Pricing your SMM services

Presented by

Good morning!

Welcome to Social Studies.

Here’s the agenda for this week:

• brought to you by…

• pricing your SMM services

• stuff I like

• want to work together?

• want my favorite dad joke?

  • Refer 1 fellow social media pro and I’ll send it your way. 👨

Social Studies is free because of wonderful partners like…

Master the art and science of creative strategy

Creative minds. Math-obsessed media buyers. To ship more winning ads, you need both worlds working together. 

Introducing: Thumbstop. 

Thumbstop is a weekly newsletter covering the art and science of creating winning Meta, TikTok, and YouTube ads. 

⚡Creative strategy templates 
🔬The science behind effective hooks  
💰 Winning TikTok & Meta ad formats 
📊 Time-saving reporting techniques 

Who is this newsletter for:

👉 DTC and ecom creative teams looking to build their data skills 
👉 Heads of growth who want to increase their creative skills 
👉 CMOs who want to build effective creative performance teams 

Every week, you’ll get new growth & creative cheat codes used by top DTC and ecom brands. New issues are sent every Sunday. 

💌 Subscribe here 

QUICK QUESTION

Before we dive in, I have a quick question.

I’m thinking about sending emails more frequently.

Toying with the idea of sending out trending memes as they’re starting to blow up, algorithm change alerts, killer campaign examples, etc.

Curious if you have a strong opinion about this. Is one email a week enough as is, or if the content was actually valuable, would you be excited about getting 2, 3, 4, or even 5 emails per week?

PRICING YOUR SMM SERVICES

What you probably want is for me to give you an exact dollar amount to charge for a list of services.

If only it was that easy.

When I first started, I’d look at a potential client and judge how many hours the gig would take.

If I thought it might take 10 hours/month, I’d pick my hourly rate (usually with about as much precision as a random number generator), multiply it by 10 and then charge that amount as a monthly retainer.

As someone with a fully time job and a growing family, I quickly found that my time was incredibly finite and this put a massive cap on my income.

If I quit my job, spend zero time with my family, and never sleep, I can only bill for 168 hours per week.

Cue an interesting conversation with my dad.

My dad is a criminal defense attorney in Kansas City. When people (allegedly) make poor choices, he works to get them the best outcome possible.

He told me that people really don’t like going to jail. They’ll pay obscene amounts of money to avoid going to jail. They’ll even be thrilled to pay obscene amounts of money to avoid going to jail.

They don’t care in the slightest how many hours my old man spends on the case.

As long as the client doesn’t go to jail, they gladly pay his fee.

Translated for social media managers:

Instead of charging based on how much time you spend, charge based on the size of the problem that you’re solving.

Don’t ask, “How many hours will this take?” ask, "What is the value I’m providing?”

It doesn’t matter if it takes 30 seconds or 80 hours. If you know how to solve a problem that makes your client 10 bundles of money, it’s perfectly reasonable to charge 1 bundle of money even if it’s 5X your standard hourly rate.

On the other side of the coin, you shouldn't be charging massive amounts of money unless you’re truly adding value to your clients.

Examples (these are entirely made up, don’t @ me):

• Client: Publisher

  • Goal: Drive traffic to an ad-enabled website

  • Expected Outcome: Doubling traffic

  • Monetary Value of Expected Outcome: $10,000/month

  • You Charge: $2,000 (20% of what you make your client)

• Client: RV Repair Business

  • Goal: More customers

  • Expected Outcome: 50 additional calls/month

  • Monetary Value of Expected Outcome: $12,500/month

  • You Charge: $2,500

Pro tip: Depending on your cost of living and level of experience, you may not want to drop below the $1,000/month mark.

(Adding value doesn’t always mean making more money. Usually it does, but it could also be providing time savings, reducing costs, etc.)

If you’re a freelancer, I’d love for you to reply and tell me how you decide what to charge! It would be fun to highlight some answers in the next email I send.

-Jacob

WORK TOGETHER?

I like helping cool brands and creators scale using social. Send me an email to start the convo!

CREATORS I LIKE

Does this sound familiar?

boss: We should do influencer marketing.

SMM: Awesome! Where should I start?

boss: idk, can you take care of it?

Influur is currently my favorite influencer marketing platform.

I did a paid partnership with them on LinkedIn, but am truly a fan of the platform, so I’m giving them an organic shoutout here too.

Feel free to grab a demo below:

Future Social is one of the first (and best) social media marketing newsletters. Again, completely organic, I really love Jack’s content. Subscribe below:

Hey! You’re still here!

p.s. clicking some of these links costs you nothing, but helps fuel my cold brew habit. I, and Onyx Coffee Lab thank you.