Episode 40: Should You Outsource Your Social Media? The Dos and Don’ts

Welcome back to the pod almost said pod squad. And I was like, I feel like somebody is already surely has taken that name. And so we need a name. Maybe y'all could be like the simplified squad or like the. I don't know if you have a good name. DM me, coming at you from my sunny home office in Cincinnati, Ohio on a beautiful fall day drinking coffee from this morning that I just put ice in. Is that gross? I do that all the time. Yeah. So here we are. Today's episode is going to be about outsourcing. And what you should consider before outsourcing your social media, the do's and don'ts. I get this question a lot around like a virtual assistant or if you're brick and mortar and you know if you have like a front desk staff or office manager or ca or something like that, doing your Instagram or whatever for you. So I'm just gonna kind of walk through things that I've learned over the past four years of doing this. This is actually how I got my start. And we're going to talk about, like I said, all the do's and don'ts of outsourcing your social media. If you get a chance, could you please leave me a review wherever you listen to these podcasts. If you're loving it, I would love to know. And my goal is to get to 50 reviews by the end of the year. And you can help me do that. And I would appreciate it so much. All right, here we go. Welcome to holistic marketing simplified a podcast for health and wellness professionals looking to simplify their marketing. I'm your host, Molly Cahill. And this podcast is brought to you by my marketing roadmap, which is a five episode private audio training that's kind of like this podcast, but not exactly because it's not available to the general public when you search on your podcast feed. So the great thing about consuming free content like this for me or on my Instagram or my blogs or whatever is that yes, you will learn a lot but you kind of have to go searching for what it is exactly you're looking for. This five episode private podcast is broken down in a logical step by step order. That's why it's called a roadmap. If you're ready to get started on your Instagram marketing journey, or if you already are started and you're just feel like you're kind of like overwhelmed with all of the different free information. This is a super clear roadmap with lots of tangible step by step action items that will get you from point A to point B for just $27. So all you have to do is head to Molly cahill.com/private training. And based on the reviews I've had so far, I know you won't be disappointed

Hello, my name is Dr. Abby Parrish and I'm a chiropractor located in Old Town, Daphne, Alabama. And I listen to the holistic marketing simplified podcasts.

Like I've been doing a lot of longer episodes recently. So I'm just trying to keep today's shorter, we'll see how that works. I'm also getting over a head cold. So I apologize to my podcast producer in advance if I'm making any weird sinus, terrible noises that you're gonna have to edit out. For the sake of you lovely listeners. But let's talk about the do's and don'ts of outsourcing your social media. So I have seen time and time again and this in this might not be you right? So don't tune out if this first scenario is something that you don't feel like suits, you know, whatever you've seen, but it's like, oh, I have a patient who does our Instagram, or RCA does our social media or something like that. And that's totally fine. There's nothing wrong with that. But I do want to talk about some of the pitfalls and like do's and don'ts that come along with that. So also, this pertains to if you have an online business only, I see this a lot like Oh, my assistant, or my virtual assistant does my social media. Again, this could be okay. But also there's some things to look out for. So we're going to talk about all of that. But those of you who don't know, we run a fully booked 30 account, Instagram management agency. So these are things that again, like I feel like I'm pretty well qualified to talk about because when I first started my agency, years ago, it was never really meant to be an agency. I was running the Instagram account for my chiropractor at the time just for trade. And that snowballed into me doing an acupuncturist for trade and a massage therapist for trade and I was like the most relaxed bodywork to him and no demand. But I'm gonna talk about the trade pitfalls. And I'm not saying it's a bad thing, but there are definitely some things to look out for. But at the time of this recording, our Instagram Management Agency is actually full for new clients. You can still inquire if you're in interested, because we are going to be starting, actually, we're looking to expand our team. I have a couple of interviews this week at the time, I'm recording this. And we will be onboarding some new clients for February 2020 For start date. So you can definitely enroll in holistic marketing hub right now, though, and have the person that you're looking to offload it to watch the hub. And so we're going to talk about that, too. So first, let's talk about knowing whether or not you're ready to outsource your social media. So it might be that you're just already wearing way too many hats. It's not something that you enjoy. And it's not something that you want to do anymore, and you just want to completely get it off your plate. Totally fine. Maybe you're ready to outsource. One thing to think about is, I used to have on my sales page for the Instagram Management Agency, one of the packages, one of the descriptions of one of my packages was something like, we'll take it all off your hands, you never have to think about Instagram again type of thing. Well, I took that language off of my sales page. And here's why. Even if you outsource, or delegate your social media to someone else, you still have to be present in terms of