Any small business owners on here?

[Shinypeas]

I’m looking to restart my copywriting and content business and will be aiming it at SMEs /small business owners. So, people who are looking for a bit of publicity and regular content but don’t necessarily have the skills or time todo it themselves. Mainly writing blog articles and press releases, and managing social media posts and campaigns.

can I ask, if you’re the owner of a small business, can I ask if this is something that you would use, and if so, what would you mainly be looking for? And what dort of cost would you be willing to pay a month for say, 2 blog articles?

thanks x

DH and I run a small business. We had someone running our SM accounts (FB/Instagram) for a while - think we paid £90 a month + VAT and this was for a weekly post. We sort of put the blurb together with a photo and they did the rest.

We stopped because in honesty the posts weren't anything that I couldn't do myself.... I didn't get any wow from it, if that makes sense. They improved our viewings/followers but not a lot of them were from the UK and were mainly Indian "influencers" which didn't bring us any business in whatsoever.

Thanks Badger1970. That’s useful to hear. It doesn’t sound as if they were doing an awful lot for the money, if you don’t mind me saying that. One post a week is minimal. If they had got you publicity in local press, would this have been useful do you think?

My writing background is in commercial property, HR and legal services so I was thinking of targeting smallish firms in these sectors.

Our business is quite niche so local press wouldn't be a big advantage to us. And oddly enough, social media doesn't really meet our main client base either which was why we decided just to stick to one large ad per month in a county based lifestyle magazine.

Given your target market, though, social media sounds like it work for them.

I suggest you give these companies a free consult and tell them what you think they need and how you could benefit them. You are the expert after all, this is a growth area, people need to be on it. Your services are enabling management to focus on their core services while you are getting some profile out there. Be open minded about what type of message the client wishes to get out - that is the key really and you are halfway there if you can get that right. With our business, which is a premium service delivered over 10+ years to clients, it is all about keeping our message informative due to changes in financial systems. It is about trust and guidance. We are paying a retainer of £12,000 per annum for typically 2-3 industry or interest group articles / releases and 1-2 blogs and 1-2 new website articles each month. They are technical so we write them in a bullet or case sturdy style, but need someone to hone the message. I would guess there is somewhere between 45-60 hours worked by out consultant per annum, but we do not check up on the hours, we just give a budget and ask for fair work in return. We are not interested in trying to equate the content created to sales. It is actually impossible to do that and it is more about feeling the right projection.

I pay a freelance sales and marketing consultant £25 per hour and she works around 10 hours a month but about half of that would be what you're describing and the rest is sales and prospecting. So £400-£500 a month.

However, what I would suggest is that you make more of your social media skills / knowledge as 'good copy' isn't how you succeed in social marketing - it's a very dark art and manipulating the algorithms is the aim.

Building engagement / followers etc is a very different skill to being able to write interesting / informative articles.

So when marketing your services, make sure you're telling people how you can offer them the whole package.

Thanks TargusEasting and FusionChefGeoff.

Good idea about the free consultation.
i’m more on the content side than social media, ex-journo and PR with many years of comms experience, but I think SM is seen as where the value is ie: not many people know how to build or grow a social network (or don’t have time to do that), or run digital campaigns.
Maybe I need to focus more on that…