How To Choose The Right Social Media Marketing Agency

Why am I not getting more followers?
Why am I not getting more comments?
How should I measure my social media ROI?

If you've had these questions pop up recently, then maybe it's time to hire a social media marketing agency.

It's quite common these days to have an agency manage one or more parts of your social media landscape.

Some of the most popular brands on social media go the route of outsourcing their social media marketing to an agency.

The benefits of having an agency take care of your social media needs are endless.

From basic stuff such as content creation, community engagement, running campaigns, etc, to more advanced things such as ROI analysis, competitor analysis, sentiment tracking, lead generation, etc.

Hiring a social media marketing agency also allows you to focus on other important areas of your business.

But choose the right social media marketing agency that fits your requirements & budget is not an easy task.

In the article, we have outlined the factors to consider before hiring a social media marketing agency. Identifying the unerring agency for your brand is crucial to scale success in business.

You can scroll through the article or can click on the segments.

• Understand Why You Need A Social Media Marketing Agency
• Advantages Of A Hiring Social Media Agency
• How To Choose The Right Social Agency
• Statusbrew For Social Media Management

Understand Why You Need A Social Marketing Agency

Has your brand reached the point where managing social media in-house is difficult?

Or does your social media strategy fail to give the desired results?

Switching to a social media marketing agency can help your brand to achieve your goals. But to get the most out of the agency's services, set priorities, check your resources, and analyze your current social campaign performance.

When you know where to put the effort & where to invest your money, it results in augmentation of brand sales, brand visibility & generating leads through social media.

Consider the following points as the basic guidelines to analyze the needs to hire the right social agency:

Why Are You Looking For A Social Agency?

To choose the right social agency that works best for your corporation, you need to explore all the possibilities and analyze your requirements.

You should ask yourself a few questition and prepare a list of needs to get the most from hiring a social media marketing agency:

• Ask yourself if you need an agency to create content on regular basis or running campaigns. If your in-house resources are exhausted to meet your goals; which channels are you targeting; how many posts do you need in a day?

• Analyze if you want to hire an agency as an expert who can help to plan your upcoming campaign. Communicate with your team if you are struggling with engagement on posts or if your social ROI is less despite putting in considerable time and money.

Image Source: Influencer Marketing Hub Instagram

Answers to these questions will help you get an idea of why you need to hire a social media marketing agency. Also, agency will help you get your current internal scenario of the brand & you can determine the scope of work for the outsourced social media agency.

What Are Your KPIs?

Before hiring an agency for your brand, check out your present KPIs. The basic KPIs you should look for are:

• Website Traffic

This is a general way to measure the effectiveness of your online presence. Analyzing website traffic becomes comprehensive with the growth of digital marketing agencies. Metrics like bounce rate or users' time on a page depict the user's behavior.

• Growth On Social

Get the report of how many followers you have gained in your social profiles. You can track the insight available on different social media channels like Facebook & Instagram; you can measure collective growth through Statusbrew.

• Reach & Impression

Monitor reach & impression of your content. Reach denotes the total number of viewers who choose to see your content & engage with it. Impression indicates the number of times content is displayed; or delivered on users' feed. Reach tally the clicks on your content; impression measures your content's exposure.

• Engagement

Measure your brand's social media engagement. Check out for likes, comments, reshare, tags, and mentions. Monitor if your social media engagement is increasing or is it helping in generating leads.

Make Sure To Do A Competitive Analysis

Make sure to analyze your competitors before hiring a social media agency. Before you plan anything, it is recommended to analyze your competitors' actions and how they are performing in the market.

• You can do a google search or can use tools like Google Analytics or SEMrush. Dig deep into the keywords or the industry terms or phrases and check who's name is on the top lists.

• Check out competitors social media channels and monitor what is their social media strategy; and analyze what is working for them. Find out what your contemporary rivals are posting on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, other social media channels.

Image Source: Digital Silk Instagram

• Look for the engagements, shares, likes they are getting on their posts, what trend they are following. Create a summary and compare it with your competitors social media efforts.

• Conclude and think where you need expert support and how hiring a social agency can give you more visibility or growth.

To check out your engagement or how your customers are perceiving your brand, you can rely on the Statusbrew Engagement tool. With Statusbrew's Engagement Reports, you can analyze how many comments, likes and messages you're getting & identify the gaps to create a smooth social media workflow.

It enables you to identify inbound conversation volume across different networks & fine-tune your engagement strategies. You can visualize data and track trends through the Statusbrew engagement feature.

What Are You Looking In A Social Agency?

Right from content designing or analyzing engagement to providing social media analytics, agencies offer an array of services.

From sharing dazzling content on your Instagram feed to creating a social media campaign on Facebook to sharing updates on your Twitter feed, social agencies can significantly increase the visibility of your profiles.

