When your business is on a very fast growth trajectory, operational imperatives may keep you so busy that you may not be able to devote as much time as required to handle social media marketing. This may be the right time to look for an experienced and competent agency to take over the reins of your social, media marketing and take it to a higher level. Unfortunately, choosing a good agency can be quite difficult because of the number of agencies to take a pick from, and more importantly, you would not even know which evaluation criteria to apply. Some useful tips:
Do They Have Specialized Domain Experts?
Even though most social media marketing agencies will have an account manager to deal with you and work out the finer points of your contract, you need to be able to find out whether all your work will be handled by just one person or they have people looking after different aspects of the marketing function. Even though the account manager is knowledgeable and helpful, you need to remember that the actual work will be done by others. It means that if all your work right from graphic design to keyword research and more is done by the same person, it is very likely that the result will be mediocre. Any social media marketing agency you choose must necessarily have specialists to look after the various responsibilities that go with the account. Ideally, the agency you select should have available in-house experts in all functional areas like strategy, graphic design, SEO, analytics, ad purchase, PPC, animation, etc. As a client, you may not even want to interact with all the specialists directly, however, it is a great comfort to know that the resources are available any time they are required. According to Forbes.com, you should only look at agencies that have a good fit with your brand.
Are They Familiar With Your Industry?
Most digital marketing agencies try to impress their potential clients by showing them a client list of companies in diverse industries. While this can be a great strategy for the agency to snag accounts across different agencies, you need to think about whether you want your agency to be a generalist or be familiar with your specific industry. It is usually a far better option to engage an agency that has complete familiarity with your industry, preferably your niche so that they understand the profile of the users in that category. This knowledge will help them to carve out the profile of the ideal customer and craft messages and content that will be preferred by them. The biggest advantage of specialist social media marketing services agencies is that they understand the industry well and the psychographics of the target audience. Because they are familiar with the industry terminology, the content they create has the stamp of domain expertise that expert users will appreciate.
Does The Agency Have All The Necessary Tools For Successfully Executing Social Media Marketing Campaigns?
Even though social media platforms are becoming smarter by the day, they still can’t run digital marketing campaigns successfully by themselves. To engage your target audience successfully and achieve the desired ROI from the campaign, the agency should have a wide range of tools with which they can tackle various aspects of the campaign. These include content creation, graphic design, advertisement scheduling, post scheduling, data monitoring, and analytics as well as keyword research and integration of AI technologies for improved customer feedback response. Ideally, the agency should not only be able to monitor the performance of your account, but that of your competitors as well so that you can find out what they are doing that is worthy of emulation. The agency should be capable of giving customers prompt responses to queries, complaints, and feedback as well as respond to the comments, mentions, and reviews by customers. They should be able to evolve a strategic vision for following accounts and engaging with them. You should keep in mind that their proficiency in using modern social media marketing tools should not only help better account management but also assist you to evolve with the emerging trends and make its performance better.
Are They Quick To Respond?
Digital marketing, especially social media marketing, is one of the most dynamic sectors where the environment can change dramatically almost overnight due to the impact of changing technologies and customer preferences. As a marketer who is aware of the various changes in the marketing environment and wish to take advantage of emerging opportunities or react promptly to adversities, you also need an equally responsive marketing agency. Beware of agencies that take days to respond to emails or telephonic queries. While it is understood that the required answers or campaign modifications cannot be made available by the agency immediately, a responsible agency will take steps to acknowledge your concern and set up an interaction with the account manager to understand the issue better and work out a mutually acceptable time frame for the desired resolution. Agencies that suddenly become unresponsive should never be trusted, more so when it is common for the agency and the client to be separated from each other by thousands of miles. However, all said and done, both you and the agency need to be able to work out a professional working relationship and appreciate each other’s limitations and compulsions.
Conclusion
There is possibly no end to the considerations you can take into account for selecting a social media marketing agency of your choice, however, you cannot keep on looking forever. The ideal way is to list down your most important criteria and interview some agencies based on how well they are rated by users. Pick the agency that ticks off the maximum number of boxes and with whom you can have a comfortable working relationship. At the end of the day, the willingness to find optimum solutions to issues and take action based on the interpretation of market and industry trends should be the defining criteria for a good choice.
