HOW TO GET YOUR FIRST CLIENT AS A SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER
When it comes to signing your first client as a social media manager, there are several things you need to have in place.
In this blog post, I’ll be sharing practical tips to help you find your first client as a social media manager alongside the mindset you need to adopt in order to make signing clients easier.
For the purpose of this article, I’m assuming you already have the skills to manage socials for your clients (no, you don’t need a degree!) so won’t be talking about how to become a social media manager.
Before you decide to sign your first client, as well as having the correct legal bits in place, you need to be crystal clear on these things:
The vision for your business
The price of your offers
The package you’re offering
Where you’re going to market yourself
You don’t need a website to be able to sign clients. I didn’t have a website for the first 8 months of my business when I was a social media manager and I still signed plenty of clients.
You also don’t need to worry too much about niching down just yet. Of course, if you have a particular type of business you want to work with, you can focus on attracting that clientele. But, if you don’t know who you want to work with, you can work with a range of clients and niche down at a later date (if you want to).
The vision for your business
It’s important when you start looking for clients that you have a clear vision for what you’re trying to achieve. Your Big Vision will keep you motivated and encourage you to keep taking action, even if things take longer than you were hoping.
If you want more info on how to create your big vision, read this post.
The price of your offers
One of the mistakes I made when I began attracting clients as a social media manager was not knowing how much to charge. When enquiries started landing in my inbox, I became stressed about what to charge for my services and ended up offering an amazing package at a really low price.
This soon meant I was overwhelmed with clients and still not hitting my income goals. Please don’t make the same mistake I did!
Deciding on your pricing before you start attracting clients means you have time to feel confident charging that amount and you won’t panic when a potential client asks you what your rates are.
To understand exactly what you should be charging for your social media management services, listen to this episode of The Price with Confidence Podcast:
The package you’re offering
Once you’ve decided on your price, it’s time to add in the value and create the package you’ll be offering to potential clients. You may also decide to offer bespoke packages for each client so don’t get too caught up in this step. It can just be helpful for you to have an idea of what you deliver to clients.
A few things to consider when creating your packages:
What platform(s) you want to manage
What you’ll be doing: content creation, curation, engagement, feed posts, stories, etc
How often you’ll be posting for your clients
How long you’ll be engaging for
Terms of the package: Rolling monthly, 3 month minimum, 6 month minimum (I recommend at least a 3 month minimum with 30 day notice to ensure you’re earning consistently each month)
Communication: monthly strategy calls, weekly check ins
Will you include responding to DMs or will you leave that to them?
Remember, this is your business. You get to offer whatever package you want to.
When I first started out I offered all the platforms, even though I didn’t enjoy Facebook or Instagram marketing. It’s ok to only offer one service if that’s all you enjoy. Never be afraid to say no to the things that don’t excite you.
Where you’re going to market yourself
It’s entirely up to you whether you market yourself across all platforms or you decide to focus on growing just one platform at a time. Personally, I believe that choosing just the one allows you to be really focused, is less overwhelming and means you can spend more time building genuine connections with potential clients.
Again, it’s your business so it’s up to you to decide what platform you enjoy using the most and where you think your ideal customers will be hanging out the most.
Now you have those 4 things in place, it’s time to look at how to sign your first client.
Mindset
Before you do anything, it’s important you get your mindset in the right place.
Whatever you believe becomes your reality so if you tell yourself it’s going to be hard to sign your first client, guess what? It will be.
Instead you need to be telling yourself how easy it’s going to be to get your first client - even if it doesn’t always feel like it. Here are three of my favourite mindset exercises to help you increase your confidence and self belief:
Affirmations
Visualisation
Empowerment Lists
Affirmations
Affirmations are positive statements that are true/ you want to become true about yourself. By repeating these positive phrases, you start to believe they are true, therefore they become true.
For example, if you repeat to yourself over and over that you’re feeling really tired today or you don’t have enough time, you’ll find yourself feeling really tired and always running out of time.
But if you change the story you’re telling yourself to something empowering, it’ll soon become your reality.
You can repeat affirmations out loud or in your head, you could write them out 30 times a day in your journal, you could read through your list of affirmations or you could record yourself saying them on the free app ThinkUp and then listen back to the recording for 10 minutes a day.
When it comes to signing clients, here are a few affirmations you could repeat:
It’s so easy for me to sign my first client
My first client is on their way to me
I’m confident in my ability to sign my first client
I’m so grateful to have signed my first client
My first client can’t wait to work with me
Visualisation
This is a powerful exercise many pro-athletes use to help them become champions. The idea is that you visualise what you want as if it’s already happened. As you tap into those feelings of happiness, pride, excitement, you become a vibrational match to the real thing.
Not only that, the visualisation exercise can help increase your motivation and re-ignite your passion if you’re feeling a bit disheartened.
Try laying down for 5-10 minutes, close your eyes and take a few deep breaths. Imagine yourself signing your first client. How do you feel? What’s the first thing you do? Who’s the first person you tell? How do you celebrate? Visualise the process of signing that first client and really feel those excited feelings as if it’s already happened.
Once you come out of the visualisation, try to stay in that high vibe energy and act as if it’s already happened. This takes away any pressure or feelings of desperation to sign that client and instead allows you to focus on taking action.
You can access a 10 minute Dream Day guided visualisation inside The Pricing Academy®.
