Welcome to another episode of the show. I’m really really excited to talk about why hiring someone is not enough. Frequently we hear stories about people who have hired a VA or another sort of support person maybe a social media manager and they’re frustrated that they’re still feeling “in it all the time”. They feel like they’re still stuck on social all the time. They’re still trying to figure out content all the time. They’re still having to sort of guide the process and a lot of that is because you have skipped the most important step. And that’s the step we’re going to talk about today.
I want to talk about being super clear on what the plan is.
And then being super transparent with your team about that plan. This is one of the reasons why we start with this when we onboard every single client to Uncommonly More we do not skip this step. If you do not have a plan documented now, let me be clear. This doesn’t mean you need hand calligraphy, save the date, wedding invitation style documentation. It’s literally a Google doc for us. We have a template version and then it gets customized as we build strategies for clients. It’s not terribly complicated. It’s not terribly difficult to create but skipping this step creates a ton of work, it creates so much extra effort because there’s no clear direction and so I want you to make sure that you have a plan documented and we have talked about this on the show before we’ve talked about what you need to do before you create your strategy. We’ve talked about the parts of the strategy. You can find all of those episodes. What I want to talk about today is actually what this documentation looks like.
I want you to make sure that you have some really important core documents in a folder in Google Drive or Dropbox or OneDrive. Whatever it is for you, but I want you to make sure you have these pieces documented and then we’re going to talk about how we update them and how we manage team communications around them.
The four things I want you to make sure you have in a folder somewhere.
It exists in the ether of your business files, right?
Who is your ideal client big picture and for each of your offerings?
So we’ve talked a lot about this in the past, but just to recap here inside of Uncommonly More we have lots of offerings. We have things like done for you services. We also have things like the Backstage Live events and Hit the Mic Backstage and our VIP days. So that’s more done with you instead of done for you. We have lots of different ways we work. Ultimately we’re talking to the same type of people the same type of woman really because that’s who wants to listen to the show and who wants to hang out with us.
Where they are in their journey and their willingness to invest is going to vary and so that’s where we have to get more specific and really how that manifests itself is pain point are a little different. The pain point that Hit the Mic Backstage solves is different than the pain point that Backstage Live solves and it’s really different than the pain point that done for you services and our ongoing management and support solves.
Backstage is I’m trying to acquire information.I need to know more. Done for you services, I don’t need to know more, I need to have more done. I need more high-level support. We sort of act as a contract marketing department. That’s the structure Uncommonly More has when we support our done for you services at that level. So again that pain point is a little bit different and so I want you to be super clear. On your ideal clients for each of your offerings. What makes them different. What are those specific details that qualify them or make them ready for each of your offerings? And again, I want this documented in writing and available for your team. Yes. I will continue to beat this drum.
Number two, some kind of guide around what you say and what you don’t say.
I actually did this work with the ladies of North Star Messaging and I had a great time building my brand voice guide with them. They have a really cool brand voice guide opt-in that you can check out. I highly recommend you putting in that work. If you don’t want to jump into working with them, they have an opt-in.
But also just write down all the things you don’t say and write down all the things you do say. How do you talk about things? For example, just pulling from my brand voice guide that I have opened up in front of me here so that I could give you some examples. I don’t say, girl boss. I don’t say mompreneur ever. Now I do occasionally try to sneak into the girl boss, hashtag and engage with people. Because some people do use it. I don’t use it in my branding. You’ll never see me say hey mompreneurs in an email because it’s not the language I use. It’s not aligned with my brand values. It’s not aligned with my personal values, but that is another show.
I have that document, and again we have that saved in Google Drive the team can see. It’s something we actually worked on with a couple of our clients like talking to them about it. Generally a good strategist a good team can pull some of that out from listening to your content, but this is a great way to shortcut that.
The number three thing that I want you to have documented, what are you selling?
Seriously, what are your offerings? And I’m not asking for sales pages here, but I am asking for clarity around the offer. As an example, we have Backstage Live. Backstage Live is a full-day event. Sometimes it’s a person, and sometimes it’s virtual. In the course of that event, we build out a strategy for content marketing, social media marketing, and email marketing. Then I would bullet point inside of content marketing. We’re going to brain dump topics and calendar them.
Inside of email marketing, we’re going to talk about funnels and how those should look ideally and some customization of them. Inside of social we’re going to talk about what networks were on we’re going to talk actually have all of that mapped out in a document.
I want you to look at do you have your offerings mapped out brain dumped in a document? And here’s the step that I’m realizing right now that I haven’t done which is I don’t know that I’ve shared that with my team. See, we’re always trying to get better full transparency. So I want you to make sure you have that with your team. We have to know what we’re selling or it’s going to make it really hard for us to explain to people why they should buy it. It really is that simple so I want you to look at what are you selling and I would take that a step further. And somewhere we should know when we’re selling these things.
This could be a Google sheet that has the months of the year and what gets sold in each month. It could be that simple in the breakdown of what you sell sharing that these are the times of years we sell. And that gets updated year-over-year. But as you have been in business for a few years, you probably start selling things that’s sort of the same times each year as an example. Let’s say you’re a mastermind that you need to fill and it’s 12 months and runs January to December cool. When do you need to sell that thing? Probably not December probably going to start selling that thing in October. Depending on how big the investment is. Let’s say you run a live program, or live course every March it starts getting sold in February. Pre-launch starts in early February, whatever the dates are map those out build in that.
