Thinking about having a marketing agency help with social media? Make sure you’re prepared. A social media marketing agency might promise you’ll always be on the latest and hottest social media trends—but won’t tell you how much work that takes or how that can actually translate into the goal of marketing: making you money. Today, we’ll review some examples from our agency’s clients and what you can learn from them.
1. Start with a Social Media Marketing Plan
All good marketing needs to start with a marketing plan. Sounds simple, but it also means waiting. This can cause problems with clients who want immediate results, but there’s so much that needs to be done when an agency takes over. A social media marketing plan includes:
- Strategy: Not only what platforms are you on, but what platforms you need to be on. What is the competition doing, and what do you have in your favor? What are the goals of your social media marketing: engagement, lead generation, or community?
- Branding & Voice: Some businesses already have strong branding, others do not. Brand management is essential for consistency and first impressions, and includes everything from how you talk to what your visuals look like.
- Photography: Speaking of visuals, almost all businesses are going to need a photoshoot as part of social media. This is important, so plan for it. Figure out who will be in photos, video, and more, and who can provide content when the agency isn’t there with a camera.
2. You Can’t Plan to Go Viral (But You Can Capitalize on It)
A failure to go viral doesn’t mean bad marketing, and going viral doesn’t mean more business if you fail to market it properly. We’ve seen both: those clients who are trying too hard to chase trends and those clients whose social media regularly explodes with engagement but don’t use it to best serve their business. It’s better to focus on long-term marketing instead of chasing short-term trends and have a plan in place to best use the fame if your content does go viral.
3. Don’t Be the Barrier for Fast-Paced Social Media
If you are looking to collaborate with your marketing agency on trendy social media, you need to avoid being the bottleneck for content. Trends are timely, so you need a production line and to trust your marketing agency. An example of a problematic client:
The client would ask for ideas for Instagram Reels. I would send them over. They would film. They would send it to us for edits. We would edit and review. We would send it to the client for approval. They would approve. And finally, we would schedule.
This produced a content pipeline that was simply too long: by the time content was scheduled, the social media trend had passed. The client was the barrier because they would only start the process when they had time (not when it was timely), and having final approval meant further delays.
4. Remember in Your Marketing Goals
At the end of the day, your marketing needs to exist to make you money. Sometimes this is straightforward direction to a place they can contact sales or make a purchase. Sometimes it’s a softer form of marketing that’s about showing expertise, providing community, and showing up in search engines. Either way, you can’t be doing social media just for engagement and impressions: remember your marketing goals and make sure to track your results.
If your current social media marketing agency isn’t delivering (or you’ve been burned in the past), it’s time to work with an agency that follows these rules. Contact us here at Vision. Want some more tips? Check out our post, Marketing Trends Fail Without Marketing Fundamentals. Also make sure to check out the rest of our Vision blogs, our enVisioning Success podcast, and our downloadable Marketing Strategies Playbook!
