Focusing On Revenue Growth Utilizing Social Media With Victoria Lee

Andy Splichal 0:02

Welcome to The Make Each Click Count Podcast. This is your host Andy splichal. We are happy to welcome this week's guest to discuss today's topic, which is Focusing on Revenue Growth by Utilizing Social Media. This week's guest is the co founder and CEO of a UK company 100poundsocial.com. A fully productised Social Media Marketing Agency working with 160 plus companies across the UK and worldwide. With a 72% average year on year revenue growth. We are happy to welcome Victoria Lee. Hi, Victoria.

Victoria Lee 1:23

Hi, Andy. Thanks for having me on today.

Andy Splichal 1:26

Well, thanks for coming on. Now, before we get started your bio reads fully productized Social Media Marketing Agency, what the heck is productised?

Victoria Lee 1:37

So productised . I think I think there's the US spelling, UK spelling, I slipped in there when I sent you, I'd sent that to you. So productised is when you've you, you have a service based business. And you've productize this, you've you've kind of described the word, but only the word can I you, you've basically taken a service and you've packaged it up a little bit like a SaaS product. So when you sell your service to people, you don't write out a proposal, like most service based agencies, would, you have a very set specific package that you're offering. And that's exactly what the client purchases. So the client is fully aware of what they're purchasing and what they're getting for their money. And as a business owner, productizing allows you to offer a more streamlined service, because you can build processes around every single service you offer. And that's partly how we've been able to scale the business so quickly through that productization.

Andy Splichal 2:38

Got it. got it! Well, it's amazing, too, because your bio also reads that your clients have an average of 72% growth year over year for revenue. How are you? How are you doing it? Is it through being prophesized for them to or what's your secret there?

Victoria Lee 2:53

So that's actually the the average year on year growth for up for the company, our company when productization.,

Andy Splichal 2:59

You're accompany? That's your company?

Victoria Lee 3:01

Yeah, exactly. So we've been going for four years, and that's our average year on year growth, which we've achieved, partly through that productization process, obviously, partly through the strength of the service that we're offering. So we offer social media marketing, and content, writing and lead generation services to small businesses. And that's where that growth is coming from.

Andy Splichal 3:23

I see. So you're almost doubling every year. So you're adding a lot of products, a lot of clients, what social media platforms are you using? Are you using for your own company and are using the same ones for your clients?

Victoria Lee 3:36

Yeah, we do. So we try and kind of practice what we preach so that we are the platforms, we often for clients and Facebook, Twitter company, LinkedIn, personal, LinkedIn, and Instagram. And we're the company use all those platforms for our own marketing as well. For us, we mainly cater to B2B companies. So businesses selling to other businesses. So these might be service based providers, like consultants or professional coaches, and we have some SaaS Companies as well. And for those companies, LinkedIn tends to be the strongest platform. In the same way for us is a business LinkedIn is our strongest platform for really getting our message out there and reaching our own clients.

Andy Splichal 4:19

And for those startup companies out there, who might not be able to afford an agency like yours to handle their marketing yet, and the key word being yet because everybody hopes to grow and be able to hire a professional, but what tips can you share for creating engaging social media post?

Victoria Lee 4:39

That's a really, really good question. So most of the clients we work with, we only work very small businesses, so they mostly have maximum under 10 employees. Most of our clients have either it's just the founder or the founder and co founder, or they've maybe got their first or second employee. So they don't have marketing departments yet, and they've often been in that position where they've tried to do their marketing themselves before they've got to the stage where they've come to us. And I think for anyone who can't handle your marketing, the first thing small companies often don't do this is to work out what your brand is work out what your brand voice is, what kind of message you're trying to put across, and what kind of tone of voice you want to have, in your messaging, work out exactly that audiences on each social media platform that you're trying to reach. Because we're often for companies, the audience on LinkedIn won't be the same as the audience on Instagram, for example, going through the exercise is really the foundation before you can get before you can create social media posts that are engaging to your target audience. And that's often what we find the companies who come to us have tried to do it themselves, they've not done a good little, they haven't felt they've done a good job. And often, that's because they've missed going through that exercise before they've started. So that's where we start with all of our clients. We take them through that exercise when they first start working with us.

Andy Splichal 5:57

And then once you have their target in place, and what kind of voice they want, what is your content strategy with their clients? So how often are you posting? Do you do a content schedule? How does that work?

