Introduction
A social media marketing agency is an organization that offers social media marketing services to businesses.
These services may include developing and controlling social media accounts, writing and posting content, running social media ads, and more.
Social media marketing services focus on producing high-quality content that is consistent with your brand and appealing to your target audience.
They are skilled in many social media platforms and understand how to use them to your benefit.
Table of Contents
1. What are the Benefits of Working with a Social Media Agency?
An increasing number of businesses decide to outsource their social marketing to social media specialists and social media agencies in order to save time for other tasks.
With the help of a social media agency, you can better position your business as a thought leader by creating content that shows your expertise and knowledge.
Social media specialists know that the best way to increase the organic searches of your company is to create original content that speaks directly to your audience’s needs.
Social media agencies that do social marketing focus on everything from researching the competitive landscape, engaging, and interacting with your customers to planning content releases.
2. 6 Reasons to Hire an Expert Social Media Consultant
a. It is More Cost-effective
It can be quite costly to employ a full team of social media specialists for your business.
Most of the time, new businesses choose to hire one or two people who oversee the social marketing of your company.
However, oftentimes these people also have other responsibilities and they have to work on other marketing-related tasks.
On the other hand, when you hire a social media agency for your business, the team consists of social media specialists who concentrate on every area, from design to creative content writing, to quality video production.
Therefore, a social media agency will help your business to grow quickly and steadily.
The social media specialists will also provide a higher price-value relation thanks to qualified and continuous support on the design of the marketing materials and social media advertising campaigns.
b. More Targeted Campaigns and Accurate Results
Social media agencies that work on social marketing for your business are experts in identifying and researching your target audience.
As this is one of the most crucial phases to developing a successful social media advertising campaign, specialists invest a good amount of resources to understand the behavior, preferences, and interests of your target audience.
This will ensure that they can create the most targeted marketing strategies to maximize the results of your social media advertising.
Furthermore, if you decide to hire a social media agency for the social marketing of your business, you will gain an outside perspective for ways to engage with your audience and to entirely analyze the evolution of your customer base.
Social media agencies use a wide range of tools and techniques from content planning, analytics, social marketing management, and monitoring. The social media specialists ensure the right strategies to help you achieve your marketing goals.
c. Save Valuable Time
Social marketing allows consumers to communicate with their favorite brands in real time.
Consumers expect brands to be constantly updating, sharing and engaging with them on social networks.
Replying after 1 hour will certainly jeopardize the relationship with your customers and could end up in losing them.
As this can demand a considerable amount of time, it is beneficial to allocate this task to a social media agency that has the resources to meet customer demands.
Here is a list of typical daily tasks of social media specialists who work on your social marketing:
Creating content and posting it (blog posts, videos, graphics and other media)
Checking industry-related news
Replying to comments of followers
Researching new influencers to collaborate with
Scheduling posts for the week/month/important dates
Reviewing social marketing analytics
Overall, social media agencies are responsible for developing sound marketing strategies and consistently optimizing social media advertising campaigns.
This entails great responsibility to handle for one person but by giving these tasks to a social media agency, you will ensure that you obtain better results and free up valuable time for your team.
Staying relevant to your posts and responsive to followers' comments is key to having a successful social marketing presence.
d. Work Guided by Best Practices and Latest Trends
By hiring a social media agency for your business, you work with social media specialists who know how to get the most out of your social media advertising.
They implement industry best practices to circumvent the algorithm changes from major platforms like Facebook and Instagram that cause a decline in organic traffic to most companies’ websites.
If you start on your own, then you would first need to get up-to-date with all the best practices from every social marketing channel.
Only then would you know what is worth investing resources into and where not.
Social marketing is more focused on campaigns than ever. That is why specialized social media agencies also have the edge here because they almost exclusively work with social media advertising on these platforms.
The social media specialists implement a wide variety of content, design, and other creative ideas to make your social media advertising stand out from the crowd.
As social media agencies are also always up-to-date with the latest news, they also know how to master the timing and posting of your content on social media when new updates change the algorithm for trending topics providing a chance to produce new content.
Furthermore, by knowing what works best on every platform you will get the most out of your social media advertising budget.
Especially, when structuring your posts, your social media agency applies the best formula that consistently brings back the best results.
e. Testing and Optimizing your Social Media Advertising Campaigns
In order to be successful in social marketing, social media specialists always need to tweak and adapt their social media advertising campaigns.
For example, this can mean adding captions to a video or changing the settings of social media advertising to adjust the marketing-specific goals of the brand.
Conducting these tests, setting them up, tracking the results, and making adjustments can be a lot of work.
It is easy for business owners to misunderstand results or to not focus on testing and optimizing their social media advertising even though it is an essential part of their success.
A typical mistake that business owners make is to think that their performance on social marketing can’t be improved because the results have reached a plateau.
This leads them to not optimize their strategies and leave them as they are, which can make them lose a lot of potential followers and subsequently valuable leads.
That is the benefit of working together with a social media agency because they are constantly optimizing their social media advertising campaigns and looking out to improve their performance.
It can be challenging even for experienced marketers to keep up with the new best practices, ad types, formats, and other options that social marketing platforms regularly introduce for marketers.
Because social media agencies generally work with a variety of different businesses, they have more experience with all the different tools as they have to adapt to every new client.
f. Experience in Dealing with Critical Situations
Social media advertising campaigns that backfire can seriously hurt your company’s brand image. Prevent a marketing fail at all costs.
The chances of that happening are higher when you manage your own social marketing because no one else except for you is working on it.
Even major companies have made mistakes and ended up infringing copyright laws or even got a lawsuit against them.
3. Case Study: When Dove Got It Wrong
For example, when Dove, the beauty product brand, which is known for empowering women put up an ad on Facebook where they showed a black woman transforming into a white woman after using Dove body lotion.
They received a huge backlash for the social media advertising which led to Dove removing the ad from Facebook and apologizing for this mishap.
In case this does happen to you, your social media agency can minimize the damage and de-escalate the situation quickly.
They know exactly what to do in these cases because they have to deal with such situations more often than the average business owner.
4. How to Choose the Right Social Media Agency for Your Business?
It is important to take your time and research which consultant you need or which agency is right for your company.
You'll need to trust your specialists with sensitive company data, and therefore most brands want to feel comfortable that they fit your culture themselves.
Another way to see if you are hiring the right social media consultant is to look at their track record and case studies.
Looking at their specialization can also give you valuable information if they are the right fit for you or if you need to look for an agency with more experience in a specific field.
If they can show clear results from their previous clients and how the agency improved their numbers, that's even better.
Conclusion
Social media agencies are dedicated to getting a brand widely recognized on all social marketing platforms, and to getting your brand talked about among influencers.
Not every individual is aware of social marketing trends and changing techniques.
Often social media agencies propose different packages to fit different needs of businesses because not every company needs all the social marketing services.
It is crucial to do your research before deciding to hire a social media specialist to work for your business to ensure that they fit with your company's culture and that they specialize in the services you need the most.