By According to data from Pew Research, more than 80 percent of individuals aged 18 to 49 use one or more social media platforms. Among those aged 50 to 64, more than 70 percent are on one or more platforms, and even close to half of retirees aged 65 and older are on social media (Forbes).
Social media is an important communication channel. Ensure you create content that connects with your audience by downloading our free “White-label social media checklist” now.
It’s this preponderance of people making social media their digital homes that makes social media content creation services so critical for many businesses. Often, those businesses turn to agencies for help with this essential digital marketing effort. Agencies can use tools such as Vendasta’s Social Marketing tool to get the job done. And those that don’t have the desire to start social media service lines with all in-house resources can invest in white-label social media management.
For agencies taking the white labeling route, the 10 strategies below can help support success.
1. Communicate and collaborate with your clients
Many clients don’t hire a social media content creation agency simply so they can look the other way regarding social media. Chances are your clients want to be actively involved in decisions about how their brand interacts on social media, but they don’t have the internal resources or desire to carry out such efforts on a day-to-day basis.
Establishing clear and open communication with clients helps you create the partnership relationship these types of clients may expect.
Start by asking the right questions to understand each client’s business and social media goals and needs. A social media questionnaire can be a great tool to foster this first step in collaboration. Ensure you know what clients expect from their brand voice, and create schedules, milestones, and meeting opportunities that keep everyone on the same page and proactively involved in the work.
2. Customize and personalize content
While social media content creation packages help agencies provide “boxed” services to various clients, ongoing success requires a dynamic approach to what comes in the box.
Yes, every client that purchases package A may receive management services for two social media profiles that include three original posts weekly, up to six curated posts per week for each profile, and comment and message moderation. But the details of those deliverables should be unique for every client.
What should you customize in social media content packages?
Some personalization clients may expect includes:
- Messaging. Your clients’ social media accounts shouldn’t all sound the same. Endeavor to understand each client’s brand so your team can create content in the correct brand voice. One client may want funny, almost risqué content, for example, while another needs a formal, journalistic tone. Crossing those streams could be disastrous for client brand reputation and satisfaction with your agency.
- Client logos. Use client logos and other brand-related images on each social profile, so consumers can easily tell which company or brand the content comes from.
- Client colors and fonts. Integrate the client’s brand colors into logos and social media images to create a cohesive visual experience across all the client’s social media profiles. This also helps to create a visual bridge between the client’s social media profiles and its web pages.
- Audience-centric content. Collaborate with clients to provide social media ideas for businesses while also learning about unique audiences. Create content that would be interesting to each client’s target audience. Consider how each target audience is most likely to react to and engage with content.
3. Maintain quality assurance
The quality of the content you create or pass through to clients doesn’t just reflect on your agency. Remember that many clients look to social media for reputation management, and content that isn’t high quality or doesn’t reflect the values and mission of a brand can be bad for that company.
After all, more than 80 percent of users say they’ve discovered products on social media or purchased products from brands on the platforms (Business of Apps). When your high-quality white-labeled social media content converts those consumers for clients or helps build loyal customer communities, you have happier clients and longer-standing contracts.
3 tips to ensure quality social media content
- Pay attention to all content. You can easily tweak your copywriting to meet client quality needs, but you should also pay attention to other factors such as visuals and formatting. Even the hashtags used in content are important—hashtag errors have created PR firestorms for more than one brand in the past.
- Create a QA and editing process. Set up a process that ensures all content goes through editing and quality assurance before it’s published to client social media accounts. Depending on client needs, this process may need to include client review—this is especially common in regulated industries such as finance or healthcare.
- Listen to and implement client feedback. Develop a process that reviews client feedback and routes it to the proper individuals quickly so you can implement necessary changes before teams or partners create another set of content.
4. Maintain timeliness and efficiency
Set your agency and all your partners up for success when selling social media packages to small businesses by creating realistic timelines and expectations. Sure, you might be able to rush to meet an urgent social media marketing need, and your client will certainly appreciate the heroics. However, agreeing to that level of service all the time puts your team on the road to burnout and almost always ensures failure in the long term.
Remember, too, that white labeling can pull other partners into the mix. Your timelines should accommodate for theirs, and you may want to build in extra time in case partners miss the mark on milestones. Establish efficient workflows that include clients and partners as appropriate and streamline content production while ensuring nothing falls through the cracks.
5. Maintain flexibility and adaptability
Recognize that client needs ebb and flow and flexible content creation and social media management helps you foster long-term relationships with clients. Here are just a few ways you can adapt to client needs with white-label social media services:
- Offer content for a variety of platforms. Ensure you can manage numerous social media platforms so you can holistically meet client needs. Top social media platforms include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, and YouTube. Depending on the clients your agency targets, you may want to offer options that include any or all of these as well as some other specialty platforms.
