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Are you stuck on how to start your social media consulting journey? There’s a lot to accomplish when you start building your new business, and it can be difficult to know which steps to take first, how to ensure you’re taking the right steps, and measure if your efforts are successful over time.
Throughout this article, we’ll talk about how to start an online social media consulting business, so you can hit the ground running when the time comes to start your business.
No matter your level of knowledge in the industry, it’s important to have a strong grasp on the steps to take to ensure your business’ success, and that’s what you’ll be learning about today. Without further ado, let’s go through some of the overarching steps you should take, so you know how to start a social media consulting company on the right foot. We’ll be diving into the following:
- Learn the Ins and Outs of Social Media
- Narrow Down a Specialty & Choose Your Unique Selling Point(s)
- Be Diligent About Tracking Progress
- Register Your Company
- Manage & Optimize Your Business
- Partner with a Trustworthy Digital Agency
Slam Media Lab offers endless resources and knowledge when it comes to learning how to set up a marketing agency of all scopes. For starters, we’ve done it for ourselves! Slam is one of the fastest-growing digital agencies thanks to our marketing materials and knowledge, and now we get to share our expertise with everyone from mission-driven startups to expansive Fortune 500 companies.
Learn the Ins and Outs of Social Media
If you want to know how to start a social media consulting business, you first should know how to navigate social media and leverage it for your own business. This will be your entire job for other companies that sign on with you, so it’s crucial you know how to do it for yourself first and can prove that to potential clients.
Depending on the nature of your company, there are many avenues you can go down to optimize your business and maximize success. Luckily, you can keep yourself organized with resources like Slam’s social media planner and content creation template.
Some of the top social media platform options include:
Choosing the Right Social Media Platforms
In 2023, DemandSage recorded approximately 4.9 billion people on social media all around the world, and that number has only increased since then. What’s more is these stats are not isolated to a single social media platform, indicating how important it is to have a comprehensive, multi-platform approach to social media marketing.
Depending on your target audience, there are a variety of social platforms from which you can choose to make accounts that will elevate your social media strategy. Here’s a bit more information about each of the top social media platforms available to you as a business:
- Facebook: Sharing industry news/stories, sharing company news/stories, posting events, announcing contests/giveaways, etc.
- Instagram: Sharing photo/video content, sharing company news/stories, gathering opinions through polls, announcing contests/giveaways, etc.
- X: Communicating directly with your audience, reposting industry news, sharing fun facts, etc.
- TikTok: Sharing video-heavy content, reaching younger audiences, creating comedic content, researching popular trends, etc.
- LinkedIn: Sharing industry news/stories, sharing company news/stories
- Youtube: Sharing long-form video content (tutorials, explainers, interviews, etc.)
- Reddit: Connecting with your audience on a more personal level, gathering thoughts and opinions, staying up to date with current trends, etc.
No matter which platforms you choose to optimize for your business, it’s crucial to use them to connect with your audience. You want to be talking with your audience, not always at them—even when you’re sharing information or telling stories.
There’s an interesting trend with social media these days. More and more people get their news and information from their social media feeds yet the overall trust ratings in these platforms is fairly low. That means you have another built-in job to do when you’re representing your business online: earn people’s trust in you and what you’re selling.
Creating & Managing Social Media Accounts
The good news about social media for businesses? Creating social media accounts for your company is easy. Managing and optimizing these accounts involves more discipline and involvement, but social media management software like Sprout Social and IconoSquare can simplify every-day tasks, so you can get the most out of your accounts while maximizing your own time, too.
Communicating Through Social Media
When starting a business on social media, it’s important to establish your brand voice and be consistent with it. While the reality of the situation may see multiple people posting content through your social media accounts, the information should be coming from a unified voice. Tools like our Airtable content calendar make this easy by providing a space to collaborate and store information.
Moreover, it’s important to strike a balance between being professional and being personal through your channels, so you can present yourself as an expert and thought leader in your industry while still appealing to your audience’s wants and needs. There are a handful of ways you can do this, including:
- Responding directly to followers
- Providing useful resources
- Sharing trending topics
- Organizing contests
- Reposting user generated content
You can establish yourself as an expert in your field by creating and interacting with relevant content. This includes writing blogs, going on podcasts, starting a newsletter, and more. Our team at Slam offers many resources to help you with content creation, social media management, and more. Once you get the ball rolling, you can also feature past work and case studies to back up your claims as an industry pro.
