Work with social media agencies and take your business to new heights
A study in the UK found that 38% of small businesses outsource their marketing needs.
Outsourcing marketing can be more cost-effective than hiring in-house marketers, without the hiring process and investment of time & resources. Working with an agency also means you have access to a wide pool of talent that can cater to all your marketing needs but you need to invest time into figuring out a solid marketing strategy first.
Learn how to work efficiently with a social media agency to get the best results. The first thing to know is that you shouldn’t see marketing as an expense but an investment – it can yield excellent results if done correctly.
After all, what good is a product that no one knows about?
Table of Contents
What do social media agencies do?
While a full-service agency does pretty much everything marketing related, from media buying & TV advertising to graphic design, social media agencies are much more niche as they focus on pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and content marketing through social media.
As there’s been a huge decline in results from organic marketing, most social media agencies have turned to paid advertising as a more effective medium that’s also easier to track results from. Many marketers have speculated that the ever-changing advertising algorithms are a bid to secure more “pay-to-play” customers.
Most of the tasks that social media agencies carry out include; content marketing, PPC advertising and personal branding.
PPC advertising may include specific channels such as Facebook and Instagram but can also include Search Engine Marketing, via platforms such as Googe & Bing. The top advertising channels are Google and Facebook but there are agencies that also focus on TikTok & Snapchat, especially for targeting Millenial or Gen Z users. LinkedIn is a great advertising channel for B2B based companies and Quora advertising can work well for targeting specific questions that users are searching.
Source; https://www.broadbandsearch.net/
Do I need a social media agency?
Ask yourself the following;
Do I need more sales?
Do I want a larger online following?
Do I have profit to reinvest in marketing?
What’s my average order value?
Am I in a very niche space?
1 to 3: This means you should definitely try social media marketing for a short while.
4: Usually, if a product or service has an average order value of over £1,000, you may need a salesman/business development manager instead. People don’t generally buy high ticket items in the first instance of seeing them, although remarketing several times to the same user can work.
If you’ve got low ticket items/solutions, these may be a better fit for online marketing.
5: The tighter the niche, the less likely an agency will understand your target audience & product. You may need to consider hiring an in-house marketer instead but it’s worth finding agencies through platforms like WorkWyse that target based on industry focus.
Full-service or specialist social media agency?
See how strong their social media work is by going through previous case studies. Some full-service agencies are very strong in social media marketing so don’t be quick to discount them because they don’t specialise in it.
Some social media agencies are very effective at analysing data & creating channel-specific ads. If you’re selling products, you might need some graphic design work also to really help them stand out.
Ultimately, there isn’t a definitive answer for this as it all depends. In our experience, we’ve worked with full-service agencies as well as social media agencies and have found both to be very effective.
If you’ve got a few more bucks then going down the omnichannel approach (multiple marketing channels) may require a full-service agency. This ensures that the agency can work on branding to make sure it’s just as powerful as your targeting & messaging.
Should I work with social media agencies?
Brand Identity
Brands with interesting stories to tell should definitely leverage social media marketing. Although your brand’s history may seem mundane to you, a clever copywriter can turn it into a well-crafted story that bolsters your brand identity.
This helps your brand seem more relatable to the average Joe & Josephine, even more so when you add in your personal reasons as to why you started.
The “because” is a highly powerful reason for people to buy into your brand.
Humanise your brand!
Real-world users don’t respond well to jargon, unless your target market is highly specialised and can only be reached with specific wording. If this isn’t the case, your content shouldn’t consist of phrases like ‘synergistic digital transformation solutions’.
Social media agencies are able to give your brand the human element it needs so it doesn’t sound like a cold and heartless corporation.
New Business
For businesses that have a relatively poor online presence, social media agencies can really bridge the gap between you and your target market and making your brand more accessible. The majority of social media efforts carried out are to turn visitors into prospects, and after all, if your conversion rate stays the same – more visitors can mean more business.
Many social media marketers work hard on defining your value proposition – the reason that this is so important is that it helps you speak to your audience with absolute clarity. Being able to hook your audience in with your messaging and branding is most of the work leading up to a sale.
There’s a reason you delete some emails without opening them and it’s usually down to the subject line. If it’s compelling enough, you’ll take a peek because you feel it’s worth your time. This is the same for adverts, landing pages and pretty much anything on social media.
With a host of tools at their disposal, social media agencies can quickly track a visitors user journey from the point of entry all the way to their exit. This helps you understand why they decided to leave or to buy. Assuming your targeting is correct, it’s an extremely agile approach to iterating on your marketing to get the best outcome.
Conversion Rate Optimisation
This is an overused term nowadays but it simply means turning more clicks into conversions.
It’s not worth getting bogged down by minor details like slight colour changes to buttons in the hopes of getting more conversions – these small changes make a significant impact on a very large number of users.
The main thing to work on here is the messaging.
Are your ads click-bait? Do they lead users to your landing pages where they don’t want to be?
Keep your messaging crystal clear and hyper-focused. Send users through to landing pages with single CTAs (call to action) are better for products or solutions that require a bit of “hand-holding”, even more so for novel/brand new solutions.
You may be stubborn in keeping your social media marketing in-house but you might not be able to impartially look at your messaging; this is why social media agencies are much better at crafting adverts.
They’ve got the right amount of understanding to simplify your messaging and tug at the right psychological strands that drive behaviour.
Sending your users through lots of web pages to get to their destination can severely impact your conversion rate, although there’s no ideal number of clicks users should go through, you can at least try to remove as much “click-friction” to get users from A to B efficiently.
Competitive Analysis
Social media agencies are highly skilled at working with competitive industries.
While you may understand your direct competition well, they’ll be able to look at indirect competitors that you could learn from or leverage in some way. Whether through keyword targeting or copying high performing messaging or ads, it can give your business new growth with very little effort.
Reaching Targets
An in-house marketer may have lots of tasks that don’t necessarily aid in reaching your growth targets, whereas a social media agency is able to focus on deliverables with no distractions.
By outsourcing time-consuming tasks to a social agency, you can use your internal resources to focus on your business instead.
Pros and Cons of Working with Social Media Agencies;
Pros –
- Can be cost-effective (no training or hiring needed).
- Flexible & easier to trial.
- Access to a wide skillset.
- Access to a wide range of experience.
Cons –
- Difficult for niche industries.
- Possible learning curve needed.
- Limited to a certain amount of time every month.
For businesses in the UK, especially around London, we’ve curated some of the finest social media agencies for you to outsource your marketing to.
By posting a request, you can get matched to social media marketing experts based on your location, budget, timeframe and industry.