The fourth thing where and how do you show up?
This portion is where we are really mapping it out in one big strategy doc that we provide for our clients. We break down each network that we are using and we break down the specifics of what gets shared there and how we share it.
Let’s take Instagram for example, we’ve got lots of ways we can share content on Instagram. We have grid posts, we have stories, we have IGTV, we have highlights. How are we utilizing each piece of real estate on Instagram? How frequently do we make grid posts? How frequently do we go live with IG live do we use IG TV, what are our highlights? How often are they updated? These are the kind of things that we want to make sure we are absolutely documenting and building in transparency for our team so that they know exactly what’s happening. When and this is how we beat the “so what are we saying on Facebook this week?” situation. We know who we are talking to. We know what we’re selling. We know how we provide content on Facebook. So we are selling Backstage Live right now. That means we need a testimonial post about why Backstage Live is awesome. Done. Easy breezy, I want you to make sure that you have those four pieces documented and in a folder labeled strategy because that’s what’s going to allow you to be really transparent with your team. It’s how your team is going to be able to actually serve and support your goals now.
Hiring The Right People
Before we wrap this up. I need to go on a small but important rant. This is something I have done on IG stories but we are now going to take a step further. I’ve seen frequently posts specifically on Facebook asking about where you find and ”a good VA.” And when they say that they want to find “a good VA” they say they want someone who can create social media graphics, write social media content in their voice, come to them with social media ideas, and update their email funnels.
Here’s the real talk guys.
That’s not actually a virtual assistant. The first part is a social media manager and probably really a social media strategist and a manager together. The second part is an email marketing expert. If you want it all in one you need a marketing agency. By the way, I know this one called Uncommonly More that’s great. But that’s not a VA and this is not to say that VA’s are not incredibly talented people. But traditionally that’s not their support role. Most really great virtual assistants I know don’t want to touch social media. They’re too busy helping you run your brain. They are managing you and your business. They’re not running the day-to-day minutiae of your marketing. And there are some VAs who do offer some social media support. First of all, I think they should call themselves social media managers or social media marketers. It’s just clearer. It’s just easier to identify but generally speaking, if you are trying to find someone who will both manage your email and your calendar and schedule high-quality social media posts that they’re going to create. You’re asking a lot and so I want you to rethink who you’re putting in these roles.
Now, there are 100% absolutely virtual assistants who can handle and who are comfortable and who offer the services of doing scheduling they generally don’t create and they almost never provide any kind of strategy. So if you are going to utilize a VA on your team or an admin person on your team to do the scheduling then engage someone to do the strategy first to build out the things we talked about in this episode so that you can say here’s what we do build out the documentation of your social media posts so that they can repurpose and reuse from the library of posts you’ve created.
Inside of Uncommonly More we have Google Sheets, like Excel documents, but in Google that contains every social media post for every social network that we’ve ever posted for clients.
All of them forever. I have one client who I have worked with quite frankly since I was a VA since I still owned On Demand Virtual Assistant. I started with her doing VA stuff and we evolved our relationship as her needs changed and really as what I offered changed. She has been my client for six years six or seven years. I’ve been a business eight. Yes, six or seven years, so we have six or seven years of social posts. In Google Sheets, so guess what when she goes and teaches at XYZ place every year. We copy, we paste, we update, we do not recreate. You want to start building that library now so that as you have somebody like a VA who is a little less versed in finding the stuff and figuring this stuff out on their own you have a whole library of examples of what your social content looks like and how its evolved. They can see these are the changes we have made. This is how this is happening. This is how this is transitioning. Build this library and get support. That is going to meet you where you’re at if that means hiring a strategist and then having your admin do it great. If it means hiring an agency who can take over all the pieces, great. If it means hiring somebody who is a social media strategist and an email marketing, strategist and a content person separately, awesome. Make sure that they can communicate with each other. Make sure that they all have access to all of the things they are doing.
Put them in a Slack channel so that they can talk to each other so that these different pieces are supporting your goals. Because if you are still stuck in the middle playing traffic cop you have not actually handed any of the stuff off. You’ve not actually invested in you doing less work or effort when it comes to marketing because now instead of communicating with clients or responding to comments or engaging with people in DMs or doing your stories on IG instead of doing those pieces, you’re just playing traffic cop. You’re just trying to make sure the trains run on time. No, that’s not the same thing as a traffic cop, but that’s why I went with guys. All right. All right, I’m putting a soapbox away.
I want to remind you that a great place to start with this is Backstage Live because we’re going to build out a big chunk of this documentation in that day together. The really cool thing is our September 12th Virtual Backstage Live means you can join from anywhere. We will be going live from 9 a.m. To 3 p.m. Pacific time. You can join us from your home office from your favorite coffee shop from wherever you can get Wi-Fi. And you can build out a big section of this stuff with me and with the rest of the group.
The early bird price ends next Thursday, August 15th. I hope you join us. It has literally never been better priced and it will never be priced this way again. So now is a really good time to take advantage of this our December event will not even be priced the way this is priced so get in and strike while the iron’s hot.
We will be building this stuff together.
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