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Social media marketing invoice template for Finance

I don't know about you, but when I first started freelancing, pricing was definitely the thing that prevented me from sending that first proposal that prevented me from launching my website sooner. It was so confusing. How am I sure that I am charging enough and that I'm not overworking myself? How do I know that I'm not charging too much and looking absolutely ridiculous when I send this proposal out? It is still kind of very secretive. I think a lot of people don't talk about money, and that hurts us all to be honest. But that's another story for another day. Today, I want to share what I know about creating freelance packages and charging appropriately for them. This is gonna be slightly specific to social media managers, but regardless of what you do, I think you'll be able to learn something. So let's hop in. Okay. The first thing that you need to do is decide which services you. To offer. I think social media manager, and I'm guilty of this social media manager, is kind of like this catchall term now for anyone who's involved with social media content. And truly there are like so many different roles within that job. There are so many different. Functions of it. So you really need to find your kind of niche, find your sweet spot. And often when we talk about nicheing, we talk about an industry that we like to work with, and that's valid and that's a different, again, it's a different story for a different day, but I think this also can refer to your specific positioning and your specific offer in the market. When I first started freelancing full-time, one of the things that I was really a leader, Social video. You know, I used my video training and my passion for video to create video content that lived on Facebook ads for my clients and Instagram before, like Instagram reels were a thing, so figure out what that's gonna be for you. I think there are three real key functions of social media, or I guess I would say three kind of roles within the role of a social media manager. The first is platform management, which is what we typically think of when we think of social media manager. It's the person who's putting together the content calendar. Scheduling the stuff out, who might be reporting on the results, who might be doing some engagement. The second piece is content creation, which as we all know in 2023, looks very different than when I started in, you know, 20 12, 20 13 ish. Back then I was like, Creating quote graphics, and that was pretty much the extent of my content creation. Posting screenshots on Instagram, like, oh my gosh, those days were so wild today. That stuff doesn't fly. And content creation really is a big piece of the job. And then the last piece is advertising paper perplex. So meta ads. YouTube ads, LinkedIn ads, Twitter ads, et cetera. That is another thing that you can offer. Now, I don't want you to be freaked out by this. You don't have to offer all of those things. In fact, I don't really recommend you offer all of those things, especially if you are not an expert or you know, a, a high performer in those areas. Pick out which ones you are. Pick out where you know you can really help your clients see success. Create those as a package. Maybe you wanna develop your ads experience on the side and offer that in a year or two, but you don't need to offer all those things right now. The point is, write down what you envision your package to look like, what you can actually offer, and then keep it moving. Step two, you want to decide how much you need to earn, and I say need not want because for me, I think that helps. Stay true to my pricing when I am realizing that no, this is like the cost of living. This is, this is what I need to, to survive essentially. Now, of course, I could survive technically on a little bit less, but you do wanna make sure that you are factoring in. Lifestyle expenses and that you are not, um, just charging high enough to be able to sit in a room all day and not ever go out. Not ever have fun, not have cable, not have Netflix. You know, you wanna make sure that your living expenses account for your current lifestyle because if you leave a day job, if you leave a corporate job and you are miserable freelancing because you are just getting by on the absolute bare minimum. business probably isn't gonna succeed cuz you're not gonna like it very much. You're not gonna enjoy your life. And the point of starting a business is to enjoy your life more. At least that's why I did it. But don't just think about those things. You know? You also wanna factor in the cost of tools to actually do your job. Are you going to be using a social media scheduler like Metric Cool, or a graphic design tool like Canva or a video editor, like Final Cut? All of those things you wanna make sure that you're factoring in to how much you need to. to run your business every year. Also, any team members, are you gonna need to hire any freelancers, virtual assistant, a junior social media manager, you know, any, anything like that. Taxes? I'm not an accountant. Talk to one when you first get started, but in general, I think most freelancers tend to save around 20 to 30%. I think 30% is where I would start of their invoices in a tax savings account. So at the end of the year, you are not, you know, scraping. Any amount of money you can to be able to pay that tax bill. So keep that in mind. Figure out what that number is. Get your annual goal written down somewhere. and then move on to step three, which is you wanna decide how many clients you're realistically able to take. Go back to number one, you built out that package. So I'm gonna create the content calendar, I'm going to schedule the content, I'm gonna do engagement, and I'm gonna do reporting, and I'm also gonna be creating original content for one of those platforms. Maybe that's. TikTok. So in your head, you should have an idea of your bandwidth. How many clients can you realistically serve? And do that for every single month. And one way to figure this out is just by working with a mock client or just practicing using your own account. So by the time that I started offering freelance social media management services, I had already done it in the corporate world. And I also had a growing kind of personal brand on YouTube and Instagram. I had a blog and things like that, so I could. Mock things up and pretend to be my own client for a week, and just track my time and do that math to see, okay, for a week's worth of TikTok content, that might take me seven to 10 hours a week. Let's just say. So write that down, do that math, and then compare that with how much you want to work every week. If you only wanna work two days a week, well then you're probably only gonna be able to take on one client if. Willing to work five plus days a week, of course you're gonna have more bandwidth. Also, compare that with, are you looking to hire? Are there any team members? You know, so you gotta do that math for yourself, but come up with that number to figure out about how many clients you can realistically take on. And my advice to you is if you don't have a plan, if you don't have a growth plan to outsource, to bring on more team members to automate stuff. Do not overdo this. I would rather you charge a higher rate to each individual client than to get a ton of new clients in the door and then