Empowerment Lists
Empowerment lists are a type of journaling and a powerful way to build self confidence. The idea is that you write out a list of positive things or reasons that you can absolutely achieve what you want. When you have the evidence in front of you that it’s possible, you’ll build on the belief that you can achieve your goal.
Here are a few empowerment lists to help you sign your first client:
25 Reasons I know I can easily sign my first client
30 Reasons I know I’m valuable to my clients
15 Ways I can easily attract my first client now
20 Reasons I believe I’m an amazing social media manager
35 Reasons my dream clients can’t wait to work with me
Don’t worry if writing these out feels a bit uncomfortable or takes a while to begin with. That’s completely normal. The key is to keep doing this exercise either daily or 3-4 times a week to continually build on your confidence. The more confident you are, the easier it’ll be to sign that first client.
Practical
Now your mindset’s in the right place, it’s time to look at the practical steps to take to sign your first client as a social media manager.
There are two key things to focus on: Value + Connection.
Value
You want anyone landing on your social media profile to get some value from you. You want them to see you as an expert and you want to build the know, like, trust factor with them.
When I started as a social media manager back in 2017, I didn’t have to pitch my services to anyone because I organically attracted clients through my content. The way I did this was by providing a shit tonne of value. Every post I shared was either educational, entertaining or inspiring so whoever viewed it would be left with something valuable.
As a SMM, I know you don’t need me to tell you this!
But in terms of value, you want to be sharing tips, ‘secrets’, content ideas, hacks - anything that can help your audience. Here’s a list of content ideas for you:
Different schedulers to use and their benefits
How to create posts that connect with your audience
What the different analytics mean
How to batch create content
How to choose the right hashtags
Post size dimensions across the platforms
The different features of the platform you offer as a service
Where your love for social media came from
Why you decided to become a social media manager
Results that you’ve achieved (for your own profile)
One thing I’ve noticed a lot is that people are worried about giving too much value in case they give all the secrets away and don’t sign any clients. I truly believe that isn’t the case. The more value you give, the more you help someone, the more they’re going to trust you.
And also, not everyone who lands on your page will become your client. Some may follow you for months - even years - before deciding to work with you. If you’re consistent with delivering value, you’ll attract new clients into your business. Even if someone doesn’t want you to manage their socials, they may get in touch with you to have a one off strategy session or they may want you to coach them.
Be open to possibilities and have an abundant mindset.
Connection
The second thing to focus on is connection. People buy from people so whilst it’s important your content is valuable, you also need to be building relationships with your community. Personally, I would focus more attention on connecting and engaging with people than I would on posting. 2-3 value-packed posts a week can be enough alongside 1-2 hours a day engaging.
At the moment, you’re in a really good position because you have the time to spend engaging. When you start signing clients, you’ll have less time to connect with your community. Make the most of this stage.
When I talk about connecting and engaging, I don’t mean jumping into people’s DMs and cold pitching. Please, if you take nothing else from this post, do not DM people offering your services. It’s rude.
Here are my favourite ways to connect + grow my community:
Leave meaningful comments on posts
Watch people’s stories + respond to them
If you really liked a piece of content, DM them and tell them what you loved about it
Share other people’s posts to your story with a sentence or two with why you liked it
Again, as a SMM, you know exactly how to connect + engage.
The whole purpose of connecting is to help build relationships, understand who’s in your audience and to create a network of potential clients or people who may refer you to their friends.
Offer for free
Once you’ve begun to build an audience and created some lovely connections, you may like to offer your services for free to 2-3 businesses in exchange for a testimonial.
This is a great strategy to help you build up your portfolio, to help you generate results that you can showcase on your socials and to help you increase your confidence offering services as a social media manager.
A 2-4 week period can be long enough to achieve a few small wins and track the progress. Don’t forget to record the analytics! I’d recommend offering no longer than 4 weeks as you have to remember how valuable you are. Just because you haven’t signed your first client, doesn’t mean you’re not worthy of being paid.
The aim with this trial period would be to deliver an outstanding service so that when you showcase the results at the end, you can then upsell them into your package.
Announce to your friends + family
When you’re ready to sign your first client, it can be a good idea to create a post to share on your personal profile to announce the news to your friends and family. Although this can sometimes be scary, they’ll want to support you as much as they can.
You can let them know that you’ve decided to start your own business, you’re feeling very excited and are ready to take on your first client. Then ask your friends/family to share with anyone they may know who could benefit from social media help.
Sell on your socials
Mix in some selling posts into your content or add little P.S.’s at the bottom of posts to let people know you’re available for hire. In the early stages a lot of social media managers feel like they can’t sell the services yet. But if you don’t sell, how will you get your first client?
Remember, selling is serving. You have such a valuable service to offer your clients so don’t be scared to shout about it from the rooftops.
A note on rejection
Before we wrap things up, I wanted to give a nod to the inevitable rejection that comes with having a business.
Not everyone is going to say yes to you. Some will say you’re too expensive (please don’t drop your price!!), some will ignore you completely. It just comes with the territory of being a business owner.
But don’t allow the rejection to mean something about you. You are good enough, you are worthy and you are deserving of signing clients. Use this mantra when you face rejection: Every no is one step closer to a dream yes.
To recap:
Have these four things in place before you sign your first client: A clear vision, your prices + a package and your marketing strategy
Mindset exercises to feel confident signing clients: Affirmations, visualisation, empowerment lists
Practical steps to take: Create valuable content, focus on connecting with your community, offer your services for free, announce to your friends + family
Remember that everyone gets rejected and every no is one step closer to a dream yes