Victoria Lee 6:11

Yep, so we offer different posting plans. So our basic plan costs 100 pounds per month, and that's about 135 US dollars per month. And with that, we create three social media posts per week for our clients and schedule them to to have their social media platforms. And that gives them that really basic consistent presence that most companies in the beginning require. We do have plans that offer more, so you can go up seven posts per week. But to be honest, for most companies, three posts a week is, is enough, and terms of how we make the content strategy. So we take the client through our onboarding process, which involves getting working out that brand voice and helping them give us a really comprehensive briefing on what their company is about to get us to the position where we understand their company, hopefully, almost as well as they do, they then get their own dedicated content creator, and it's their content creators job to go away research into the company and decide on the posting strategy and decide the type of posts we're going to be creating for the client. Usually, we will do a mix. So we'll do two topical posts per week for those posts talking about what's going on in the clients industry. So it could be some, if it's a professional coaching company, it could be an article on Forbes talking about why you as a business owner need to have a business coach, for example. And then once a week, we recommend to the client that we do promotional posts talking about their business linking back to their website, or one of the pages maybe their case study on their website. So that's the strategy for our clients. It's personalized for every client. But that broad strategy I just outlined with the two topical posts on one promotional post a week is exactly what I would recommend to anyone who's trying to do their social media themselves. Keep it simple, and start with that and build up your strategy from there.

Andy Splichal 7:58

So the three polls, the two topical and one promotional. Are you posting those across all platforms? Are you rotating between Twitter, between Facebook between LinkedIn? Are they all the same house out?

Victoria Lee 8:14

So is this service what we offer, we allow the client to pick two platforms. And then under our basic 100 pound plan, then we post those posts to the two platforms we adapt them to they're suitable for each platform we have within our product is offering the client after they purchase that basic plan that costs 200 pounds per month, they can then add on platforms. So for an additional 29 pounds per month, they could add a third platform, and then another 29 pounds for a fourth platform. So we've got clients who have us posting across the whole range of those five platforms that we mentioned at the beginning.

Andy Splichal 8:50

And you're talking in pounds, but you guys do work with companies all over the world?

Victoria Lee 8:56

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So we're called 100 pound social, because obviously we're a UK based company and our starter package costs 100 pounds per month there. Yeah, absolutely. We've got clients all across the world in the US, Australia, Canada, and pretty much every any English speaking country. We take we our subscriptions run in pounds, obviously, you know, roughly 100 pounds is roughly 135 US dollars. We've got a good chunk of our client base is made up of clients in the US.

Andy Splichal 9:24

Now how are you producing all this content? Are you doing it all in house? Are you outsourcing because I mean, that is three pieces of content a week and 160 companies that that is a lot of content, how?

Victoria Lee 9:40

It is indeed, we're actually up to 200 companies since 200

Andy Splichal 9:44

200? Well, you know, that's easier math. That's 600 pieces of content. All right. I was afraid I was kept 160 times. Alright. 600 pieces of content a week. How are how are you guys?

Victoria Lee 9:55

Yeah. So we've got a team of content creators and editors. So Every client who works with us allocated their own content creator and their own editor, our whole team are based in the UK. And what that means is the client, each client has what the same people working on those posts for them every month. So the longer our clients with us, obviously, the better their content great to get to know their company, the more feedback the client gets their content creator, the more we can kind of tailor what we're doing to make sure it's really ticking every box for the client every single month. And that team, we've got a head of customers, so head of content and customer success in house, Emily, that who manages that team of content creators, and as I said, they're based all across the UK.

Now, is there an average size of the content is you try to, you know, is there a sweet spot as far as words or care, you know, characters, of course, Twitter, you know, you're restricted, Facebook is there is there like a sweet spot for Facebook or LinkedIn?

Yes, so what we tend to find is content that's about two paragraph long paragraphs long works best, you're obviously going to have big exceptions to that. So you are going to have times where you're going to have perhaps a short, snappy post with a really great image that's going to work well. But in general, we aim for about two paragraphs long per post that tends to work best on LinkedIn, and Facebook. And as you mentioned, for Twitter, obviously, we're very limited in the characters.

Now speaking of LinkedIn, this seems to be a bit of a forgotten platform, at least for for Ecommerce. How are you using it? And what kind of results have you seen with with LinkedIn?