By thoroughly understanding how to leverage social media, you can learn not only how to start a company but how to grow a consulting business through social media, too. This includes learning how to generate leads and how to grow your agency over time.
Understanding What it Means to Work in Social Media Consulting
When you become a social media consultant, you have to be prepared to spend a lot of time online regardless of what specific services you offer. Finding clients may be a slow start because social media is such a saturated space.
Your job is to work with clients to grow and optimize their social media presence. The problem you can face is a lot of people may already think they’re doing the right things, and it’ll be an added challenge for you to prove that you can bring something new to the table that will lead to measurable results.
It’s estimated that social media advertising spend will reach over $219 billion in 2024, so the market is there and growing. It’s up to you to position yourself within this space as a leading expert.
Narrow Down a Specialty & Choose Your Unique Selling Point(s)
If you’re learning how to start a social media marketing consulting business, you already have a broad idea of the services you want to offer. Now comes the hard part: defining those services and positioning yourself in the market. First things first, you should decide if you want to offer a wide range of services or narrow down your expertise into a specialty and/or niche.
There’s pros and cons to both options, so the choice is ultimately up to you. To help you with your decision, here are some primary services you can offer as a social media consulting business:
- Social media auditing: Providing a full view of how social media efforts are impacting a business.
- Social media coaching sessions: Ongoing social media training for in-house teams to stay up-to-date on best practices, trends, etc.
- Community management: Taking care of interactions between businesses and their target audience.
- Social strategy development: Assisting with overarching content strategies for a business as well as how to optimize
- Social media account creation & setup: Creating social media accounts and setting up metrics for ongoing tracking.
- Social media training: Training for in-house staff to better understand how to utilize social media for the business.
Whatever you decide for your business structure, a big part of your job will be marketing yourself as the best solution for a company’s problem. On the plus side, you don't have to start from scratch. Instead, utilize a consulting services proposal template that proves your value.
How to: Social Media Consulting—Specialization
When you specialize in a specific niche with your services, you get the advantage of positioning yourself as an industry expert, which can make defining your unique selling proposition much more straightforward. While you don’t want to pigeonhole yourself too much, there are advantages to honing in your target market and curating content to them.
When finding social media consulting prospects this way, you can narrow your niche like:
- eCommerce
- Fashion
- Healthcare
- Home Improvement
- Hospitality
- Personal Finance
- Technology
… And the list goes on!
How to: Social Media Consulting—Generalization
By opting to offer social media consulting strategies for a wider range of businesses, you’ll find yourself with more opportunities on the surface. However, you’ll have a bit more extra work to do when it comes to differentiating your business and showing people why you’re the best fit for the job.
If you’re planning to head in this direction for your business, consider the following to develop a unique position for your services:
- How Your Potential Customers Shop for Services
- How You Deliver Services to Customers
- What You Bring to the Table for Their Business
- Where You Can Add More Than a Specialized Agency
Register Your Company
When the time comes to register your business, you have to decide if you want to be an LLC or an S-Corporation. There are advantages and drawbacks to both, so it’s important to do your research before you dive into the process.
With our How to Start an Agency course, you can unlock an entire module on legal and operational setup, so you know how to Here’s a brief overview:
- LLC some text
- Unlimited owners allowed
- Not personally liable for business liabilities
- Better for management flexibility
- Not recognized globally
- S-Corpsome text
- Maximum of 100 shareholders
- Not personally liable for business liabilities
- Better for smaller corporations
- All shareholders must be U.S. citizens
Once you decide how to register your business, you can go about buying a domain and creating a website. There are a variety of resources at your fingertips for buying your website domain, including (but not limited to):
- GoDaddy
- Namecheap
- Squarespace
When it comes to website design, you have an abundance of options, too. You can go the route of hiring a designer to handle all the design aspects of your business, or you can go a more simplistic route by using a free template site like Canva on your own. Oftentimes, your best bet may be to utilize both of these options—opting to create more simplistic assets on your own and relying on a professional designer for more involved facets of the brand.
You can also use a website builder like Webflow to build out a persuasive website that has all the necessary elements for success, including your services, company information, educational content, and more.
