Tag: Guest Post

Social Media Strategies for Home Professionals

Being a home service professional is a challenging task. Whether you’re a general contractor or an interior decorator, earning and retaining customers is crucial to your success. In the past, most businesses relied on word-of-mouth recommendations to grow, but with the advent of the internet, marketing has long since shifted to the digital era. As a result, your business has probably had to increase its online presence in various ways, and social media has become one of the most effective yet arduous tools for people to come to terms with.
Recent data shows that people spend an average of two hours and 27 minutes per day on social media. Therefore, social media platforms offer an excellent opportunity for home professionals to promote their services and connect with potential clients.
To help you succeed in your social media marketing, we’ve teamed up with some industry experts to produce the ultimate “how to” guide for anyone looking to boost their socials.
Read all about it over at Porch.com

April 13, 2023
Tips To Build A Winning Social Media Strategy For Your Brand

Social Media Tips for your Brand

Social media has established itself as a potent tool for digital marketing. Perhaps the most potent medium for digital marketing today, brands worldwide invest in social media to elevate themselves and be more competitive. Hence, the reason for devising a strategy to use social media effectively.

A social media strategy serves as a guideline in utilising social media’s power to market your brand. It’s a plan ahead of time to ensure that you’re making the best decisions to yield a return on your investment. Managing social media for a brand is a tall mountain to climb, so a strategy is necessary to reach its peak. The competition is stiff between brands around the social media landscape. Also, there are plenty of factors that come into play in attaining success in social media marketing. With that in mind, here are tips to help your brand in building a winning social media strategy.

State your mission and set your goals

Goal-setting is key to any strategy, especially for social media marketing. The goals that
you set to attain are also useful for tracking your strategy’s progress. It will also help
assess your social media efforts’ effectiveness, so you can determine which works and those that aren’t yielding good results.

You can start your goal-setting by focusing on the bigger picture. Once you’ve done that, you can plan the necessary steps to take and the resources you need to achieve them. This involves budgeting and communicating with the right people or groups for
social media services or consulting about your plans.

To reach your high-level social media goals, you can complement them with secondary ones for each social media network. You’ll also need to tailor your approach to each platform, as they all offer different things where your brand can stand out, and user behaviour is also unique to each.

Research on your target audience

The primary reason brands turn to social media is to have diverse ways to reach their
target audience and expand that reach. To develop an excellent social plan to do that, you need to learn more about your target audience. Users will be the ones to judge your content, and different social media platforms cater to different demographics.

You’ll have to know who you’re making content for to create content that speaks to
them. That’s the key to impress in social media and to reach your target audience. If your brand already has a social media presence, you can start using your current
followers for basis.

Creating a buyer persona comes in handy when you’re looking for your potential target audience. It’ll help segment demographics and interests, which will narrow down who you need to reach.

Study your competitors

You can learn plenty of things about social media from your competitors, just like in
business. Look for their social media accounts and see how they’re doing. You may pick
up a thing or two that you can use.

You can also come up with better ideas by looking at their content and engagement rates. Using the top social media brands in your industry as a benchmark can help when you assess your strategy results.

Choose the best social media platform for your brand

There are plenty of social media platforms where you can market your brand, but not all of them may return your investment as excellent as you expect. You need to figure out which channel is best suited for that purpose. To do so, you need to evaluate your following, current and potential, analyse your content’s performance, and understanding each social media channel’s strengths at your disposal.

You should also try exploring other platforms that you can use. There may be greener
pastures outside of the familiar ones that you know.

Setup a content pipeline.

The content that you release on a regular basis will make or break your entire social
media strategy. Producing content for social media is challenging due to the factors in play; thus, you need to set up an organised approach of what to create and when to
release it.

The most effective way to do that is by creating a content calendar. It’s a schedule of
content development and releases that you’ll implement as part of your strategy. The basis of a well-planned content calendar is your objectives and defining the proportion of content that you should dedicate to attain each of them.

Evaluate and adjust as necessary

After you’ve begun implementing your social media strategy, the next thing to do is assess its results. Evaluating it is vital to the success of your efforts. You don’t need to evaluate everything, just the important metrics that affect your objectives.

