How to make myself unpopular (aka Can you outsource your social media?)

I’m going to make myself unpopular by not giving you the answer you’re looking for. But don’t worry, I’ll make up for it all with a really good alternative.

Can you outsource your social media? Yes. Ish. You can certainly have someone create the posts and do the scheduling.

But the most important bit is the strategic thinking. And you can’t outsource that. Social media (and for that matter email marketing, newsletter creation, blogging and advertising) is about creating a relationship with your customer that convinces them over time of the benefits of buying from you.

You can’t build that relationship if you don’t understand the company and the idea behind it; the brand; the customer and their challenges; your service and how it delivers a meaningful benefit to your customer.

Who is best placed to do that? Yup. It’s you. I told you I was going to make myself unpopular.

But here is the truly brilliant news. It isn’t actually that hard to do the strategic thinking. It takes a few hours and it requires a clear process that is designed to elicit everything you have to say.

Your customer doesn’t arrive on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook or Insta ready to buy from you. They go through a process of finding out about you, seeing what you’re about, reading what you have to say and assessing whether you’re for them. In short, they go through a sales funnel – and the job of your communication strategy is to make sure that at every stage of that sales funnel, your customer is loving what they see and finding what they need.

If you have a target to post every day this week, you have the wrong target. If you’re saying everything you have to say to everybody who needs to hear it, you’ll have more than enough to say.

Any communications consultant or social media manager worth their salt will create a strategic plan with you to ensure you’re communicating effectively. They'll work out with you how to build up a base of customers and how they'll move them through your sales funnel so that they actually buy from you.

The process I use takes a few hours - obviously it varies according to the complexity of your business. But it's a few hours that gets a far better return on the ongoing investment in your communications - from social media to blogging to advertising to... everything you say to your customers.

Get the strategy in place and you can hand over the management of your social safe in the knowledge that everything that is posted is delivering on your strategy and designed to get results.

And it’ll save your social media manager hours.

Contact me for communications strategy planning or book on one of my training courses to learn the tools you need to create your plan yourself.