An Agency’s 3 Tips for Scaling Small Business Services

“We’re saving so much time and money without lessening our offering”

Too many agencies are bogged down with manual tasks that aren’t scalable and end up draining their staff’s valuable time and resources.

Take Pronto Marketing, for example. When the agency expanded their services to include social media they quickly realized they needed scalable processes. With over 1000 small business clients, their team needed to dedicate a lot of resources to manual work such as managing processes, creating reports, and managing hundreds of different social media accounts.

Today, Pronto monitors and publishes content for over 300 clients, making sure each brand has an active presence.

At first, Tim Kelsey, the Director of Client Marketing Services and his small team of three used to login to 150 different Hootsuite free accounts to manually track, share, and pull reports. This method took so much valuable and billable time away from other client services to just share a few social posts. As more clients wanted representation on social media, they needed help scaling.

3 tips for scaling small business services across social media:

1. Consolidate efforts

The first step to success was to get organized. With the help of Hootsuite Customer Success, Kelsey transferred over all of the 150 individual accounts and added the additional clients into the fold. Setting up a Hootsuite Organization with Teams, permissions, and assignments allowed them to start collaborating effectively and efficiently from one dashboard.

2. Train your staff to sell expertise

Hootsuite University training and educational videos armed the team with the knowledge, skills, and confidence to manage the sheer scale of listening and sharing. As an agency, Pronto Marketing’s in the business of building and selling their expertise, so having an easily accessible channel where agents can become Hootsuite and social media experts is huge.

“Training videos explained aspects of Hootsuite that would have been complicated and time consuming to learn on our own,” says Kelsey. “The lectures have helped me train new team members to get them quickly up to speed.”

3. Spend less time on manual reports and scheduling

From there, they allocated one Hootsuite Tab per client, wherein they can monitor that client’s social profiles, @mentions, and relevant keyword searches to monitor for shareable content. This way, the team can work together to listen across hundreds of social profiles for any new activity and assign messages that require a response.

Pronto uses this same workflow today to search for relevant content for each client. While Kelsey’s team monitors social media activity on a daily basis, they’ll often catch great content that would resonate with a client’s target audience. By keeping track of this, once a month the team uses Hootsuite Bulk Scheduler to upload and schedule up to 50 pieces of content at a time for up to 350 cumulative messages across any social profile. This allows them to spend an allotted time every month scheduling out content that will fill each client’s social feed, every day.

“Every month, we have to schedule dozens of posts with trackable links for hundreds of clients,” says Kelsey. “Without Hootsuite Bulk Scheduler this wouldn’t be possible, let alone quick and efficient. In fact, I couldn’t imagine doing any of what we do without Hootsuite.”

Final takeaways

The biggest solutions that Hootsuite provides Pronto is scalability and time saved. They first launched their social media program with only a few clients enrolled. Now they’re managing over 300 clients with the same sized team, but more effectively and efficiently than ever before. This level of scalability makes the social media program very cost effective for the company, allowing them to pass on savings to clients without diminishing the value of services they provide.

Pronto Marketing uses Hootsuite Analytics to provide basic reports to each client every month. For a small business owner who doesn’t have the time, resources, or know-how for social media, having active brand presence on social is essential. Not only does this help them reach greater and new audiences, but it drives SEO and ultimately brings more business through the door.

Download Pronto Marketing’s case study to learn more

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