The insight that you get from your assessment will help in refining your strategy. Things
are continually changing in social media, so you have to learn how and when to make
adjustments.

Final thoughts

With the proper plan, you can win in using social media to expand your brand’s reach
and boost its presence. You just need to devote time and effort to devise your winning
strategy, and your investment will return.

If you need help with your social media strategy, get in touch. We offer a range of social media services for new and existing businesses of all sizes.

Guest post by Edwin Deponte

Edwin Deponte is a motivational writer who is also passionate about anything digital and social media marketing-related. On his free days, he spends his time indulging in digital and social media marketing books.

May 26, 2021
8 Steps for Paying Employees of Small Businesses
If you’re a new business owner, learning how to pay your employees may seem tricky. After all, you can’t just hand them a wad of cash. You need to document every dollar that passes through your hands to theirs in a legal way.
Fortunately, the process isn’t as daunting as it seems.
In this guide, from Hour.ly you’ll learn:
Different types of compensation classifications
How to determine how much to pay an employee
How to pay an employee in a small business
How to pay a worker with a 1099

Different Types of Compensation
There are three primary ways that businesses compensate their employees:
Hourly wages
Fixed annual salary
Commission

Hourly Compensation

Hourly wages are based on an hourly rate. The employee’s pay is determined by how much time they work during a pay period.
For example, you could pay an associate $20 per hour for their work. If they work 80 hours in a pay period, they are owed $1,600.
An hourly wage is ideal for a part-time employee or someone who doesn’t work a consistent schedule, like a restaurant server. Typically, hourly workers are “non-exempt,” which means they qualify for overtime pay.
Salaried Compensation

Salaried employees are paid a fixed annual rate. Each payday they are paid a consistent figure, which is determined by dividing their annual salary by the number of pay periods.
For example, with a $60,000 annual salary and a bi-weekly pay period, an employee will receive $2,307 in pre-tax wages each payday.
Salaries are best for corporate roles in which the employee’s time input is predictable. Salaried employees are typically exempt from receiving overtime pay.
Commission-Based Compensation

You can also pay employees on commission. They would potentially earn a low base rate — which can be hourly or salaried — plus additional pay based on predetermined sales goals.
For example, a marketing person at your company might have a $35,000 base annual salary. On top of that, they also earn a commission based on a percentage of any deals they close.
Commission-based compensation is ideal for marketing & sales roles, as it incentives employees to meet specific goals.
How Much to Pay an Employee

How much you should pay your employees depends on what your competitors are paying for similar roles.
Conduct market research to see what other companies in your field and location pay for the role you’re hiring for, or for the type of work you need to be done.
Online tools like PayScale and Salary crowdsource pay rates from around the country.
How to Pay an Employee as a Small Business

To start paying employees, you’ll need to set up a payroll system.
First, let’s uncover what processing payroll involves. Then, we can explore the best payroll options for small business owners.
1. Collect Paperwork from Your Employees
Have new employees and current employees fill out and submit the relevant tax forms. Available in Australia from the ATO.
If you plan on paying your employees via direct deposit, you will need to request their banking information as well.
2. Calculate Pre-Tax Pay
Determine your employees’ gross pay for the pay period:
Hourly employees: Multiply their hourly rate by the number of hours they worked during the pay period.
Salaried employees: Divide their yearly salary by the number of pay periods in your annual payroll schedule.
Commission employees: Determine their hourly or salaried base pay. Then, add their commission earnings for that pay period, based on your company’s commission structure.

3. Determine Tax Withholding

Refer to the paperwork you collected from employees to calculate how much of their earnings you need to withhold for (pre-tax and post-tax):
Income taxes
State income taxes
Local taxes
FICA (Federal Insurance Contributions Act), which comprises Social Security taxes and Medicare taxes, a.k.a. payroll taxes.
Deductions for benefits such as healthcare, retirement savings plans, flexible spending accounts, and commuter benefits

If applicable, you’ll also want to consider the cost of unemployment insurance, including SUTA (State Unemployment Tax Act) and FUTA (Federal Unemployment Tax Act). Typically, this is not deducted from employees but paid on the employer side.
4. How to Pay an Employee: Calculate Net Pay