- Make it possible for clients to scale up and down. Don’t lock clients into scale that won’t work for them in the future. Provide options for scaling up to meet growth needs or scaling down during slow seasons.
- Plan for seasonal content needs. Understand the seasonal needs of every client and create proactive processes that increases social content creation to meet those demands. Keep white-labeling partners in the loop about the expected ebb and flow of content needs.
6. Ensure content variety and diversity
Social media management and content creation services encompass much more than basic text posts and captions these days. Any content creation services you provide for social media—white labeled or 100 percent in-house—must meet the diversity and variety needs of all your clients. That means:
- Providing diverse text content. Ensure you can support a mix of promotional, educational, and entertaining content to engage target audiences and build community for clients.
- Avoiding promoting all the time. Social media should never appear to be wholly self-serving. The 80/20 rule is a good measuring stick. This rule says that 80 percent of content published by a brand should be useful or entertaining to the audience while only 20 percent should directly promote products and services.
- Including visual content. Social media posts perform better when they include images and videos. Test out different types of visual content, including memes, photographs, and infographics, to find out what works for each client’s audience.
- Curating links. Curate helpful or interesting links from pages that don’t compete with your client and share them with the audience. Try to add something additional from the brand, such as an opinion or thought about the content at the link.
7. Implement analytics and reporting in your services
Demonstrating ROI is a continuous struggle for marketers. Though the vast majority of in-house and agency professionals are under pressure to demonstrate ROI, around 60 percent don’t do it well or at all (Business Wire).
For agencies, analytics and proof of ROI becomes imperative. That’s especially true when white labeling, because you need to know that you’re getting ROI from your partner and that you’re providing it to your client.
Some considerations for analytics and reporting include:
- Ability to track overall performance. Use robust reporting and analytics tools to automatically capture information about key performance indicators. This helps you tweak services for optimal performance.
- Options for drilling down in campaigns and efforts. Ensure you have resources that let you dig into the performance of every effort and campaign. This is especially helpful when you’re managing social for multi-location businesses.
- Detailed reporting for clients. Set up milestones and touchpoint schedules and provide detailed, transparent reports for clients. This builds trust in your services and helps support collaboration.
- Visuals that show the value of your services. Create dashboards and other visuals that tell growth stories and otherwise demonstrate the value of your social media content services.
8. Continuously improve your services
Social media management is a constantly evolving industry. Create processes and make the time to support your team in continuous education and keeping up with trends. Pay attention to algorithm changes and current best practices so you can provide the best social media content and management for your clients at all times.
It’s easy to become complacent when you believe that your team are the experts at something, so constantly remind each other that what works today may not work tomorrow. If you work via a white-label model, check in with your business partners periodically to find out what they are doing to stay current in the social media content landscape too.
9. Have guidelines for confidentiality and brand protection
Start new client relationships with processes that build trust in your content creation and social media management teams. Create a social media policy that support confidentiality and protect client brands and let potential clients know about them. Work to ensure that your entire team adheres to non-disclosure agreements and respects the privacy of client data.
This becomes even more important when you white label, as you may involve business partners outside your own walls. Your confidentiality policies should encompass those partners. For example, you might require anyone at a partner organization working with your clients to sign an NDA or you might request that your partners have suitable policies of their own to protect your business and your clients.
10. Ensure good customer service and relationship management
Finally, never forget about the customer experience aspect of your social media content creation services. Ensure you have teams and processes that:
- Gather feedback. Create methods by which clients can provide formal and informal feedback.
- Address feedback. Ensure feedback doesn’t sit on a server or in an email inbox. Build methods to extract actionable data from customer communications and route it to all team members and partners so you can make appropriate changes to services or content.
- Communicate consistently. If you think you might be over communicating to clients, you’re probably communicating the right amount. But do ask clients how they want to receive communication. Some may want weekly updates via emails while others want a biweekly call to discuss content.
- Proactively attend to client needs. Don’t wait for clients to bring up something before you act. As the client’s social media agency, you’re the expert. Let them know about trends or other strategies that could improve performance or about concerning comments or other customer concerns on their pages.
Frequently asked questions about white-label social media content services
How can white labeling benefit small business clients?
Agencies of various sizes and their small business clients benefit from time and cost savings. White labeling allows the agency to provide products and services without starting from scratch with development. That also allows agencies of all types to make higher-level, more effective resources available because they can work with products developed, managed, or marketed by experts in each niche.
How can I ensure that my white-labeled social media content is high-quality and effective?
Start by working with reputable white-labeling tools and partners. Maintain ownership of the content and services you pass on to your clients. While white labeling can save you time, money, and other resources, it’s not a set-and-forget solution. Ensure your team pays attention to white-label services and works to ensure ongoing quality so you’re proud to associate the services with your brand.
