How To Be A Successful Social Media Marketer Without Any Experience

Do you want to be an ace social media marketer without any experience? Are you looking to start an online social media marketing business from home? Here’s a full in-depth guide on how you can start as a freelance social media marketer without any prior working experience.

In the last decade, social media marketing has accounted for more than half of online sales.

Social media has changed the way businesses used work. It’s not advertisements or marketing campaigns anymore bringing in business. The changing perceptions now push companies to use social media to grow their businesses.

How Social Media Helps Companies Bring In More Business?

Marketing has seen a rapid change over the last few years. It’s more personal now. The audience has changed, and so has the taste. Loud marketing and aggressive advertising no more work in the long term.

Social media helps to fill in the gap by establishing a more interpersonal connection with customers.

What Does A Freelance Social Media Marketer Do?

There are several companies and businesses that need a freelancer to control their social media campaigns, pages, and handles. As social media is accessible from anywhere, companies often outsource these services to a freelancer to cut down operational costs.

There are also such companies that have a single person controlling everything with additional freelancers directly reporting to the authorized person.

How Profitable Is Freelance Social Media Marketing Business?

Quite profitable given the high demand. It’s growing, and soon almost all companies, irrespective of their size will need a social media person. Even if you are someone without any prior working experience, the pay is handsome compared to other online businesses.

Digital marketing is currently considered one of the five most profitable service industries in the world.

Here’s an in-depth stepwise breakdown of how to be a successful freelance social media marketer. We have emphasized what a social media marketer does and how to get started in the process.

10 Easy Steps to Become a Social Media Marketer

Step 1. Do Your Research

It’s really important to find out what’s happening out there. What do you know and what do clients need. Start with looking up freelance social media marketing jobs on sites like UpWork and Fiverr. See what they need. It could be creating posts for their Facebook page, replying to customer messages, or asking customers for feedback.

You can even look out for what competitors are doing on sites like LinkedIn, Indeed or even standard Google searches.

Step 2. Skills You Need

As a social media marketer, you need to have certain skills. While some of them can be learned, a few will depend on your approach. Being a freelance social media marketer, you will be responsible for a company’s online reputation.

These are some of the necessary skills you need to have as a social media marketer:

• Strategy planning.
• Tactics and execution.
• Community management.
• Understand how content works on a social web.
• Optimizing content and technology.
• Creative mindset.
• Public Relations.
• Online reputation management.
• Writing skills.

If you are looking forward to learning online from your home, Udemy comes up with many highly rated social media learning courses. For beginners, we highly recommend attending this complete digital marketing course there.

There are also some great books one must read for bettering understanding of the trade. One such book is The Art of Social Media by Guy Kawasaki. In addition, check out video tutorials available on YouTube or on training platforms like Lynda.com.

Step 3. Deciding What Services To Offer

As a freelance social media marketer, you have the liberty to choose what you want to. If you are comfortable doing everything, you can choose to work as a full-time freelance online marketer. Or else, you can pick up a niche, and offer services in that particular domain.

The most popular niche online social media marketing services:

• SEO.
• Keyword research.
• Content strategy.
• Content marketing.
• Online campaigns.
• Social media manager.
• Account creation and setup for new businesses.
• Social media strategy session.
• Social media audit.
• Coaching sessions or retainers.
• Training.
• Video marketing

You can also be a specialized social media consultant. You will offer consultations on what they should do to improve their business online. Though, as a social media marketer, you will mostly have to deal with SEO, content creation, and social media management.

Suggested Read: How to Become a Successful Instagram Influencer

Step 4. A Business Plan

You can stay at home, start and stop work whenever you want and travel as you like as a freelancer. But do remember that this is a business. So, you need a business plan here. Even if you start small, you should plan to grow big and make a full-time living out of it.

Plan up how to market your own services, approach new clients, sales pitches, content development, and networking.

This will help your business keep running. As your own boss, you need to keep yourself motivated to stay in the flow. Some of the key topics to be included in your social media marketing plan document are the following:

• Initial and recurring costs
• Target customers
• Pricing plan
• How do you plan to plan to sell your social media marketing services to customers?

Step 5. Financing, Legality & Business Registration

You don’t need to invest in anything particular. As a business, you need to move beyond your computer. There are processes and workflows you need to establish. First, you need to register your business for a smoother operation. You need to handle invoices, and client appointments, and file for tax payments.

So, register as a sole proprietor, or form an LLC and file for a Federal EIN for taxes.

Step 6. Understanding Analytics

As a social media marketer, you will have to understand analytics. Social media management and analytics go hand in hand. There are many helpful software programs which you need to know about. You need to utilize analytics to understand what’s bringing in traffic and conversions, and whatnot.

You’ll need to create your own report or generate one from any existing service. Offering analytics will help you stay ahead of your competitors.

Furthermore, you need to buy some social marketing tools for carrying out social marketing assignments efficiently. The most important is the media scheduling tool. There are many social media scheduling software you can consider buying like sprout social, buffer, and Hootsuite.

Step 7. Approaching Clients

As a beginner, it’s better to go for anything. Be it posting Facebook posts or replying to messages, you need to start somewhere. Don’t expect to get a content strategy job on your first take. Also, do not keep yourself restricted to a particular domain.

Having a mix of social media services will allow you to diversify your income stream.

Don’t be too cluttered either, or very narrow. Too many services can be prohibitive, as it will complicate your job with more scattered tasks and duties.

Step 8. Marketing & Promotions

While you may take up jobs and assignments online, you will need to promote yourself to grab big projects. Your work experience will obviously be the most important factor for clients to pick you, but you should try to promote your work as well.

You can approach blogs to write guest articles for free or work for some Facebook pages to showcase your work.

Visibility is the key. Also, keep an updated profile on professional social networking sites like LinkedIn and platforms where you are taking up regular assignments like UpWork and Fiverr.

Step 9. Staying Updated

Social media marketing is a dynamic ever-evolving industry. So, you need to keep up with what’s happening around and new. Keep yourself updated with the latest trends and happenings, and social media news, and do write blog posts on your own site or social media handles to establish your expertise.

This will help you to indirectly market yourself to potential clients.

The more you engage with the community, the more they recognize you as a social media expert.

Step 10. Scaling Up

As a freelance social media marketer, you need a grow with time. You just can’t stick to offering social media services from home. You will have to build a client base, hire a few more freelancers under you and get professional. Don’t keep yourself limited to an online space only.

You may also start to take up offline orders in your area by approaching businesses and companies locally.

Currently, social media marketing services come with innumerable opportunities and scopes. It’s a great time to start back with some big possibilities to grow in the dynamic social media industry!