So LinkedIn is our strongest platform by a long, long way. So this is where we and we get around 70% of 100 pound socials, clients, actually find us through LinkedIn. So we have got a really strong posting presence on LinkedIn, each of our team members posts almost daily to LinkedIn. And we also run a lot of outreach through LinkedIn to reach out to business owners that we think might be might have an interest in our service. And as a company, I've mentioned our 100 Pam post plan. That's our content plan. We also offer a LinkedIn lead generation plan. And what we do with that plan is we basically take the client's personal LinkedIn profile, and we turn it into a sales machine. So we use it to build up their profile posts for them to build up their reputation as a thought leader. And then we use their profile to reach out to their ideal clients to generate new business opportunities for them. So to get sales calls booked into their calendars. And as I mentioned earlier, we do this principally for the B2B companies we work with. So for us, LinkedIn is out of all the social media platforms the strongest, but we are obviously a B2B company. So that advice may differ if you've got a kind of b2c business owners listening to a podcast.

Now speaking of B2B, I see for ecommerce and you do work with some clients within the health and wellness vertical, is, you know, that makes sense with social ads, especially Facebook. But are there any other verticals you work with for Ecommerce?

So for Ecommerce, we principally work with online retail, and so people selling products through an online website. And we also work with kind of apps selling again, selling products. We've also got some people selling ecommerce services. So we've had quite a few clients selling that kind of online party organization or having a chef come to your house, you know, at a London based company that was sending chefs to people's houses for clients like

Just like Gordon Ramsay?

Kind of exactly. I don't think any of them got Gordon Ramsay, unfortunately. So yes, sending these kind of bespoke party parties in within people's houses, obviously, this was pre COVID. So that's the Yeah, that's principally what we do on the ecommerce side.

Now, have there been any struggles that you have gone through with new clients being able to successfully grow their business using this strategy?

No, I don't think we've had struggles with that with every client is different. So it's not it's it's rarely just straightforward. But we tailor the plans to each client. Each client has their own customer success manager who's available to jump on the phone, have a call with them at any time. And we're constantly working to every month the client provides us with more feedback before we create their new set of posts to make sure their content creator is always on track in terms of the content they're creating for them. I think in terms of struggles for small business owners, the biggest one, but when it comes to their marketing and working with a company like ours is time we all don't have enough time and we all need more hours in the day. And when you are either doing your marketing yourself or investing in a company like ours to do Marketing for you, you don't need. If you're investing in our company, you need to put aside maybe 30 minutes to one hour per month to give us feedback on what we're doing. But the struggle we sometimes see is some entrepreneurs don't even have that amount of time. And we have to work quite hard to really pin them down and get their feedback from them. The clients that get the most out of working with us are the clients that provide us regularly with feedback tell us we you know, what they like about what we're doing and what they don't like so much. So we can improve our service based on that. But I think that time thing is a problem. I'm sure it's a problem for you. And it's definitely a problem for me, I think all entrepreneurs struggle with having enough hours in the day.

Sure. Now, on the flip side, do you have a favorite success story from one of your clients that you could share?

Yeah, for sure. So we're really proud of our success stories. And we published about four new case studies and client testimonials every month on our website. So we've got a client called Scott Cowley, who used that LinkedIn lead generation plan I mentioned earlier, I was getting about 20 new inquiries per month through that plan. We've got another client, the name is skipping it now but got a great testimonial on our website. So he was on our LinkedIn lead generation plan that cost 299 pounds per month. And he said that that's the only marketing he does for his business, it cost him 299 per month. And that brings in all of his new business for his company. So those kinds of stories really, really make us proud of what we're doing and make it worthwhile every day.

Now, you said your agency is about four years old, right? Yes. Have there been any struggles you guys have gone through with your agency in growing growing pains that you could share with other agency owners listening?

Yeah, for sure. I think you often as an agency, you'll get to a stage and then you'll kind of plateau in terms of your growth. So that would definitely hit a plateau about a year ago, and it really has taken some work to try and get our marketing in place. So we can kind of get over that bump, and start to grow a little bit faster again. And I think that's from what I read and understand that that's quite normal when the companies get to a certain kind of revenue figure to plateau at that point, until they work out the next steps. Were a completely remote business. So although the all of our team, we're based in the UK, we don't have a head office, we've never had one. When we started the company, it was a company I started in my living room. And it was never kind of in the game plan to have an office. And I think I wouldn't say it's been a struggle, but it's definitely been a learning process learning how to build and manage a remote team. We were lucky in a way because obviously with COVID, everyone's had to figure that out very quickly. But we're obviously an advantage because we had that in place before Coronavirus, struck.

