Mediaboss Marketing

Invoicing can be a daunting experience, especially when many entrepreneurs and freelancers are busy juggling their main work: social media marketing.

However difficult it may seem, invoices are crucial for getting positive cash flow, the real metric to determining the health and longevity of your social marketing endeavor.

In order to help you increase your monthly cash flow and boost your social marketing business, well look at 5 tried and true ways to make your invoicing smarter.

One of the most important things for social media marketers to do when it comes to managing their invoices is to set very clear, direct general policies or Terms and Conditions.

When you create your T&Cs, you are actually giving yourself and your clients a reference point to how your invoicing processes should be going. These are general points that cover all your clients and will discuss the base payment and invoicing issues.

Its important to mention here that these T&Cs are not just client-facing, but inward-facing as well, so that you can keep yourself accountable and be stricter in the way you deal with clients when it comes to invoicing.

Your T&Cs should include the following points:

Setting these up clearly will allow you to point to all your clients what can be expected of you and from them when it comes to payment. This will help you to clarify many issues and avoid any problems later on.

As a social media marketer or manager, you are probably aware of the power of automation. Social media management usually revolves around a few key tools that help you to automate a lot of your daily tasks so that you can focus on other parts of the job.

However, very few social marketers connect this aspect with their invoicing. Instead, they go about the business of manually entering a lot of repetitive information about their clients. This usually means they have to sift through lots of emails to get the specific contact details or to decide what the next unique invoicing number should be.

Manual invoicing can be fine, especially with invoicing templates. However, online invoicing software was created to help small businesses and freelancers automate as much of their invoicing process as possible, giving them more time to focus on their main tasks.

This includes things like saved contact details and job descriptions, prices, etc. It also includes recurring invoicing (when you send similar invoices to the same client on a regular basis), expense tracking, and other features.

Webcast, February 28th: Sales Automation Made Easy

In this digital world, it should be a given that anytime you can automate something, you should do it. That way, you can focus on providing the best service to your clients and growing your business.

As opposed to your general policies from above, you still need to provide a specific job proposal to your social marketing clients.

This is the space where you can clearly help settle your clients expectations. Be sure to answer the following questions:

By addressing these issues clearly in your proposal or quote/estimate, youll be able to further avoid any confusion, delay, or outright payment refusal when it comes time to have your invoices paid.

One thing that affects a lot of entrepreneurs, but freelancers especially, is the energy drain that accompanies a completed task. This happens when you are trying your hardest to complete a project or reach a goal in the waning days or hours of the agreed timeframe. With the amount of energy spent on that, there is great relief in having it done and notifying your client.

However, right after that, many social marketers want to just take a breakfor an hour, a day, a week. And this energy drain then naturally leads to procrastination, where you should have sent the invoice out two weeks ago and still havent started on it.

This is one of the biggest reasons for not getting paid on timesimply, its because you didnt send your invoices out on time.

One great way to fight against that is to use, online invoicing software. You could probably do your whole invoice, from start to finish, in less than a minute. Or, with regular customers and regular prices, setting up recurring invoicing would mean that you wouldnt need to do anything at all. The software will do it for you.

Beyond that, its important to start putting your invoices together even before youve completed the task or the month is finished. This way, you can have a rolling invoice that you update for each itemized job so that you wont have to do it all in one day.

The biggest reason that social marketers dont have their invoices paid faster is because the clients just arent paying them on time. This happens a lot more than you think, and it can cause serious cash flow problems.

One reason that clients pay late is that they are busy and have simply forgotten. Another reason could be that they are holding off payment until their cash flow problems ease up. Either way, its your responsibility to remind them of their obligation to pay you on time.

The best thing to do is to send out a payment reminder to your client before the payment is actually due. The best payment terms is 14 days, and not the standard 30 days. So, for example, if it is day number 13, I will send a quick, polite email reminder that the payment will be due the following day.

If that payment isnt delivered on the 14th day, I will send another email reminder on the 15th day. These emails are all polite, of course. However, that doesnt mean they cant be strict and direct. With the second payment reminder, the client should be able to provide payment or inform you when payment will be made.

For the rare case when there are further delays, you should skip the email and place a personal phone call. Direct interaction with the client will be enough to jolt him or her to recognize their obligations to provide payment for your completed services.