Prioritize your goals and decide what type of social media marketing agency or services you are looking for.

Image Source: Ignite Visibility Instagram

Consider Your Budget

It depends on your brand's requirements what service packages you want to choose.
List the services you are looking for in a social media marketing agency.

Communicate with your teammates and discuss the budget you want to invest on social agency hiring.

Agencies offer different packages based on the services included in the package.

Understand the scope of the work you require, analyze the market prices, and accordingly set your budget.

Advantages Of Hiring Social Media Agency

To stay on top of the social media game, you need a steady flow of posts and other exciting content that will keep your clients, followers, and supporters hooked; or they may quickly lose interest.

Social media marketing agencies help you to fill that void. The right social media agency seeds interest in your followers and encourages them to enter your brand's sales funnel. They prepare market driven social media strategy for brands to impact growth of your revenue models.

Check out the benefits of hiring a social media marketing agency for your organization:

Expertise & Precision

Building a result-oriented social media strategy requires precision and expertise. Agencies have a specialist workforce who have practical knowledge & they can help you with data-driven insight to grow your business.

The expert professionals work together with you to create a cohesive, consistent & attractive brand identity.

A dedicated social agency is well aware of current trends & the social media landscape. They ensure that your content is up to date and applies the latest tools & technology.

Before creating a social media strategy for you, they analyze your brand's audience. A social agency goes in-depth into understanding your audience's demography and their social media behavior.

Image Source: Weber Shandwick Instagram

With the amalgamation of their expert team and different social media tools like Statusbrew, they proactively work towards creating your brand visibility & awareness.

They streamline your marketing process, enhancing your daily operation as well as business development initiatives.

Access To Resources

Social agency use & have access to social media marketing tools like Statusbrew. Statusbrew give them access to features like Compose that is time efficient and user friendly.

It simplifies the agency's content publishing and also helps to maintain consistency across prominent social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, & Google My Business.

Utilizing Statusbrew features such as scheduling and sentiment analysis, agencies create excellent social campaigns that produce results.

As a brand, your in-house resources may part away from the fast-changing trends of social media like new updates on social platforms, changes in social media algorithms, or new software.

But with access to the updated paid resources, agencies easily cope with the scenario, delivering you the most market-driven updated version of social campaigns.

Image Source: Influencer Marketing Hub Facebook

Hiring a social media marketing agency helps your brand with time-sensitive content as well. They have expert knowledge in using various tools that are instrumental in drawing sales to your business & the workforce is well trained to use the tools efficiently.

You save money in expensive yet significant scheduling and analytical tools, image libraries or content software or reporting platforms, and customer relationship management (CRM).

Learn More: The Ultimate Guide To Social Media For Marketing Agencies

Boost Sales & Enhance Growth

Hiring a social agency boosts your revenue by helping you to generate leads through enhancing social media engagement. From Facebook to Twitter, Instagram to Pinterest, each social media channel differs from the other.

Agencies provide you with targeted & engaging content to excite your customers over different channels. Experts in the agency curate strategy understanding channel's audience demographic, maximizing view, interactions & click-through.

It saves your time, and you can invest the time in implementing a comprehensive marketing strategy offline or work on the core of your business.

Customized Services

Social agencies offer services with customized packages. After prioritizing your goals, communicate with the agencies to understand the customized services.

Your brand's social media success lies in branding your business aptly. A haphazard or inconsistent effort is harmful to your brand image.

You can connect to the agencies and communicate with them what you're looking for to enhance your social media game, a plethora of agencies are in the market, and you can customize their services exclusively for your enterprise or brand.

You can get tailor-made solutions for your requirements, and it provides you a sense of satisfaction.

How To Choose The Right Social Agency

In today's world,you must venture into social media to connect with your existing customers, attract more customers, essentially expanding your business.

"You snooze, you lose" is a saying that perfectly fits this world.

As it is evident, social media is a fast-paced, opportunist entity, which means that you need to act fast to attract peoples' attention, and there is always someone ready to take your place if you happen to falter.

You may feel the pressure to handle the business while simultaneously handling your social media presence. To save you from this very trouble, there are social media marketing agencies.

There are marketing agencies that have been serving clients for a long time, along with several agencies coming up each day.

But finding the perfect social media marketing agency for you is sometimes challenging based on your requirements.

So, here we talk about some of the basic things that you should consider while selecting your agency:

Check Out Credentials & Customer Reviews

Credentials, here, essentially mean the operation of the marketing agencies, i.e., the services they provide, the connections they have. All agencies have their unique manner of functioning and a set of services they provide.

For example, some agencies provide content designing & planning & advertising services across all the prominent social media; some provide services like comment management, enhancing engagement, social media management.