do a really poor quality job for all of them. I think that's something we all have probably experienced is like that fast growth and realizing. I actually need to let some people go or you're getting a poor, a negative review because you're just not doing that high quality job that you would like to be doing. If you want a number for me, my number, when I was, you know, working by myself with no additional help. Honestly, for me, it was usually around three or four clients was where I felt comfortable. I could probably do five, but usually that at that point I was feeling stressed. I was working a lot of nights, working a lot of weekends. But your workflow could be different and you could be way more efficient than me. Who knows? Okay, so now that you have those numbers, you gotta think about how much these packages are actually going to be. So a good place to start. I know a lot of other coaches. People, content creators advise against this, but I think you've gotta start somewhere. So I use this as a starting point, is the hourly rate method or thinking about how much your, your time is really worth. So let me pull up my calculator here. Let's just say that your package, your, your TikTok package that I just mentioned is gonna take you seven hours per. Times four. That's per month, so that's gonna take you about 28 hours per month, come up with an hourly rate that your time is worth. Again, as a starting point, I would say 50 to a hundred dollars per hour is where I would be targeting as a goal. I think when I first. Started social media management. I was charging about $25 per hour, which I will say was way too low to account for all of those other things that I had mentioned. Taxes and team member, I mean, I definitely didn't have money to pay a team, so I think 25 was too low. And keep in mind, that was several years ago. So let's just say 30 F. Let's say 40 is a starting point. I think 40 is probably. decent starting point. So 28 times 40 would be about $1,100. $1,120, which sounds like a fair starting point. Now the other thing you wanna do though, is you wanna add in value to that mix so tos, like if you are gonna be. In the TikTok, right? If you're gonna be your faces in the TikTok, I'm gonna add a small upcharge, not really small, maybe 10 to 20% onto that just for my likeness and my intellectual property. Because you're giving that away. That brand can use your likeness basically forever. They're owning that content, so don't take that lightly. And definitely for all my U G C creators who are watching, please charge more , charge more, and be sure to be charging for your likeness because you don't. Write that off. Also, some other things that can factor into the value conversation are, are you generating leads for the company? Are you having a direct tie to how much money they're making? Because if you are running Facebook ads and they're lead generation campaigns and you are literally collecting emails and phone numbers for their sales team to call, well, that's extremely valuable. Especially if their service or product is expensive, you know? So if you have the potential to make this company a lot of money, definitely charge for that. Add an upcharge. Don't just use that raw hourly rate calculation. Use that as a starting point always. Then from there, you're just going to reverse engineer your revenue goal. With your package rate and your number of clients that you wanna take on. So let's just pretend that my revenue goal is I wanna make $10,000 per month, and then I want to take on a maximum of five clients. Well, that's $2,000 per month that I need to be charging each client minimum and then cross-check that with the math that we just did. For your hourly rate and your packages if you're finding it's falling short. So I said, you know that TikTok, if I said 1100, what did I say it was 1120. If I add on that 20% surcharge for likeness, That still only has me at 1344. Now, that's probably just for creation of tos. I didn't factor in the time to schedule the TOS and do reporting. So I think realistically that package would easily be $2,000, maybe even $2,500, and then you can start to do more math and have a little bit of fun. So if I do 10,000 divided by 2,500, if I raise that package rate, then that means I only need to take. Four clients as opposed to five. So you can kind of play around with the math, but just knowing in the back of my head, I'm not going to offer a service that's less than $2,000 if I wanna be sure that I'm reaching my revenue goals. And honestly, that's what goes into pricing. I mean, you definitely will want to benchmark this a little bit. Now I leave this to the end because you never want. Have a race to the bottom, and that's what I see a lot of times happening when people look at what their competitors are doing. If I paid attention to what my competitors are doing, I would be given everything away for free, because there's always gonna be somebody, you know, I remember when I first started freelancing, there was this guy who did a lot of local social media and he was charging like $200 a month for his packages. There's no way that. Compete with that, and I did lose clients to that person. And guess what? Those clients always came back and a lot of times I was too booked out with higher paying clients to take them back. So don't go there. Don't get in that race to the bottom, but you will want to just make sure that you are not, you know, extremely high compared to the. The, the median, I guess I could say of your competitors or that you are not extremely low because if everybody else is charging $2,500 for their packages and you're charging 500, it often sends a message about the quality of service. I see that everybody else is charging 2,500. I'm gonna be asking, well, how is it even possible that you're charging this low? So you wanna make sure that you're not undercharging either. Of course, industry I already mentioned, and location too. If you are wanting to. Clients locally, this is gonna be relevant if you don't care so much about local factor, you know, working with people in person or in your geographic area. I don't want you to let geography limit you too much. Obviously different countries have different cost of living and all of that, so that might be relevant. But like for me, I live in the Midwest. If I were to charge Midwest prices only, I would have to charge a lot lower than I actually. Ask for, historically, most of my clients have been not in the Midwest. I actually don't work with a lot of clients who are local to me. A lot of them are in New York or you know, la, California, where the cost of living is a little bit higher. So I'm able to charge a, a premium for my services. So don't let that limit you too much. But of course, if you're looking to work with local businesses than you do have to, uh, you. Again, benchmark and make sure that you were not asking something that is just completely unheard of for your local area. All right, so I've got a free class for social media managers if you wanna check that out. It's a social media starter class that will walk you through everything you need to know to get up and running as a freelance social media manager. I'm gonna leave the link for that below. But otherwise, I hope that this video was helpful. Leave me a comment down below if it was. Be sure to subscribe if you're new here, I post video. Twice a week-ish and I will talk to you in my next one. Bye.