term success.