your face or videos of you or like some, some little pulse to show proof of life. You know, you are here, you're actually on this account. Because no longer can you get away with like what I used to do years ago, when I would help these other people with their accounts is I would say, Oh, don't worry, I'm kind of like a magician, I can make something out of nothing. And while that's true, we still can do that, we can usually make something out of nothing, you're just not going to see the results that you're probably desiring with that approach. So just go into it knowing that you definitely can outsource. But there still needs to be that pulse of you that you know, the Instagram account still needs to be personified as you. And I always say I can only pretend to be you for so long. Now, what does that mean, there's kind of a couple of different levels. So for us for our agency, it means our clients aren't having to worry about writing captions, or editing their videos or anything like that. But we do ask that they have professional photography done in their office. And if you're virtual, the same thing we've had some people do some really cute shoots with like, certain lab tests, they might order or supplements that they recommend or just with like healthy food that they cook or whatever the majority of my audience is brick and mortar. But I do have a lot of online businesses too. So like I said, I don't want you to feel left out if I'm just talking about the brick and mortar stuff. So yeah, so that's what that looks like is we ask our clients to have professional photography done. Because stock photos, and just graphics alone, even if they're branded graphics to your brand colors and fonts, that alone is not enough to make people really convert to becoming a pant paying patient or client in 2023 2020. For social media, I shouldn't be able to come to your Instagram page, and change out the name and the logo and then feel like it could belong to any number of people who do the same thing as you. It needs to have that personal signature of your face, at least every six posts. And so again, I have completely removed any language from my sales page, or just from like on Discovery calls with people saying, Oh, we're magicians we can do something to make something out of nothing or never have to worry about it again. Because truly in this Instagram climate that we're in, I'm going to use that word to makes me feel fancy. You really do you have to show your face because I was actually just on just over an hour ago I have these like a one off one on one pick my brain calls with people sometimes. If you're interested in one of those, let me know they're not on my website because I really am trying to pare down on the amount of calls I do but I would love to chat with you. So anyway, if you want to do a one on one pick my brain call let me know it's just 147 bucks for 60 minutes. But anyway, I was just on this one on one picked up brain call with this lovely woman who does a lot of like clean beauty for women and menopause. And she was like, what is it that people are looking for? Like how what are people looking for in shoe more does like influencer marketing, which really isn't something I specialize in, but I was like, You know what, Mary, they're looking for you.

You can't put on a mask to try to pretend to be someone else. Like that's not what people are looking for. And there's going to be people who are drawn to you and there's going to be people who are repelled from you and that is perfectly okay. So I'm sorry this is turning into a whole lesson on personal branding, which I did not mean for this to be. If you want to learn more about personal branding, I have a free resource on this. It's a like a free branding guide. And it's just something I talk about my content a lot, so you easily can find it. But anyway, let's go back to the outsourcing topic, this is what I have outlines and I always straight from the outlines. And my producer and copywriter probably like wanna kill me. But okay, so that's, that's kind of my disclaimer on outsourcing. So even if you do outsource, you still have to have like that element and heartbeat of you to be like, hey, proof of life, she really is running this account. That is another reason I don't like pre done Canva stories, Instagram stories. I don't think Instagram stories need to be made in Canva ahead of time, because the whole point of Instagram Stories is to be the behind the scenes like oh, he or she is here with me now. Even if it's just like a boomerang of your dog or something that's going to be way more effective than premade, templated Canva stories, that's something that people just like tap right on through. And like, that's why we don't even create a premade Canva stories for any of our clients. Those aren't available in the hub, because they're just not effective in 2020 3020 20, for Instagram. Now what we do to speed up the story creation process for our clients is we design Instagram stories right in the app using the native Instagram fonts. So we'll have like a photo, let's say we have a photo of one of our clients working on a pregnant mom. And we'll have like one slide that's like, did you know that chiropractic is great during pregnancy, and it'll be like a poll yes or no. And then the next slide will be might be the same photo or a different one. But and then it'll be like a progressive tech slide of like, here are the five benefits of chiropractic care. And it'll be like, one story has one piece of text, the next story has the first and second, the next story has the first second third pieces of text, that type of thing. If you're a hub student, and you're listening to this, that tutorial is inside the hub of how to create a progressive text story. But that's how we still save ourselves time of getting the stories done ahead of time, and where they still feel personal and bespoke to you. But