15 Considerations for Hiring a Social Media Marketing Agency

The future of business is social, says Barry Libert.

Jeff Regovin goes a step further by saying: Brands that Ignore Social Media will die. It’s that simple.

Seriously.

No brand can be successful today without an impressive and compelling social media presence.

That said, beware: if you try to go social by yourself, without either a strategy or a social media marketing agency to implement it, bad things can happen, including:

• Followers grow at a snail’s pace.
• Posts are “liked” or shared by few people.
• Updates and posts are few and far between.
• Updates spam your followers’ news feed.
• Poor content spoils your brand image.
• Social media draws few website visitors and sales.

These problems go away by working with an active social media marketer.  You’ll grow your social footprint faster and build a stronger brand.

You’ll also generate more leads and sales for less cost, earning enough money in profits which more than justify your agency’s retainer.

Hiring a good social media agency can be the best business decision you take this year, but what is an excellent social media marketing agency, and what are the activities that make it “good”?

15 Things The Best Social Media Agencies Must Do

Here are 15 things that a professional social media agency must do to be “good”-- transforming your business into a dynamic and engaged social brand.

1. Identify Your Goals

Your social media marketing agency works with you to understand your business and goals. You and your agency will focus on a range of options:

• Growing your community.
• Generating website traffic.
• Launching live events.
• Other actions creating buzz and excitement around your business.

2. Identify Your Audience

One size doesn’t fit all in marketing, and an effective social marketing agency knows it.

Your quality social marketers take the time to understand your target audience and ideal customer personas or avatars.

To achieve your goals, your social media agency delves into your customer research data, previous social media campaigns, and the demographics and interests of your social media followers.

A top social media agency segments your followers and targets each segment with customized messaging.They make sure every update and interaction hits the sweet spot with your followers.

For example, American Eagle employs both behavioral and occasional segmentation to target American voters during the mid-term elections:

3. Decide Branding Elements

Branding is much more than your logo and name. It spans brand attributes and brand voice, which depend on your target audience profile as well as the type of your product or service. Branding also includes

• Optimizing customer experience during all interactions with the brand
• Training your people in brand values and customer service
• Consistency across channels and customer interactions

A professional social media marketer ensures that your branding stays relevant and consistent across all updates and channels.

4. Suggest the Best Channels

If you’re not using any particular channels already (or even if you are), your agency suggests the most promising platforms, keeping in view your business and audience. For example, some social marketers suggest LinkedIn for B2B firms and Facebook for B2C retailers.

Regardless of your business, however, you’ll be in multiple channels during your social media campaigning.

5. Complete Your Social Media Profiles

Image: Starbucks’ social media profiles are comprehensive and compelling.

Your agency creates compelling social media profiles for your business pages on different social media channels. A professional agency uses compelling cover images and writes an impressive brand story for your brand. It optimizes your profile for social media searches and lists your address, phone numbers, website, and more.

6. Create/Curate Great Content

You need to share great content to win on social media.

A competent social media marketing agency builds a content marketing strategy for your brand, keeping your brand attributes and target audience in sight. Then, it employs its human and technological resources to create, curate, and customize engaging content for each of the social media channels you are targeting.

For example, the following Kellogg’s video uses fitness icons along with their Twitter handles to engage a health-conscious female audience.

7. Post Consistent Updates

Consistency is one of the key benefits of working with a social media agency. Your agency must create a content marketing calendar for posting updates on different channels, so that you know the topics of updates and track them.

In the above example, McDonald’s Twitter profile shows 463K tweets. McDonald’s social media team performed consistently well to achieve this number.

8. Post Timely Updates

Social media channels like Twitter and Facebook can tell you when most of your followers are online. Your social media marketing agency considers these timings and posts updates accordingly.

Additionally, a top social media agency also tracks important happenings and posts timely and relevant updates to engage the maximum number of people.

9. Focus on Influencers

A social media influencer is a user who has established credibility in a particular industry.

For example, Fiji Water ran an influencer marketing campaign featuring Danielle Bernstein, and Instagram influencer.

Similarly, the boat shoe brand Sperry worked with more than 100 micro-influencers on Instagram and achieved impressive results at little cost.

Sperry’s social media agency encouraged Instagram micro-influencers to share creative photographs of Sperry Shoes. The company then shared the photos with the influencer’s Instagram @ handle to greatly expand the reach of the post. Here’s the most liked photo from the campaign:

10. Engage Your Audience

User engagement is the best metric to measure the success of your social media marketing. Social media channels are designed to trigger a newsfeed story whenever a user interacts with your post—such as by liking, sharing, or commenting on the post. The more engaging the content, the more stories it creates, expanding the organic reach of your brand.

Your agency must continuously increase your number of followers, post likes, shares, and comments, so that you may expand your organic social reach.

11. Be Very Responsive

A social media marketer responds to people’s comments and complaints and participates in discussions about the topics that are of interest to your audience.

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Microsoft Xbox is the world’s most responsive brand on Twitter, with an average response time of 2 minutes and 42 seconds. They have a dedicated Xbox Support channel on Twitter. Customers can tweet with @xXbox support handle and the company representatives will respond—within 2:42 minutes, statistically speaking!

Xbox is not the only brand offering exceptional customer service through social media. Nike has a support channel too, and they respond fast!

And Starbucks uses Twitter to answer customer questions and glean ideas to improve and evolve their products and services.

12. Use Paid Social Media Advertising

Without advertising, a terrible thing happens.

Nothing!

Contrary to common belief, social media is not free, especially if you want to achieve quick growth and brand recognition. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and other social media channels offer paid advertising to expand the reach of your posts.

Social media advertising enables you to target people on a granular level based on their interests and behavior. Research has shown that social media advertising delivers a lower cost-per-conversion compared to Google Ads.

An experienced social media marketing agency promotes your most engaging content to multiply its reach and make it go viral.

13. Repurpose Content

Creating great content takes time and money. When you create an awesome video, snap some great photos, or write a killer blog post, your agency then repurposes them for different social media channels.

For example, they may transform a blog into several Facebook updates or tweets, clip a video for publishing on Instagram, or create a slideshow from photos.

14. Integrate with Other Channels

Digital marketing makes it possible for small businesses to go cross-channel and compete with the ubiquitous mega-brands.

A good social media agency helps you tap into cross-channel synergies by integrating your marketing across all channels--social media, email, website, blog, and offline channels such as your front desk or retail outlet.

15. Track and Report Results

Doing social media marketing without tracking results is like walking backward in stilettos—you walk slowly and are likely to fall. Another key advantage of working with a top social media marketing agency is that your marketers always keep you in the picture about your progress. You know what’s working, where you are, where you’re going, and how to get there faster.

Conclusion

Success with social media depends on a sound strategy and a competent social media partner to put your plan into action. You must ask your prospective social marketers the services they will deliver and see if they will do everything that a top social media agency must do.

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