Marketing/Social Media Business for SMEs

A19B1C12

Hello all,

I was wondering what would you guys think about the feasibility of setting up a marketing/social media business for SMEs. It would work along the lines of I would charge a monthly fee (€500 was what I was thinking - about a week and a half wages of a full time employee) to set up and maintain an on line presence for small to medium companies. Using social media, google analytics, blogging, etc to gather publicity and work in tandem with the company to create offers that will be both profitable and garner excitement/interest around the company and in their area.

I am a 20 year old student and very familiar with twitter, facebook, blogging, adwords, websites, etc and often look at company websites and think I could make them so much more interesting and engaging fo their potential customers as its an area I feel is hugely underutilized by local businesses.

Any thoughts on whether or not this would be viable? Any business owners out there? Thanks.

Graham

Might be worth you doing a search for other social media related posts in this forum. Several others have received some good responses to the same question quite recently.

Hanley

If I was ever to go for something like this the first thing I'd be looking for is real results and testimonials. Get those and you have a runner.

Cianos

Someone else started a similar thread recently, here it is.

bizleads

Go out and ask local businesses simple question. can you handle more business ? or do they need what you want to sell. you will be surprised at the answers.

This way you will know for sure if they are ready to pay for your service.

I can only tell you that it will be hard sell to small businesses, because most of them are just 3 months from going bankrupt and use only hope and pray strategy to get new business.

My advice would be to search for businesses that have at least 10 employees and already do some sort of advertising.

If you can get leads then you are ok

Axwell

You need to have proven results or be able to show someone a campaign thats going to increase traffic and convert posts into sales over a set period of time. No one is going to pay you €500 just to post on facebook and twitter etc if its not going to benefit them, or at least as far as they are concerned it wont. Chances are if they dont have something up and running the a) dont know how to or b) dont consider it of any value.

You say you are very familiar with social media etc but thats not enough imo tp convince someone to pay you. You would be better off doing a few freebies (or very cheap at least) maybe starting off for a few businesses you know and develop some case studies for different sectors so that you can show proven results to potential clients. If you can do this then there is no reason you couldn't have a few campaigns going on at once but as I said if you plan on just posting some tweets and facebook posts because they dont have a social media presence then you will be stuck with a hard sell I fear.

bucks

If I were looking for someone to manage social media for my company the first thing I would ask is "how well do you know my company and the industry we operate in".

If you don't have a clue about that then it wouldn't matter to me how good you are on twitter/facebook/google + etc...

Apart from that it is an incredibly competitive industry at the min where every facebook user with a digital marketing cert claims to be a jedi of social media, that and the time involved to manage campaigns is a lot more than you may think.

It's a classic case of 'show me some of your previous results from other clients'.

So to start, find a niche/industry you know and are somewhat passionate about then find companies operating within those industries and be prepared to start for free with at least one.