How media companies can sell social media management packages with Vendasta

Media companies working in traditional channels like print, radio, and TV face unique challenges in the new, digitally dominated media landscape. However, adapting to change has always been part of working in media. Publishers in this space have the opportunity to leverage their existing customer relationships and evolve their offerings to meet the demands of the present.

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With the right additions to their portfolio of services, media businesses can ensure ongoing growth in the years to come.

Your existing customers may buy ads from your business, but they also require a range of additional digital advertising and marketing services to stay competitive. By offering them digital services, you can grow your revenue, strengthen your relationship with existing local advertisers, and ensure the health of your business in a changing media landscape.

Social media management packages are a good addition. Why? Your current customers, whether large or small, have some sort of social media presence. They likely find managing their social channels time-consuming, confusing, and difficult to stay on top of. By putting together individualized social media management packages, you can offer your customers tailor-made solutions to help them grow and interact with their online audience. Ultimately, this will help boost their leads and sales.

We’ll talk through how you can start selling social media management packages that grow your business, even if you don’t know much about social media yourself.

Why you should be offering social media management to local advertisers

Adding new revenue streams is one of the sure-fire ways you can future-proof your media business. As more local advertisers shift dollars and attention away from traditional media advertising toward digital marketing efforts, it will be increasingly difficult to stay afloat if you only sell traditional ads.

It’s normal for there to be some resistance to these changes at media companies. It’s important to remember that those media leaders who are taking the plunge are seeing real growth as a result. As more media companies make the shift, you don’t want to become irrelevant by resisting the inevitable changes in the industry.

Adding social media management services will make you more valuable to your clients since they can come to you for multiple marketing needs rather than using competitors for everything but traditional ads. By using a white-label solution to deliver the services under your brand name.

Expanding your digital offering ultimately makes your life easier as a media leader, because it enables you to feel confident that you can meet the demands of the future while still being an expert in your core competencies.

Why do local advertisers need social media management?

Social media has become non-negotiable for just about every business out there. Having a social media presence helps local advertisers establish themselves as trustworthy, authoritative voices in their industry. It helps them grow their business by offering a way to get in front of a larger audience and to stay top of mind for their existing audience.

Ultimately, social media helps to support the success of traditional TV, radio, or print ads. Prospective customers might come across a traditional ad and later search for that brand on social media. If they see an active, engaging social media presence, they’ll likely follow, and be more likely to make a purchase.

Social media management is also important from a customer service perspective since customers frequently get in touch with brands on social media. The channels need to be monitored so that customers can get quick, efficient support.

Tailor your social media management packages to advertisers’ needs

As important as social media management is for your customers, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution that will best suit all of them. By creating social media management packages that are tailored to each advertiser’s size, budget, and requirements, you can demonstrate that you understand their business and are prepared to offer them tailor-made solutions.

Snapshot Report

The tools already exist for you to create personalized social media management packages, so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time. A great place to start is by using Vendasta’s Snapshot Report. This tool generates a report that assesses your prospect's current social online presence among several categories including social media. This is the area you’ll be most interested in when selling social media management packages.

You can show these custom reports to your customers and prospects, which is a powerful sales tool in helping you secure social media management business from existing and prospective advertisers. Today’s advertisers value data, because it makes the effectiveness of marketing efforts quantifiable.

The insights in Snapshot Report allow you to demonstrate to local advertisers that you understand exactly what their social media requirements are and can provide targeted solutions.

Select the right Marketplace tools for the job

Once you have used Snapshot Report to address the advertiser’s social media management needs, you can recommend social media marketing services available through one or more of Vendasta’s top Marketplace tools for social media. These include:

• Social Marketing: This is a social media marketing tool that enables you to post social media content within the tool and have it automatically post to multiple social media channels. The tool makes it easy to respond to comments across social channels from one simple dashboard. It also has tools for making shoppable social media content to drive more sales for your advertisers, enables you to monitor social media trends in your niche, and more.
• Social Media Management: This white-label solution makes it easy to have experts handle all social media management for your clients under your brand, including conducting an onboarding call with them, providing expert writing services, providing professional reports, and even having ongoing strategy calls with them if requested.
• GetSocial: This tool lets you see which social media content is being shared the most, including through private messages. This makes it possible to create more content based on what is getting the most engagement and shares.
• Metricool: This tool makes it possible to analyze the social networks of competitors to come up with better ways to optimize an advertiser’s social media strategy.

Once you have chosen some services that will be useful for your client, you can create bundles that are right for them. You might want to have some go-to social media management packages you present to clients based on how developed their current social media strategy is. For example, you might offer a simple bundle to small businesses, a more advanced one to those in the growth phase, and an advanced one with plenty of features for large accounts. You can adjust your offering based on the specific needs of a customer, as assessed in the Snapshot Report.

As a general rule, you don’t want to overwhelm your customers with too many bundles. Instead, give them a few choices at several price points to let them zero in on a bundle that strikes a balance between having the features they need and falling within their budget.

Pricing your bundles

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all pricing strategy for social media management services. You should aim to strike a balance between making a profit that is healthy and sustainable for your business and providing advertisers with prices that aren’t so high that they’ll go to the competition.

Local advertisers can range from small startups to large, established businesses, and you should be able to demand a higher price from the latter.

Hand off your social media management work to a white-label team

It’s not uncommon for traditional media companies to find themselves in a situation where their in-house expertise isn’t aligned with the demands of offering digital marketing and advertising services. Luckily, that doesn’t mean you can’t stay competitive and offer these digital services.

Hiring and training can be expensive, and you don’t want to risk delivering sub-par services to advertisers. Instead, have a white-label team deliver all of the social media management services advertisers purchase.

You can’t afford to neglect social media services

Social media has become a must for businesses of all sizes, creating significant opportunities in the social media management space.

By showing advertisers that you have the analytical tools to identify their social media needs and the expertise to deliver excellent social media management, you can establish yourself as a valuable partner.

By delivering more digital solutions, you can not only help local businesses succeed but also advance your media company’s digital transformation.