How to Pick a Social Media Agency for Your Business?

by First Launch on Tuesday Sep 28

How to Choose the Best Social Media Agency?

There are a lot of things that you should keep in mind when you pick any digital marketing agency to promote your business. The best way to do this is by integrating them into your team. This makes communication across departments easier, paving the way for better work getting done.

Here are some things to look out for when you pick a social media agency –

Specialization in Social Media

It’s always considered best practice to hire a social media agency that provides as many services as possible, as the chances of miscommunication are lesser and will cost considerably less. Of course, some digital marketing agencies may be good at many things, but hiring social media specialists is generally better. Let’s take a look at Web design and UX. Some agencies focus on the creative side of things, while others focus on the user experience side. Ideally, you want a good mix of both in order to grow your audience. After all, creativity will mean nothing without being paired with functionality. Check if the digital agency has a strong internal marketing team if you have a complex website to build. You don’t want to risk them outsourcing it and coming up with unsatisfactory results.

When we look at SEO, it’s dependent on high-quality content and the use of keywords that have a high probability of people searching for them with respect to relevance to your website. SEO works best when social media agencies have dedicated teams who specialise in it, and the content aspect works best when your in-house digital and marketing agency teams are on the same page.

Content marketing is highly dependent on specifics, and it’s better if the social media agency handles your email marketing and digital strategy because they are all interdependent on each other for lead generation.

Having a dedicated team to handle PPC with in-house expertise to write ad copies, creatives, landing page messages etc., to bring everything together and run it is a hard task and something that should be considered when hiring a social media agency.

Even when a social media agency swears that they have an in-house team for all these things, look at referrals, portfolios etc., before making your choice.

Testimonials, Case Studies & Reviews of the Social Media Agency

A happy customer means a well-run business, the biggest indicator for choosing a social media agency. Of course, sometimes agencies can’t market themselves because they are busy serving their current roster, but even they should be able to provide proof. Make sure to check out their success stories, testimonials and milestones.

The character of any Social Media Agency

As much as social media agencies bring in great ROI for their clients, some agencies adhere to unprofessional practices in the industry. Some things to look out for when you reach out to an agency are:

• If they try to explain something to you without telling you exactly what you are getting?
• How are they going about things strategically?
• Are they trying to get you settled into an internal software that will make you grow dependent on them?
• Do the reviews about them online. Besides highlighting their work, values and ethics speak volumes about any business.

Social Media Strategy

A good social media marketing agency should handle KPIs and metrics well. This is imperative in order to generate leads and accomplish the goals set out during the marketing effort. Strategy becomes the basis of all marketing efforts. The agency you pick needs to be able to pick up your existing strategy and give additional value to it. It’s all about meeting the demands that your business generates and having a strategy that promotes growth.

Pricing

You should always look for value add when you are looking for agencies. You must be wary when an agency prices social media management and marketing at the same rates. This is because managing social media accounts and tracking can’t be compared to strategizing new ideas to generate leads and bring in new business.

Just like there are many things you need to look out for a while picking a marketing agency, there are some things that you don’t need to worry about when picking an agency.

Experience

Experience in an industry is something that doesn’t matter as much as most people think. Of course, it’s a comfort to the client, and some industries have strict advertising policies for the Healthcare sector. Still, any good agency will be well aware of what they are getting in before entering a new industry. Besides, in design, industry experience is not relevant in most cases.

Similarly, if a social media agency has a highly technical team that has already worked on highly detailed projects but hasn’t worked on a very specific detail, you need to be done. Then you probably don’t need to worry about it as much because their team will probably figure it out without much trouble.

Ideally, an social media marketing agency should be focused on ROI, KPI and other metrics that help your company grow. Because as much as creativity is important in this line of business, a beautiful website is still a poor investment if it doesn’t generate enough leads. Also, different industries have different needs. An educational institution will have a very different need than other businesses. Similarly, you may have seen beautifully crafted email campaigns and landing pages fail to generate interest because they weren’t strategized.

Conclusion

As marketers, we all love well-designed content and websites, but at the end of the day, if they don’t provide results, the marketing effort is deemed redundant. So while picking a social media agency, remember that clear strategy and planning are the only way forward, not flashy campaigns (unless there is a need for it).

Check out our digital marketing blog to catch up on more marketing content.

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