Running social media campaigns for clients means using your time, resources and skills to deliver consistently effective campaigns.
While many clients accept that social media is a key marketing expenditure, there's still a lot of skepticism. Unimpressive returns and cowboy practices, in the early days of social media, are to blame. As a result, modern social media agencies have to think carefully about how to deliver a higher ROI for their clients.
Time is Money
For agencies and clients, time is money, which means having great project management skills is essential. Before you plan another campaign, send another Tweet, pin another inspiring quote on Pinterest, stop and think about your project management skills.
Review your last campaign. Think about how time was really spent, compared to how you wanted to spend it. Most agencies, regardless of their specialism, experience this same disconnect. Here are some tips about how you remedy this, for everyone's benefit.
5 Top Project Management Lessons For Social Media Agencies
1. Take A Moment When You Win
This might sound counterintuitive, given the fact that time is money.
However, take a moment and think about your team.
Everyone is working hard to achieve a shared goal, plus the daily, weekly and quarterly toils to score wins for clients.
Do you acknowledge each win?
Or do you forget, quickly moving onto the next thing?
The daily grind is all about working hard towards a shared goal, but without taking a moment - treating your team (a meal, Friday drinks, an early finish) - each win will feel less satisfying. Shared struggles mean less and less without shared victories.
2. Listen
Effective project managers listen, understand, and then implement solutions, while managing external stakeholder expectations, including customers.
Balancing these dual and sometimes competing or conflicting needs is about crafting workable, measurable solutions. These won't always be perfect and you can't please everyone all the time; but it all starts with listening.
3. Give Useful, Objective Feedback
"I don't know, I just don't like it," is not feedback. That's what you say when you are looking at modern art and can't make sense of it.
Only give specific feedback that can lead to actionable changes and therefore results. Otherwise, you risk wasting time chasing some vague ideal of perfection.
4. Prioritize Important Over Urgent
When everything is urgent you lack a clear order of priorities.
When a customer says, something is urgent, find out why and whether you need to take action or can manage expectations. Again, it all comes down to listening, then setting suitable goals for your team in order to keep the client happy.
5. Don't Force It
Social media, like all forms of marketing, is knowledge economy work. It takes effort and creativity. Good ideas rarely come from a tired mind in the evening at the end of another long day.
Sometimes taking a break is what you need for a solution to come to mind.
Don't sit at your desk trying to force a spark of genius. It won't happen.
Take a walk. Take a break. Think about something else. Let ideas percolate. A solution will most likely appear when you least expect it; then you can take action.
6. Sometimes Mistakes Happen
Mistakes happen. Everyone messes up sometimes. Nobody's perfect.
In the wise words of Don Draper: "Get out of here and move forward. This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened."
Go over the highlights, figure out what went wrong, and then move on.
Learning how to manage time, is the way generate more revenue and achieve results that will impress your clients. Make your mistakes early on, learn from others, seek advice and keep your eyes on the prize.
Thumbnail image via Shutterstock