In-house or agency?
It’s a question that every small business will ask. We all know the importance of having a strong presence on social media. But the question you really need to ask is “What do I want out of my social media campaign? Do I just want to stay posted? Or do I want to take it to the next level?”
It may seem extravagant to employ an agency to manage your social media accounts, but there is a lot more to a social media marketing campaign than simply posting status updates on Facebook.
A social media savvy teen vs. a socially specialized consultant?
There are currently over 7.4 billion people active on social media. The temptation for most business owners who feel the pull towards putting their business on the social map, is to give Sue in Accounts the job of updating their business profiles, or employing a young whippersnapper (who has grown through the digital age & has no knowledge of a world without Facebook or SnapChat) to be entrusted with their business’ social presence. Sound scary? Could be!
Social media is a fast-moving landscape, with new features, algorithm updates, and an increasing push towards paid media. All this makes getting your content in front of the right people an art form. With an agency, you have a team of socially savvy nerds 
tuned into social platforms, listening to brand mentions, and managing conversations. An agency makes it a top priority to invest time into research and development to ensure they stay ahead of the curve.
By the time you have read this article & tweeted about it, a new update or social platform has already been launched.
Cost is a hard pill to swallow for some businesses when looking at outsourcing your social media activity. But do not be fooled by the soft cost of using an internal resource or hiring an in-house social media manager as there are hidden costs associated with this too.
- The average salary for an is $15,000-25,000 a year excluding the recruitment costs, overheads like equipment/software and, if they have a day off sick, who covers the social media activity?
In my experience, the businesses who assign an employee to manage their social presence have no understanding of how to measure the success. They get distracted with likes or reach, leaving a [MIND THE GAP] moment when asked how much traffic or how many sales/enquiries they are generating through their current activity.
An agency can help set some key metrics in line with your business goals and put a strategy in place to ensure those goals are reached.
The boundaries between SEO, PPC (AdWords), Email Marketing, and Social Media all blend into an integrated strategy instead segmenting the activity into individual campaigns not working in harmony.
INVEST IN THE BEST
Just because I can drive a car does not make me a race car driver. Being an F1 driver takes skill, talent, practice, strategy, and teamwork to stay ahead of the competition.
APPLY THIS THEORY TO YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING:
- Know your brand and your brand followers
- Know the best platforms to reach them and keep them engaged in your social media
- Invest in the best agency with an eye for creating visual, social content
- Strategically set up paid adverts to support your campaign
- Ensure you have the resource to deliver a cutting-edge campaign
- An agency who is willing to work with your team to extract the right information to really make your campaign pop
- Stay ahead of the Competition – Results driven campaigns; let the data drive your decision
- Keep all social media links easy to find on your web site