In general, the most important takeaway here is that smarter invoicing is possible if you follow these steps. Not only will you see better revenues and boosts in your social marketing business. Youll also find that the relationships with your clients are improved and more professional.

Uwe is the Founder and CEO of InvoiceBerry. The online invoicing softwarehelps small businesses and freelancers to create, send and manage their invoices online. He's been in the tech scene since over 15 years with companies ranging from FinTech to AdTech and games publishing. Viewfullprofile

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5 Ways Smarter Invoicing Can Boost Your Social Marketing Business - Business 2 Community

If you think teens and young adults are doing the same things on social media that Baby Boomers are doing, or that Gen Xer's experiences in social are the same as Millennial's you're mistaken. That's the key takeaway from new Sprout Social data.

"Social media holds great promise for reaching your audience since multiple generations are now reliably all in the same place," said Scott Brandt, CMO of Sprout Social. "The effort doesn't end there for brands, however. The data shows that while these people of all different ages may be reachable via the same platform, they can use it in drastically different ways. Strategies should be adjusted to support individual customer needs, and brands that don't talk to their customers-directly or via social media-won't see the best possible results."

Researchers looked at how the difference demographics are engaging through social, and found that Millennials are more likely to turn to social specifically to engage with a brand. Other demographics are more likely to make a call or an email, for example. But, both Millennials and Gen Xers are about 2x more likely than Boomers to follow brands via social media. Other interesting findings from the report include:

43% of those polled are using Facebook, making it the most popular social network 1 in 10 social messages get a response from a brand Gen Xers are 2x more likely to unfollow a brand because of the brand saying something offensive.

Tags: Social marketing, social marketing trends, social media trends, Sprout Social

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Report IDs differences in how people use social - BizReport

At The Drum's Predictions Breakfast, I was interested to hear how 2017 is going to be the year social takes its rightful place at high table of digital marketing.

Im normally suspicious about 'years of anything' being proclaimed, but after I saw some fantastic presentations on the use of social data and about how a complex ecosystem of tools has evolved around the discipline I had become a convert.

The biggest area of growth seems to be around influencer marketing with the smart money moving from celebs to micro influencers as the centre of this world. And of course tech and agencies are growing up around this sector as well. We really are seeing a lot of growth in the requirement for staffing in this market already in 2017.

As we are all well aware, organic reach and effectiveness continue to diminish and most brands are increasingly have to pay to deliver the strongest results. Even organic posts which do perform well need fantastic content and more often than not, that will need funding as well.

So it's becoming clear that brands need to put the social channel at the heart of their marketing. Its also become clear that they need to do it well and to do it well is going to cost. No longer can social be seen as something you can do on the cheap. There's nothing more off-putting to a prospective customer than untended or abandoned Twitter or Facebook accounts.

Sadly, when we look at the data we gathered for the seventh edition of our Propel Digital Salary and Industry Insights Report, we see that this is not a view that is prevalent across the board. Social media salaries remain below the average marketing salaries at all levels. This suggests that businesses are still to be convinced that effective social media marketing influences the bottom line enough to increase remuneration.

We found that the average mid-level salary came in at 35,583. Compare that with a general marketing role at 40,296, email marketing at 38,688 or SEO at 39,422 and you can see that social staff are getting a raw deal.

We see the same patterns at junior level where the average social salary is 25,379. A general marketing role is 27,376, email is 27,419 and SEO is 27,038.

So we can see a disconnect here. We know brands want to invest more in social. We know that social marketing is growing as a medium as brands move away from traditional display. Surely it should follow that if social is an integral part of your marketing strategy then you should pay to get that expertise?

Melina Jacovou is chief executive and co-founder of Propel. The Propel Digital Salary and Industry Insights Report combines internal salary data with over 1300 respondents to a survey carried out over three months in 2016.

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It's time to take social media seriously and that means paying higher salaries - The Drum

Business-to-business (B2B) companies need to research and understand buyer behavior on social media before executing a social content marketing plan, which can be done through social insights.

Knowing that buyers are using social networks is only the beginning, said Jillian Ryan, an analyst at eMarketer and author of the latest report, B2B Social Media 2017: Tying Efforts Back to Larger Business Goals. (The full report is available only to eMarketer PRO subscribers).

