Social media/Audio question that needs a strategy

We have a client, which is a rather successful business offering large and small companies all over the world a creative service that is provided by contractors who have creative skills that we use to fulfill the needs of our client’s marketing projects.

We want to push forward with a robust social media campaign, however we have plenty of contractors and at this time need to engage with more clients to keep the workflow growing at a steady pace. Our goal is to socialize with more potential clients who need the creative services of our contractors without directly engaging our contractors with the clients…hence, cutting us out of the business equation.

My question is how we might use our social media outlets to gather more leads in the industry, without giving away our leads to the contractors who provide our content/service? For example, if our company offered graphic design solutions for large marketing firms, what would be a social media strategy to connect with more marketing firms without directly promoting our services in a way that would allow the graphic designers we hire to go directly to the marketing companies we are targeting to get more business? Or the marketing companies we service to go directly to the graphic designers we hire?

We love the idea of social media, however don’t want to be cut out of the equation of offering a service we have developed over decades and feel like we provide many personal touches that are unequal to what our contractors could provide without our knowledge of the industry.

For some clients, this won’t ever work (and some contractors). I think to start with you need to be willing to accept some loss - the people who want the cheapest most direct solution possible.

In your situation, a lot of your clients may well be paying for your service. You deal with the tech people. You deal with the arts people. You deal with the deadlines and the emailing and the fine touches. They just talk to you. That’s a service, to some clients - and to the penny pinchers, it’s just an inconvenient expense. Focus on the ones who want you, and market those wants.

Another potential solution is to have contractors sign a very loose noncompete or something that states they won’t fight you for jobs. You’d need to be very careful about that, though. When I was freelance developing, if handed a noncompete, I normally simply turned them down and walked away. It’d need to be very carefully worded to not restrict your contractors and alienate them, and even then, still risky.

If it was me I’d focus on figuring out what you really offer the clients, and why, and then figure out what markets / people / businesses that might value that to start connecting with, and the target market won’t leave you to work directly with a contractor.

Ideas

  • Customer service
  • Dealing with technical problems for them (graphics, design, etc are quite complicated sometimes)
  • Continuity - your service will continue to provide for them even if contractors come, go, open, and close
  • Etc

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