OUT-SOURCING SOCIAL MEDIA

GETTING NOTICED

Considering outsourcing your social media? Nikita Thorne of Big Day Agency offers some top tips for finding the right supplier to meet the specific needs of your business

Social media is a crucial tool for any business in the wedding industry. For bridal retailers in particular, social media provides an opportunity to showcase the styles you have available, give your brand a clear personality and interact with brides who are in the market for their bridalwear. These outcomes then have the potential to convert initial interest into a sale.

When outsourcing your social media, it is critically important that you have access to a marketing agency with a deep understanding of the wedding industry, as well as direct access to engaged couples, and of course the digital marketing expertise. So, it is no surprise that many business owners consider outsourcing this element to wedding marketing experts like Big Day Agency.

When the time is right Between supporting your brides, managing your team and trying to find a spare moment for your personal life, running a bridal retail business can be hectic! Growing and building a good reputation on social media takes time. It is best to carve out that time to ensure best practices are taking place and goal progress is monitored. So, if you are finding social media is getting forgotten about, or you no longer have time to manage it yourself, then you should consider outsourcing.

More and more couples are using platforms like Instagram and Facebook as part of their wedding research stages. They often use social media to validate their decision regarding who to work with or purchase from, wanting to be confident in certain suppliers and ensure that theirs is a business they can trust.

So, if you simply do not have the time or the energy to put effort into your social media marketing, then you should definitely look at outsourcing it to an experienced and professional team that can support you in achieving your goals.

Big Day Agency supports wedding businesses with their marketing through consultancy and activity management. Here are their top tips for finding the right partner to support your business’s social media marketing activity.

1 Choose someone you trust When you choose to outsource your social media, it is true that you’ll give up some control which can be nervewracking when you are so used to doing it all yourself. That’s why it’s so important to choose someone you can trust.

Instead of using your own instincts, and in many cases minimal knowledge of platform algorithms, with the right partner you’ll feel confident that your social media marketing is in the hands of knowledgeable specialists who you can trust.

You’ll be able to see success in a way that is systematically calculated and most importantly, regularly discussed with you so you are always in the loop and part of the strategy. This helps you to maintain control of what gets posted, without the stress of worrying if you are doing it correctly or keeping up with the algorithm.

Top tip: Ask them how their client relationships work. For example, at Big Day Agency, we begin our relationship with social media partners by scheduling a proper discovery call and handover session. From then on, clients receive a monthly status report and a quarterly strategy and feedback session. You’ll deal with one person throughout the relationship and they will be your main contact. They’ll get to know your brand, your ethos, your tone of voice and be able to communicate with your audience in a way that feels right to you, but has their expertise behind it.

2 Top skill sets for a fraction of in-house hiring You want to get a great service for a price that isn’t going to break the bank. Because of this, you’re probably weighing up whether to hire in-house

or outsource. Considering the service you would need, the cost to hire talent with comparable expertise to an agency, along with the time it takes to hire and train; you’ll likely find that outsourcing is a pretty good deal!

The typical social media management solution involves the following specialist skills: • Copywriting • Project management • Strategy and content planning • Image editing • Cross-platform algorithm understanding • Analytics

When hiring in house, you’d need to consider how many hours that individual would need to work for, how much to pay them for their skills, and other employee benefits.

When outsourcing your marketing, you can expect to pay either a monthly fee, an hourly rate, or individual project-based fees. You also won’t need to worry about the additional cost of pensions or national insurance.

When you consider the time and cost involved to hire an individual or team to manage your social media with all of these skill sets, the cost could be considerably higher than outsourcing.

Did you know, the average UK salary for a full-time social media executive is £24,847* per annum?

*Source: Glassdoor https://www. glassdoor.co.uk/Salaries/social-mediaexecutive-salary-SRCH_KO0,22.htm 3 Know what success means to you and set measurable goals Success looks different for everyone. In order to be sure you are getting good results, you need to communicate what that means for you and your business with your chosen agency. For some, they want to grow their following. For others, it’s about driving leads to their website. For many, it’s a mixture of a number of different things. A handful of clear and achievable goals that are easy to assess and measure are key to this.