Tools like Webflow can feel daunting. At Slam, we are certified Webflow experts and want to help founders like you create beautiful websites so you can showcase your product without the hassle. You can check out our work with Peer Health Exchange, Sprig & Sprout, and more in our case studies.
Manage Your Business & Optimize It
Every good business starts with a cohesive business plan. As you prepare to launch your social media consulting business, it’s crucial that your plan includes all the nuances of running your business effectively. You may offer the best services, but no one will know unless you’re managing and optimizing your business on the backend.
Hiring, Onboarding, and Managing Employees
Once you have the bones of your business ready to go, it’s time to fill in the blanks with a knowledgeable staff. You can handle all the aspects of hiring, onboarding, and managing employees through sites like Gusto and Deel, so you can keep everything organized and in one place.
This is especially easy with tools like our Notion wiki template, which can serve as your all-in-one hub for sharing information, managing projects, collaborating with team members, assigning task, and more.
Setting Fees & Handling Business Finances
Another important aspect of keeping your business afloat is setting your rates. It’s important to remain competitive while also ensuring you’re profiting over time. There are a handful of different pricing options to consider, including:
- Billable Hours for Consulting Projects
- Flat Rates per Individual Project
- Monthly Subscription Models
- Retainer Payment for Guaranteed Services
- Tiered Price Points Dependent on Services Offered
Afteryou decide what you’re charging for your services, you can easily handle your business finances through sites like Mercury. Accounting and bookkeeping is also simple to do in-house by using Quickbooks.
Staying Organized & Presenting Unified Solutions
The best way to market your offerings is to use cohesive templates for your contracts, NDAs, agreements, and more. Having an organized place for items like agency RFP templates will help you stay organized and instill confidence in your clients that you have the right resources on hand.
You can use project management software like Notion to stay organized internally and ensure everything is on track. Moreover, you can utilize resources like the Airtable Content Calendar to stay on top of all your content over time.
Want more tips on optimizing your business online? Check out our keyword research template!!
Be Diligent About Tracking Progress
There are plenty of marketing agency reporting tools and systems that you can use to track your business from the onset, so you have measurable results to formulate an ongoing business plan. By tracking your progress from start to finish, you can see what’s working and adjust on the fly, allowing you to allocate your energy to the right areas and maximize your budget.
Something as simple as tracking clicks, searches, and CMS items can be done through a tool like NoCodeLytics, so you know exactly how people are interacting with your content, including the steps they took to get there.
Tracking your business progress is a great way to measure growth and identify areas that need improvement, so you know how best to fill those gaps, including how to choose a digital marketing agency to help you along the way.
Finally, it’s important to keep your foot on the gas even when you’ve gotten the ball rolling and you’re out of your initial building phase. The industry is always changing, and it’s crucial for you to stay up-to-date on current trends, innovations, and more. On top of doing your own research regularly, you should always be networking and forging new connections for your business.
This can take on many forms, including:
- Attending Networking Events
- Being a Guest on a Podcast/Show within Your Industry
- Communicating with Industry Professionals Online
- Find Local Networking Groups
- Go to Local Industry Happy Hours
- Log In to Virtual Networking Events
- Set Up Meetings with Other Professionals in Your Industry
- Sign Up for Industry Conferences
…And so many more!
Partner with a Trustworthy Digital Agency
Learning how to start a social media consulting business and continuing to foster its growth is a multifaceted job that never truly ends. That said, it doesn’t have to be one you do on your own. Partnering with a digital marketing agency you can trust will take some of the weight off your shoulders, so you can focus on the big picture while another team of professionals gets into the nitty gritty details.
Fortunately, you found a digital agency with an entire toolbox of brand strategy, content writing, SEO, and Webflow design tactics at their fingertips, including the templates shared throughout this article. Whether you have questions, or you’re ready to start building your social media consulting company today, Slam Media Lab is here to support you with curated content you can adapt for your business.
Reach out to our experts if you’re ready to learn how to start an agency, so you can begin building your business with a steady foundation and all the right tools at your fingertips.
Want to start an agency but social media consulting is not up your alley? Check out our other guides here:
- How to Start a Social Media Marketing Agency
- How to Start a Content Writing Agency
- How to Start a Facebook Ad Agency
- How to Start Your Own Design Agency
- How to Start an SEO Agency
- How to Start a Social Media Marketing Business