they're actually made right in the app. And so it's like, oh, like the person viewing it's like, Oh, they're here with me. The next piece on the outsourcing topic is pricing. So our current prices at the time I'm recording this are 797 a month or 1597 a month, depending on the services that you get. Our prices from what I've found are actually a little bit low, when it comes to especially the fact that we're a specialized agency. And so I'm okay with our pricing as it is now because the beauty of being so niche is we know our subject matter really well. And so we've actually changed our pricing to be starting at 797 or 1597. Because if we get a new niche that we've never served before, then it's going to cost us more time internally to do the research. Like for example, we just got an applied kinesiology chiropractor, which I was familiar with the topic on the surface level, but it definitely wasn't something I could crank out like a month's worth of Instagram content around. It required a lot more chatting with the client, it required me actually going to he's actually local, so actually went and got an AK adjustment just so I could experience it. And it took a lot more research on our end. So in hindsight, I should have charged him more because the niche is that we're just so used to doing that we could just like or like our our wheelhouse. That's really what those prices were set on. So you'll also see some people charge like in a package, which is what I would recommend you look for versus hourly, because hourly, it just gets a little. It just gets a little weird because I think for one thing, nobody really wants to be tracking their hours. And it's like how do you even track your hours, you're like doing little things. So I definitely think a package rate is the way to go versus an hourly. But like I said to outsource it you could expect to spend anywhere from like if you're if you're hiring an actual social media manager like us who like that's what we specialize in. I if you're paying too little, I would be suspect around $2,000 a month. It's kind of about the you know, like I said the max that I've seen that I would go it really just depends on the scope of what they're doing for you. So that's what I want to dive into now is the scope. So, you this is one of the biggest pitfalls I see is like, oh, hey XYZ, you do my social media for traits? Like what is do my social media mean? Actually? Would you? Would this be helpful if I created like a little job description or cheats cheat sheet of like social media tasks? If that will be helpful send me a DM, I'm not going to take the time to create a free resource if nobody wants it. But if this would be something that would be helpful for you. Yeah, definitely let me know. Because it could be as like, are they actually coming to your office? Like if they're local? Are they actually coming to capture content for you? Are they going to if they are capturing content? Are they going to be editing the video for you editing photos? You know, lightning them? If they need it? Or anything like that? Are they going to be posting original content to your stories? Or are they just sharing your grid posts, your stories, those are two very different things and take a lot like posting original content to your stories obviously takes more time than just sharing a premade Canva graphic, which again, I advise against or sharing distributed posts, right, your source? Are they going to be designing custom graphics for you using your brand colors and fonts? What about adding like the closed captions? Or the words that pop up a very real? Are they adding that for you? Are they actually writing the caption? I spoke to someone last week, it was like, hey, what would it look like to have you do our Instagram? And I was talking to her? And she's like, Yeah, my current person designs everything. But I write all the captions. And I'm like, Well, I mean, I didn't ask what she was paying. So maybe she was paying like way less than what we charge. But I'm like, if you're still having to write all the captions, I mean,

I don't want to say what's the point because, you know, for some people, the design piece, and just the management organization piece is huge. But that's something to factor into the job description, and into your budget of what you're looking to pay is like the scope of this work. The next piece would be are they going to be researching niche hashtags for you? Are they going to be monitoring your results and pivoting when you know, something's not working? Are they going to be like, Okay, this, let's, instead of go along, get along with actually like, pivot and figure out, you know, how we can bring a little more life to this account? Are they going to be ideating? Like, are they actually going to be coming up with the ideas and strategy and all of that for your cow? Or is that going to fall on you? All of those things are what you want to have clearly defined? Before, like, you go into this knowing Oh, and the other thing is like the how often how often are they going to post we post four times a week for our clients on their grid. And Monday through Friday on stories for the clients who are on that top tier package. Our lower tier package, clients don't get stories, they just get the four posts a week. And when I say four posts a week, that could be reels or posts. So it could be two reels, two regular posts, one reel, three regular posts, whatever. So make sure all of that is super clearly defined. And we track like for our clients, all the top tier package, we track every month, their metrics, and like their reach and website clicks and all that jazz. So it might be that you don't need a full service, outsourcing person or agency, you might just need someone to say, hey, I really hate putting reels together. If I film all the videos, will you edit them and I'll still write the caption or, Hey, I really hate