Some potential clients you wouldn’t touch with a 10 foot pole, no matter how much money they have.
You know the kinds of folks I’m talking about.
But today, I want to talk about something different.
Assuming that they’re not freetards, how do you know you’ll be able to deliver success for them?
Agencies and social media consultants ask this question all the time.
Other ways to ask this question:
How much should they budget, how much content do they need, what are reasonable goals, and how long should it take?
Are their goals unreasonable or perhaps they are looking for you to establish goals?
Do they have strong enough digital assets that they will work on social?
But that’s missing the fundamental issue, which is….
Can you amplify their existing success into social?
If they’ve got existing email and web audiences, and if they have landing pages or content that already convert, then you’re home free.
If they’ve got brand search terms or retargeting that already perform, then you are guaranteed to have success in social.
Social cannot stand alone, since you’re drafting off their existing brand presence and marketing campaigns.
If they are a pizza shop with a lot of crappy reviews, amplifying it into social isn’t going make their product better.
If they are an agency that doesn’t have compelling, shareable content, you’re not magically going to drive them more leads.
If they are a start-up e-commerce player looking to be the next tech darling, you can’t drive social engagement without an existing PR effort.
Have you made it clear what THEY need to do and what YOU are willing to do?
So here’s the checklist.
If at least 7 of these 10 items are true, you’ll likely find success:
- THEY commit to posting once a day (not that hard when you can share industry news and create memes– doesn’t have to be your own content to share).
- THEY are responsive on social (engaging with their customer base) and post at least once a day, unless you handle community management.
- THEY have an email list of ideally at least 10,000 (but it can be only a few thousand, if they are B2B or spending less than $1k a month).
- THEY have web traffic of at least 100 visitors a day that convert against existing landing pages– you want to send traffic to what’s tried and true.
- THEY cover their ads budget on their own credit card, knowing that this is on top of your fee.
- THEY are responsive in this project (we’re all super busy), so that you have a single point of contact who can get you what you need.
- YOU have full access to their analytics, so you can measure the impact of your organic and paid efforts.
- YOU have an ace in social ads to be able to run custom audiences, Google remarketing, and brand search terms.
- YOU are charging enough to not only do the work, but train/educate the client— hint, we assume training at least THREE times the effort of the doing.
- YOU understand how to combine web, social, and email audiences together via custom audiences, to maximize the power of existing traffic.
How many of these items are true for your projects?