A good agency will be realistic, assess what should be achievable and monitor the progress. They should be able to give feedback to you on how things are going each month in a report and provide insight into whether targets need reassessing or if there are

additional things that can be done to boost the ability to achieve the target (ie putting spend behind advertising). If the target is not achieved, they should be able to look back at what happened and assess what should be tried next time to achieve this.

4 Manage your expectations Building a business takes time and as mentioned above, success looks different to everyone. It’s important to manage your expectations; just as building a multi-million pound business doesn’t happen overnight, you can’t expect to have gained thousands of followers within days of hiring an agency. You need to look at the data you currently have and assess the patterns to be able to formulate achievable targets. When you hire an agency, you are hiring someone with the experience and expertise to be able to mathematically analyse your current results and predict the path ahead. They will be setting these realistic targets with you and may be able to offer their insights of past campaigns based on your desired results. 5 What can generally be expected? For most, the desired results are achieved at a steady rate, with some ups and downs depending on what’s been tried and tested during that time or the impact of changes to platform algorithms. On the odd occasion you may see the goal achieved very quickly through a boom, but this will not happen on every occasion.

You can expect your chosen partner to communicate the progress with you on a regular basis (usually through a monthly report) and identify what’s going well, where changes need to be made, and what opportunities are available to help reach your goals.

6 Be clear on your requirements You would expect a bride to have done some research on styles and designers that you stock before they enter the boutique.

Outsourcing for social media management is the same. Make sure you have an idea of the following things so that you can get accurate quotes and avoid wasting your valuable time: • The platforms you would like to feature on – do you just want to focus on increasing your Instagram following? Are you looking to create a

TikTok account? These are the kinds of questions a media agency will be asking. • Whether you would need support with community engagement – are you able to spend a few minutes a day replying to comments and engaging with similar accounts to yours? Is this something that you’d prefer a media agency to take over? • The kind of activities you’re needing support with – do you need help with copywriting, media management or content creation? Or perhaps all three? • What you can still do yourself vs what you need total support with – do you want to still be posting or would you like a media agency to take full responsibility? • Your ideal monthly budget for outsourcing – how much are you willing or able to spend? • Finally, what you envision your relationship with the agency achieving –what are your long term goals and when would you like to reach them?

Big Day Agency are wedding industry experts and specialists in social media marketing, working with many different businesses across the industry from venues to bridal boutiques. If you are looking to outsource your social media marketing, contact them to arrange a free, no obligation discovery call to discuss your needs. bigdayagency.co.uk/contact | 01235 773462

TOP TIPS FOR BRIDAL RETAILERS ON TIKTOK

If you’re a bridal retailer who wants to be active on TikTok but you don’t know where to start or how to use it for commercial gain, don’t worry, you are not alone! To help you make the most of this popular social platform, the marketing team at Guides for Brides share the strategy that led to nearly a quarter of a million views of just one of their TikTok videos

1COPY TRENDS

TikTok is ALL about trends. Get started by watching videos on your ‘For You’ page and giving them a go yourself. It’s an easy way to make content because you simply copy another video and put a new caption that matches your brand.

Sounds too good to be true, and against all your copyright principles? This is how most of the viral TikTokers have built their empire of followers and is the accepted way to use this platform. Of course original content is great too, but you can just as easily get views and likes from doing lip sync videos and dancing videos as you can from creating content from scratch, so it can be a good way to get started.

2GET SPOTTED

Your Tiktok success depends on the algorithm showing your videos to a relevant audience. If enough people engage with it, the algorithm shows it to more people, and that’s how content can go viral.

It’s hard when you are busy, but to gain a following on TikTok you should ideally post every day, or at least every few days.

The TikTok algorithm favours accounts that post consistently so this will help to get your videos shown to more people and increases your chances of a video going viral. Unlike some platforms, there’s no risk of overloading your audience by posting too much content.