designing graphics. If I give you the ideas, can you design the graphics or whatever. So that's really, like I said, one of the biggest like common pitfalls. And then just like if you're going to outsource this to someone virtually, just be careful that the term virtual assistant is very much an umbrella term. It could mean all kinds of things. Some virtual assistants are really good specialize in social media, others are not. So make sure again, that's where this really clearly defined role comes into play. And when it comes to virtual assistants, you can usually expect to pay around $25 An hour unless you're hiring overseas, which is another thing that I am just if you've had a different experience, please DM me, I have always been nervous because I don't want my Instagram account being logged into from overseas. And now Yes, I understand that people have VPNs which is like a way to make your IP address paying from the United States. Uh, just with all of the hacking and all of the weird algorithm things I just prefer. Like, yeah, we like to keep our stuff in US, but like I said, if you've had a different experience, and it's been great for you, or like I said, maybe they won't even be logged into your Instagram account, if maybe all they're doing is just helping you get your content organized, then that's a moot point, right? Because they won't actually be logged into your account. Another thing to clearly have clearly defined is, do they plan on auto posting for you? Like, are they just gonna go schedule you out for the rest of the year? And, you know, hit auto post and set it and forget it? Or are they actually going to be manually posting and then engaging with your audience, which is what really leads to growth, we do the latter, we don't auto post for our clients. Because I mean, look, if you've already got a really full busy practice, or business, and you're just looking to use your Instagram for consistent brand presence or like a value add, then that's a totally fine strategy, just having stuff set to auto post. But if you're looking for growth, you really need to actually be building community and community engagement is another piece of that puzzle. And if you don't know what community engagement is, I've got a whole free download around that. And it's just Molly cahill.com/engagement. And that's like, how that's like the behind the scenes stuff, the scratch the scrappy stuff, that how I've grown my business, how we help our top tier clients grow, you know, on their behalf. And that's another thing to see like to have inside the scope of work, like, are they going to be doing that because if they are, then you're going to have to pay a good bit more, because it takes time, like, at least 15 minutes a day, at the very least, to be like manually pushed. So for our clients, we literally for our Instagram management agency, we have six team iPhones, and we manually push out each post, manually posted her stories, I mean, yeah, like I said, the, the posts are pre planned, and the stories are all like pretty much pre saved in a folder, but still, and then for our clients and then talk to your package or going out and engaging. So again, this is just all stuff. You want to have like laid out superduper clearly. So the other thing to be aware of is like just because like if you do go the like friend, my sister, my so and so's 18 year old niece says they can do this for me. Just because someone knows how to post on their personal account doesn't necessarily mean that they know how to market the market a business on Instagram. It doesn't mean they can't learn. I'm not I mean, that's how I learned. I didn't know how to do any of this. But I learned by taking a course. In fact, I took three courses. When I first started my Instagram management business, I took three different Instagram marketing courses. So this is definitely a learnable skill. And that's why more and more of my students inside holistic marketing have have been putting their front desk or ca or their current virtual assistant through my program. And like I said, we are booked for new clients until February of 2024. And if you're just like, hey, I just want to wait and I just want to have you do it. That's great, just let me know, you can go to my website, Molly cahill.com. And at the top, you'll see an Instagram Management tab. And you can go ahead and put yourself on the waitlist. But I'm telling you, you really can, if you don't want to do it yourself, you can totally have someone learn how to do it properly. And you would just put them through the hub. And you would pay them obviously for the training like any job you go to you get paid training. And just so you kind of have an idea of what that would look like the core content inside of holistic marketing have like the core classrooms that people would be learning from, it's like four to five hours, I just went and added it all up. Probably closer to five hours total. So if you think about it, say you were paying someone $25 an hour, that's 125 bucks for them to learn how to do all of this properly. And then on top of that, I would factor in at least two hours a month for the actual content creation itself. And then if they're going to be doing, like I said, the actual posting and engaging anywhere from 15 to 20 minutes a day. So this is definitely like a lot more doable than you probably realize. And I'll end this episode with where to find someone to help you. So I've already mentioned a lot of the obvious things like if you have a current patient, or Oh, I didn't talk about the trade piece I skipped right over that bullet point. If you're going to do anything for trade, make sure is clearly written out. And if it's somebody you're really close with, you know, you feel weird, like having something signed, that's fine, but I would still have like it in an email or a text or something and I'm not a lawyer. I'm not a business coach.