Image Source: Humble Digital Agency

Checking out the credentials will let you narrow down the agencies you want to approach based on your requirements.

Communicate with the agency and set up demo sessions to know more about them or how they can help your brand.

To get the proper credentials and know about the agency, you need to ask a few questions. Find answers to the questions like:

• What their niche is & what kind of social agency they are?

• Ask them about the case studies of previous clients or how the agency measures & monitors the success of a social media campaign.

• Does the agency have any experience in your industry or similar business?

• You can also ask if they outsource their work or if the agency can provide you strategic direction.

Once you narrow down the agencies you want to approach, you should next look for customer reviews. Customer reviews tell you a lot about a given agency or of anything for that matter. You will come to know about their quality of work, efficiency, and effectiveness from customers.

Image Source: Ogilvy Twitter

Check out their social media pages or Linkedin profile, do not tempt over the high number of fan following, to get the clear image check out the engagement, comments & conversations.

Monitor the bio section of the profiles to know the agency's strength, walk through the feed post and timelines to know about the skill set agency's workforce encompasses.

Do A Research On Value Proposition

Ensure to do market research to get a clear value proposition statement,i.e., relevancy, quantified value and differentiation.

These elements will give you an idea about how a social media marketing agency can solve your brand's issue & enhance your brand image, the special stages of the agency's service & why their services are better than their competitors.

Hop over their Facebook, Instagram profiles and check how successfully they are presenting their work on social media, how professional & organized the profiles are.

Image Source: FTI Instagram

Wherever in doubt, set up an interview with the agency, or you can reach out to your referral network.

Look Out For Cost-Efficiency

When you visit the website of any good agency, you will find a header that lets you ask for a quotation based on your requirements.

Image Source: Ignite Visibility

Look at the breakdown of costs, and then decide if it is feasible for you. It is advisable for you to ask for quotations from several agencies and then tally them against each other. This should help you to find the agency best suited for you.

Now, you may find the best, cost-efficient social media marketing agency for your business. Even after that, you may be having trouble coordinating with your agency. During the demo session, you can ask questions like:

• How do you set up the price structure?

• What is your hourly rate?

• Do you offer service packages?

• Are there any adjacent services with the packages?

• Do you offer customized service packages for brands?

• Do you have any discount policy?

Social Media Tools Agency Use

To hire the right social media marketing agency as per your needs, ask the agency what social media tools they use to make social media trackable and time-efficient; how do they maintain consistency to enhance reach & impression and to increase your brand visibility.

Agency's using Statusbrew content calendar successfully can schedule content for special days or events up to one month in advance. The scheduling feature enables the agencies to schedule the content at the best times when your followers are most active.

Social Agency's using the social media tools amplifies the social media efforts, which are visible in clients revenue-generation & social media growth.

Social media tools are crucial for an agency to give the customer strategic direction in boosting sales, conducting market research & creating brand awareness, or establishing a successful communication with the client.

Image Source: Dialogue

Communication Is The Key

Consider the communication process of the agency, how quickly they respond to your query or if the agency has a dedicated customer service team to follow up your needs & requirements. Follow up if the agency's customer service team can efficiently understand your need and requirements.

Top agency's weave an organised process for communication so that clients can reach out to them easily if any problem arises.

The customer service team diligently checks out messages or emails or takes calls, or sets up demos with the client to streamline the workflow.

Through the professional discussion handle you can convey your suggestions. The right social media agency includes you in making decisions together as a team.

With organized customer service, they also respond to the clients quickly. You can expect the right agency to interact with you to build your brand together, consistently & collaboratively.

While you hire a social media agency, set S.M.A.R.T. goals to achieve,i.e., specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, & timely results. Also, it is important to share relevant expectations with them so that the agency can clearly understand what you are looking for and plan strategy accordingly.

For example, during demo sessions, share your documented content strategy, including a newsletter or blog. This is crucial because the social agency will be required to align with your workflow.

• Also, share with them if you have brand guidelines to help them understand your brand's tone or cohesive designs.

• Share the correct information and empower the agency with the necessary data to achieve your desired result.

Statusbrew For Social Media Management

If you're doing your social media in-house but struggle to manage everything. Using a managed platform such as Statusbrew can be a lifesaver.

With Statusbrew, you can bring your publishing, engagement, reporting across social media networks to a single dashboard.

• With a single click, schedule or publish content across multiple social networks.

• Get all your comments, ad comments, reviews from across social delivered in a single place.

• Analyze the volume and sentiment behind your brand's social performance with Statusbrew Reports and there's automation to help you get things done a lot faster.

Start a free trial and see how Statusbrew can change the way you do social.

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Statusbrew makes your social media efforts visible across all prominent social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube & Google My Business.