Now personally speaking about Victoria Lee for a minute. Are there any business books out there that you could attribute to your journey as an entrepreneur?

So there's not any business books specifically, but what I would attribute is support groups. So there's a huge amount of communities to Facebook groups that I would recommend as whether or not you're a SaaS company, there's a group called SaaS growth hacks that I find to be pretty incredible and informative. And they have pretty much every day they have new posts with new new stuff with new entrepreneurs having problems asking for advice, or people who are more experienced giving that advice. And there's another one called London startups that again, I find to be really, really useful. So those online communities I would strongly recommend.

Now, as far as your agency goes, what what problems? Do you see that you're solving for your client seen? And how does your agency stand apart from the competition?

So in terms of what we're solving for our clients, we are helping them build that online social media presence at a very low affordable cost, without them having to put in those hours that it takes to actually create that content yourself in the house or hire somebody and pay somebody a salary to do that for you. And you're going to have to remind me of the second part of that question, I'm afraid.

How are you standing apart from the competition?

Yes, thank you very much. So in terms of how we stand apart from the competition, the main indicator is our price point. So because we productized our service and we have set processes we follow to deliver that service to our clients. It means we're able to offer it at a very affordable price point. And when I co founded the business one of the reasons for setting up this business This was to set up something that which new business owners can actually look at and think, yeah, you know what that is affordable for me, I can afford to pay for that. And I can see that I'm gonna get a return on that investment. And that's partly why we started at the name the company 100 pound put social and start at a lower price.

Now, who is your perfect client? If that person's out there listening now, and and you describe them? What do you think your agency would be able to do for them as?

Well. So our perfect client would be any service base fee to the business owner, we do work with a big range of clients in Ecommerce as well, like you've mentioned, but our kind of main main clientele of those service based business owners, that will be recruitment agents that will be consultants, professional coaches, SaaS companies, those kinds of businesses, in terms of how they would reach us. Sorry, no, you asked me what the ages they have to do for them. So what they'll be out we'll be able to do for them is we have that basic 100 pounds social media post plan, so we can manage their social media content creation, will build up their presence across the relevant social media platforms for their business. We also offer blog writing Pat plan or package. So again, we can make sure that they're getting that regular content creative, that's relevant and authentic, and getting it out there in front of their audience. And then lastly, if they are a b2b business, we can help them generate new business inquiries and get sales calls booked a calendar through on LinkedIn lead generation plan.

Now, how the contracts work, is there like an annual is that a month a month? How, what does that look like for a new client?

Yeah, that's a good question. So we all we all have our offerings and month to month. So the client signs up, they pay when they sign up, and then they're charged on that same day, every month. If the client wants to, they can make some savings by choosing to pay every quarter that we build upfront, every quarter, or every six months. We don't offer annual options at the moment. And obviously, the longer the contract, the client goes for the the more discount we offer. We don't have signed contracts, we just have terms and conditions that we ask the client to agree to when they sign up for this. We try and keep it simple because we obviously want our clients to stay on board with us because they're happy with our service, rather than because we've tied them into some onerous annual contract.

And probably the most important question how, if a listener out there is interested in your service, and and they're perfect for you or not, or just want to do more, whether they're ecommerce or b2b, how would they learn more about contacting and working with you?

Of course, so they can visit 100poundsocial.com, that's 100poundsocial.com. And you'll see a big button on that website says call. And that's the best thing to do is join one of our daily demonstration calls to just get a feel for exactly what we offer, who we are and what we do. And then from there, we'll have a private phone call with you to chat over if our service is right for you, and figure out what the best route forward as I think you're going to drop the links in the description of the podcast. So that'd be also welcome to contact me through my personal LinkedIn, or any of our social media channels as well.

Great. Well, thank you for joining us today. Victoria.

Thank you. It was such a pleasure to talk.

Well that's it for today. Remember, if you liked this episode, please go to Apple podcasts and leave an honest review. And if you're looking for more information regarding Victoria, or her agency, 100poundsocial.com. You will find the links below in the show notes. In addition, if you're looking for more information to grow your business using Google My Business or SEO, check out this month's featured course not only can you purchase it right now for 49 bucks, but you'll also get two months free to Make Each Click Count University. This is a promotion for a limited time so don't delay. And the meantime remember to stay safe keep healthy and happy marketing and I will talk to you in the next episode.