I'm just telling you what I would do. Have it clearly written out like if I'm giving you four posts A week with hashtags, writing the captions, creating the graphics, editing the video, but you're providing the video and I'm posting to your stories, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, then I get to adjustments per week for that or something like that. I'm literally just throwing random stuff out there doesn't have to be $1 for dollar trade, it totally can. But that's just something to, I wouldn't just be like, I'll do your social media. And I'll just you for free because that is just like way too ambiguous. And without a doubt, one party is going to feel guilty, like they're doing more or less or, or the opposite. Nobody's gonna feel guilty and someone's gonna get shorted. And you know, someone doesn't hold up their end of the bargain. So yeah, so just going back to like, where to find somebody, you could do like a patient or client trade. And the upside of doing that is they're already really familiar with you and familiar with your work. So my health and life coach Chelsea, when she first started the offshoot of her business a little over a year ago, the gut health agency, she hired me to just do some basic core content for her like I did, like, yeah, 36 posts for her. And she didn't even have to check on because I'd been a client of hers for so long, that it was so easy for me to write like her and create like her because I was an existing client. So that's step there definitely is an upside to hiring someone who's worked with you before and knows your style of work. And then also there's like if you are looking for someone local, don't discount like local mom Facebook groups or anything like that. And if you're looking virtually my friends they are wild has a VA matchmaking service so and she Sarah without an H Sara, w i l e s, so if you just Google her website, or we'll link in the show notes, she has a virtual assistant matchmaking service. And that's where this, if I create a free download would probably come in handy, because you could just copy and paste it into her virtual assistant matchmaking forum, you can look on places like Upwork. But again, that's really where you're gonna run into more like that would be better served, in my opinion, for the simple things like video editing, or like graphic creation like that, rather than, like full on social media management. So you I mean, like I said, you can outsource just those things. If you're just like, hey, I don't like Canva, I just want somebody to create graphics, like, cool, you could have somebody do that. And then there's also various social media groups on Facebook, or contact me, I know a couple other people who do what we do, and maybe I can match you with someone you never know. So I hope this episode was helpful. Again, shoot me a DM if you feel like this list of like job description list for social media would be I could kind of make it like customizable, like check this for what services you want. Let me know if that would be helpful. And then you'd have something you could copy paste into these job descriptions. And I can't wait to hear from you if this was helpful. Thank you for listening to holistic marketing simplified. This podcast is brought to you by my marketing roadmap, which is a five episode private audio training that's kind of like this podcast, but not exactly because it's not available to the general public when you search on your podcast feed. So the great thing about consuming free content like this for me or on my Instagram or my blogs, or whatever is that yes, you will learn a lot but you kind of have to go searching for what it is exactly you're looking for this five episode private podcast is broken down in a logical step by step order. That's why it's called a roadmap. So you're ready to get started on your Instagram marketing journey. Or if you already are started and you're just feel like you're kind of like overwhelmed with all of the different free information. This is a super clear roadmap with lots of tangible step by step action items that will get you from point A to point B for just $27. So all you have to do is head to Molly cahill.com/private training. And based on the reviews I've had so far, I know you won't be disappointed. I'm really proud of this training. And I know personally, I've bought 2737 $17 products before and felt like I really didn't get that much out of it. I guarantee you you will learn something from this five episode, private audio feed. So again, it's just Molly cahill.com/private training. And it'll also be linked below in the show notes. I cannot wait to hear what you think. And hey, you know how every podcaster at the very end of their episode asks you to rate and review their podcast. Well, that's because it's super important. These podcasts take a lot of time and heart and effort to produce to bring you free information. So in order for me to be able to continue doing that we need more people to find out about the show. So if you could please just take like two Whoo minutes out of your very busy day to leave me a rating and share this on your Instagram stories and tag at Molly a K Hill. That's c h i ll I would greatly greatly appreciate your support. I truly appreciate you so much. I know your time is valuable and I can't wait to see you in the next episode.

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