B2Bs still need to do research to understand audience behaviors on social platforms to deliver targeted content to the right person, on the right network, at the right time in the buyer journey, she added. These sort of audience insights can be extracted through social data mining and listening.

Companies that skip this step tend to be unsuccessful in their social marketing.

Chief evangelist and startup advisor Jill Rowley explained that mining social networks for signals is the backbone of understanding buyers. Do the research to be relevant to your buyer and the entire buying committee. B2Bs should use social networks to find buyers, she said. Insights allow you to listen to your buyers so you can relate, connect and engage them.

For marketers, this is a big shift in behavior, since social media is often thought of as a downstream method to share content with customers. However, using it with an upstream approach for persona analysis is valuable, explained Tim Barker, CEO at DataSift, a tech company that recently announced that it would be partnering with LinkedIn to bring engagement and audience insights to LinkedIns advertisers. If marketers have a pulse on their audience, they are better informed before they start to spend their effort building communities and sharing content, he said.

This means understanding buyer usage habits, channel preferences and content consumption patterns, according to Amber Long, vice president of engagement, PR, content and social media at B2B agency gyro. When a B2B maps out its whole social ecosystem and framework according to the needs, desires and preferences of their buyers, it means the strategy is all aligned to the buyer journey, she said. This is the epitome of audience-centric.

However, Long also noted that many B2B brands that she works with are still a little skeptical about leveraging social insights and intel. An August 2016 survey of US B2B marketers by Demand Metric and Socedo showed that the majority of respondents arent taking advantage of social media monitoring tools: only 39% used them.

Business-to-government defense technology contractor Raytheon, however, is sold on the power of social intelligence. We set up dashboards so that we can understand where the target audience is and listen to what theyre saying or what theyre talking about within these channels, said Pam Wickham, Raytheons vice president of corporate affairs and communications.

eMarketer analyst Jillian Ryan discusses B2Bs use (and misuse) of social in the latest episode of Behind the Numbers, eMarketers podcast.

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eMarketer Releases New Report on B2B Use of Social Platforms - eMarketer

Last year, my partner and I raised $3 million to scaleJumpCrew, our social marketing and sales outsourcing business. Our first task: sharingour ideal hiring profile with the new recruitment team.

Related:Why, and How, to Hire for Potential Over Experience

JumpCrew wasn't our first venture. Over the past seven years, we have hired hundreds of salespeople for JumpCrew, LocalVox and other clients. And during this period, the composition of our teams and our ideal profile of a top performer have bothmaterially changed.

What started as a surprising observation about top performers turned into a fascinating discovery, one which performance data ultimately supported and one whichre-shaped our hiring strategy.Last October, that discovery helped us set our 12-month hiring goals and defineour ideal team and individual profiles.

Subsequently, the majority of our first 100 hires had . . . little or no experience in either marketing or sales. --How's that, again?

Like most companies, we had started with the assumption that our top performers would be experienced salespeople who transitioned to digital marketing with sales savvy. Butwe were wrong.

In our fast-growth SaaS environment, we learned that recent grads often outperformed sales pros with 10 to 15 years experience.In hindsight, we were experiencing a transformative moment in the SaaS economys influence on productivity. The impact of new sales and marketing technologies had fundamentally altered what creates "success."

In fact, time and again, our top performers were:

In short, we found that more experienced employees brought more biasregarding how they thought they could be most effective. Less experienced employees, in contrast,brought less bias and enrolled in our processes more fully.Above all, our most successful salespeople were those who were team players and collaborated effectively.

We were also able to identify, as our outperformers, reps who took the Challenger approach. The Challenger approach describes employees with the insight and confidence to challenge assumptions they know are not true. This seems obvious, but in reality a lot of salespeople don't work that way.

The correlation between those taking the Challenger approach and those who are outperformers was not surprising.A 2007 Harvard Business Review studyshowed that fully 54 percentof the top performers looked at werechallengers (as opposed to "relationship builders," "hard workers," "lone wolves" and "reactive problem-solvers.")

The surprise for us was that even among those we considered challengers, the majority of top-tier performers had little or no experience.Instead, they shared these traits:

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Building to Scale, 'No Experience Required' - Entrepreneur