You’ve determined your employees’ gross pay and how much to withhold from their paycheck in taxes. Calculate their net pay by subtracting the withheld amount from their gross pay.
For example, if an employee’s gross pay for the pay period is $2,500 and $680 needs to be withheld for taxes, the employee receives a payment of $1,820 on payday.
5. Distribute Paychecks to Your Employees

Now it’s time to pay your employees the net pay they are owed. Checks and direct deposits are the most popular ways to pay an employee.
If you use direct deposit, refer to the bank information your employees gave you. Alternatively, you can have your bank or payroll provider cut checks for employees.
6. File Taxes

You are responsible for paying taxes on behalf of your W-2 employees. Take the portion of the employee’s paycheck that has been withheld (determined in step three) and distribute those funds to the proper places. Specifically, file taxes with the IRS, your state’s tax collection agency, and (if applicable) your municipality’s tax collection agency. Note that some taxes are paid only by the employer.
7. Pay Into Benefits

Not all withheld pay will go to the government. Depending on your company, a portion may go toward employee benefits.
This might include contributions toward:
Health insurance
Retirement
Commuter benefits
Health savings accounts
Flexible spending accounts
If you offer any employee benefits program, make a payment on behalf of your employees into the relevant accounts.
8. Update Payroll Records

You’ll need to keep your payroll records for several years in case of an audit. Keep your payroll register up to date, organized, and accessible. Include information about who got paid, how much they worked, how much they were paid, and what taxes were withheld.
How to Pay an Employee: Best Payroll Solution for Small Businesses

Payroll sounds complicated, doesn’t it? How do small business owners handle it?
Enterprise-level businesses have in-house teams dedicated to paying employees. Small businesses may not be able to afford a payroll specialist or even have enough people on the payroll to warrant the expense.
However, even one-person businesses are responsible for labor law compliance and tax withholding in most cases.
Using payroll software is the best way to pay employees in a small business. It’s cost- and time-effective. In fact, payroll software automates each step of the detailed payroll process we just covered, including distributing payments.
How to Pay a Worker with a 1099

To pay a 1099 worker, simply pay them their gross wages. In other words, follow your normal payroll process but don’t withhold their taxes.
1099 workers technically aren’t employees. They’re considered independent contractors.
Independent contractors are responsible for paying their own payroll taxes. An independent contractor can be classified as such if the person paying for the work (the client) controls the final product or result, but not how the work is done.
So, can you pay a 1099 worker hourly? Yes. You can pay your 1099 contractors an hourly rate or a fixed fee for deliverables.
If a 1099 contractor works 60 hours at $20 per hour, their gross pay or remuneration would be $1200. You would pay the contractor the full $1200. Quarterly tax payments with the IRS and state and local treasuries would be handled by the contractor — not your company.
While you can pay independent contractors a fixed fee, you can not pay them on a salary — otherwise, they’d be considered non-exempt employees and would need to get a W-2 from you.
Can you pay an employee with both a W-2 and a 1099? Yes. For example, let’s say that you own a restaurant. Your employee Amy is both a W-2 and 1099 worker for you.
She works for your restaurant as a full-time manager, for which she gets a W-2. As the manager, she is expected to work at the restaurant and follow the protocol you have set up.
In addition to her role as a manager at the restaurant, Amy also provides graphic design services for menus and advertising. This work would be classified as independent contractor labor.
You, the owner of the restaurant, provide input on how you want the deliverables to look, but Amy is in charge of deciding how to execute your input. She decides when, where, and how she creates the graphics.
If you’re unsure about whether someone is an employee or independent contractor, it’s best to consult legal counsel who can clarify how federal laws from the Department of Labor apply to your company. To avoid any potential lawsuits or legal issues, you need to be sure you are complying with the FLSA when paying your employees.
Final Thoughts: How to Pay an Employee in a Small Business

There’s a lot to know when it comes to paying your staff.
First, you must determine how much they’ll make and how you’ll pay them. Then, you have to determine whether your staffs are W-2 employees or 1099 contractors to figure out whether you are responsible for withholding their taxes. Finally, you must run payroll correctly (and on a regular schedule) to make sure everyone is happy on payday.
This article was contributed by Maddy Osman and originally posted on Hourly.io. Posted with permission.
December 1, 2020