How to Hire a Social Media Marketing Agency: Everything You Need to Know
Originally published on Vulpine Interactive
Bravo!
The time has come where marketing can no longer take a back seat and you’ve decided that it is finally the right time to invest in social media.
But… you are no marketing expert.
You don’t have time for posting schedules and counting retweets.
The whole “doing social media” thing is so ludicrous that you’re not even sure where to start.
So, you’ve been scouring the net trying to learn all you can about hiring and working with a social media marketing agency, and figuring out if hiring an agency is the correct path for your business.
And we applaud you.
Researching your options is always a good start, and that being said, hiring an agency might not even be the best way for you to grow your business.
That’s what this post is for: to give you the full rundown on the process of choosing whether to hire an agency, and what to expect from them if you do decide to go down that road.
What is a Social Media Marketing Agency?
Before you can come to a conclusion about which agency (if any) to hire, you should probably know the basics.
Different Types of Marketing Agencies
Agencies come in all shapes, types, and sizes, all with nuanced service offerings and pricing structures.
Figuring out the best fit for you will depend 100% on your business, industry, goals, budget and company structure.
Since we always say that social media is the last optimization, at Vulpine, we prefer to work with small to medium-sized companies who already have product / market fit and a proven, working business model.
But, other types of agencies may prefer to work with startups, and others might focus on enterprise-level companies or may only work with brands in certain verticals / industries.
But that’s only the tip of the iceberg…
Some marketing agencies will be full-service digital marketing solutions, while others may only focus on one thing: PR for example.
Before you begin narrowing down the options, decide what your marketing goals are, what type of agency you may be looking to hire, and which services you believe are must-haves for right now, and in the future.
What Does a Social Media Company Do?
If you’ve decided that Social Media Marketing is a must-have service, you’ll need to understand what a social media marketing agency does for a client.
And even that can vary from one agency to another.
Speaking from experience at Vulpine, we focus on our client’s customer (or end user, audience member, client…), the person they are attempting to reach with their marketing messages, and we create multi-platform social media strategies that align with our client’s business goals with the aim of uncovering information about the people we engage with on behalf of our client’s brand.
Social media platforms are just the channels we are using to get to know our client’s audience.
And our findings often influence many other areas of business strategy (or at least, they should).
I could go into the nitty gritty about some of the tactics we use in order to gather this information, but I won’t bore you with the details.
All that really matters to us is that our client’s customers are delighted by the brand we are representing, which is why we see ourselves as social media branding experts.
But, of course, not all social media agencies are going to use the same strategies that we use or even care about the same things we care about.
A lot of social media agencies are only focused on paid social (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter advertising), and don’t have anything to do with organic posting, content creation, account management, or customer engagement.
We’ve found that a healthy mix of both paid and organic is usually the sweet spot, but of course, that depends on the client.
How Does an Agency Operate?
Again, how an agency operates will vary from one to the next.
In a small agency, you will likely be working with the founder to strategize and execute on your campaigns.
Since there isn’t a large team to help with the various tasks, small teams are not usually equipped to handle larger budgets or workloads.
Typically speaking, the larger the budget for agency services (not including advertising spend), the larger the amount of work, and the longer it will take for a 1–3 person team to turn around on tasks.
However, with a smaller team, you can be confident that the agency owner has a deep understanding of your business and goals since it is their job and no one else to drive those results for you.
Larger teams mean larger workloads and budgets can be handled, but again, there is a point at which workload can drain agency resources and create delays in task completion.
Finding the right fit for your budget and timeline is extremely important when vetting social media marketing agencies.
Also, most agencies with more than 4 people will likely have some sort of structure or hierarchy.
At Vulpine, we have business strategists who handle the overall strategy and internal operations at the top, social media account managers who manage the day to day for our client accounts and speak directly with our clients on a regular basis. Then, we have assistants who execute on a lot of the social media tasks like social listening, active engagement, and content creation, then we have virtual assistants who help us with the behind the scenes tasks like post scheduling and data mining.
For us, this structure allows for flexibility and efficiency in our daily workflows, however, another agency may have a completely different model.
The important thing to consider is whether or not the agency is structured to provide you with the best experience and results.
And we’ll get to that in just a second, but first, what are the benefits of hiring an agency?
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