You’ve been hired! Congratulations! Now what?

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Let’s talk about how you kick-off your relationship with your new client the right way and make sure you have the information you need to create and manage effective social media messaging. 

Hopefully you set the expectation with your new client that just because you are hired one day, you won’t be posting the next day. There is a lot of work to do get up to speed and ready to run when you are new to the brand and the client’s workflow. 

The first thing I like to do is interview the clients using a set of “discovery” questions that I have evolved over the years I’ve been working in digital marketing. Through these questions, try to get as much information as possible. You will still need to do a lot of work, research, and strategy, but knowing where they are coming from is an important foundation to working well together and achieving success, however that may be determined. If you’d like a copy of the full list of questions, sign up for my newsletter and receive a link to a PDF to download.

    Are there any questions you think I should add to this list? Comment below and let me know! This list is an evolution and I’ll take all the help I can get!

    With the answers from to these questions, I start filling out a strategic plan document that can be used as reference going forward. It is always good to have something you can refer to with the brand message, project direction and audience specifics when you are working on content ideas each month. This will help you stay focused on the end goal.

    Here are the sections and information I like to use in the digital content strategic plan document:

    • Goals and/or Objectives

    • Target Audience

    • Competitive Research

    • Search Terms and Phrases

    • Hashtags

    • Influencers

    • Topic Categories and Ideas

    • Support Needed

    Goals/Objectives

    In a perfect world, this is provided by your client. I am guessing most of you are like me and don’t live in a perfect world. You’ll probably need to distill these from the interview with the client and create some that make sense for digital marketing results. It is important to have these written and agreed upon with the client since this will be a document that you refer back to often as you are creating content and measuring results. 

    Audience

    Again, in a perfect world, this is provided by your client. But again, you’ll probably need to create the personas based on whatever information they provide. Try to create a story about each of your target audiences, a story that inspires content ideas as you think through how to meet their needs through the products or services your client offers and the content you are delivering. What are their biggest concerns? What are their needs and daily struggles that you can help solve? What are they looking for when they are online? Go beyond just demographics (though that information is important, too) and try to find what makes them tick so you can slide into their feeds with content that makes the most sense for them. 

    Research

    Next you will need to dig into some research. In future videos, I will go into more detail about how to do this research, but for now, here are the categories and relevant information I like to cover:

    • Competitors — You’ll want to outline key messages, types of posts they make, and the frequency and timing of their posts. Make notes for ideas you can use or holes that you can fill.

    • SEO — Compile words and phrases based on use, attainability, relevancy. This will be language to incorporate into your posts going forward.

    • Hashtags — Group by industry, by category, and anything specialized for the types of messaging that you will be sharing. You will want a nice mix of popular hashtags with some that are more attainable for you to be found and not lost in the sea of posts that turn up with the more popular hashtags.

    • Influencers — Last, find the people who talk about your industry and post about topics that you want following you, that you want to re-post your content, that you want to leverage to review, test, or talk about your product. Once you have a good foundation of content posted on the social accounts you are managing, start following these folks, tag them in posts, re-post their content and comment on their content to get their attention, and hopefully their follow. You can start building a relationship with them so when you do ask them for something, you might actually “know” each other a little bit.

    Topic Categories

    While all the research is fresh on your mind, now is a good time to create categories of posts and topic ideas under each of those, and maybe even potential blog post headlines. Categories could include industry, brand, product-specific, audience-specific, feel-good, promotional, etc. You get the idea. 

    Support Needed

    Because this is a document that you will share with the client, it is a good idea to make note of things that you will need from the client in order to effectively do the job they have hired you to do. This list can include things like access to all the social channels (this seems like an easy request, but it always seems to take multiple conversations to get all the access right, access to analytics (or installation of analytics codes and Facebook pixel), access to photo or video libraries, timely feedback on content drafts, etc. 

    As you can see, there is a significant amount of work to do before you start posting on your new client’s website and social media channels. But it is worth it to take the time to gather this information now as it helps generate ideas and serve as a reference each month going forward. And congratulations on the new client!










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    Brainstorming Social Media Content For Clients

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    The First Step To Getting Paid: The Proposal