When you’re choosing a social media marketing agency to work with, what you’re really doing is choosing who you’re partnering with to invest in your business.
You are hiring professional social media advertising services to help your business grow and profit, so, you want to make sure that the social media marketing agency you hire is actually helpful and effective in doing that.
How do you do that? You choose the right social media marketing agency and advertising services by evaluating these 9 things:
- Their Proven Expertise: Case Studies & Testimonials
- Experience In Your Specific Industry
- Value-Packed Services: What You Are Getting vs. What You Want
- Reviews On Third-Party Websites
- A Measurement of Success That Makes Sense
- A Clear Path of Communication
- Agency-Grade Tools
- Success With Their Own Social Media
- Straightforward Contracts & Agreements
1. Their Proven Expertise: Case Studies & Testimonials
The very first thing you want to determine is if they really are the social media marketing experts they say they are. You do that by looking at their case studies and testimonials.
Case studies should include an in-depth, detailed look at their clients’ campaigns. If there are little to no case studies or if the case studies are vague and short, that could be a red flag.
Detailed, analytical case studies show that the agency knows how to reproduce success for their clients again and again and that they have a clear strategy that leads to clear results.
Testimonials allow you to hear directly from the clients about how happy they were with the agency’s services and why.
This can be insightful as well to see if the business owners in the testimonials had the same goals you have now and how those were met by the agency.
2. Experience In Your Specific Industry
Beyond general expertise, you also want to look for experience in marketing your specific industry on social media.
When you’re looking through their case studies, try to find some within your niche.
This proves that the agency has experience driving results for clients with a similar target market and for companies with similar goals and challenges.
Depending on your industry, there may be certain quirks or industry-specific setbacks or challenges and you want an agency that has experience in tackling those head on.
Some agencies, like LYFE Marketing, will have experience in marketing hundreds of different industries, whereas some agencies specialize in the same 1-3 industries.
Because of this, you’ll want to do your research and make sure the agency you choose has experience marketing a business like yours.
3. Value-Packed Services: What You Are Getting vs. What You Want
Social media marketing services or social media advertising services can include hundreds of different tasks in them.
You want to be very clear on exactly what you’re getting from your chosen social media marketing agency.
You want to ensure that the services you sign up for and the results expected from them align with what you actually want.
Some social media marketing agencies pride themselves on top-of-funnel metrics such as followers, engagement, views etc.
Whereas other social media marketing agencies, like LYFE Marketing, pride themselves on top-of-funnel and bottom-of-funnel metrics like followers, leads, and sales.
You’ll also want to think about what you need to pay for vs. what you already have.
For example, if you already have somebody in-house who is able to post Instagram Reels, but you need an expert to manage your Facebook ads, make sure you’re getting nothing more and nothing less than an expert Facebook advertiser in your services.
4. Reviews On Third-Party Websites
While looking at the agency’s case studies and testimonials on their website is important, you want to also look at reviews on third-party websites to ensure there’s no bias.
Common sites for reviews include Google and Yelp, but you can also look at agency-specific review websites like Clutch or Fit Small Business.
You want to look for three things: a good amount of reviews (not just 3 or 4), a high overall star rating, and a mix of reviews.
If every single review out of hundreds is a 5 star perfect review, they may not all be legitimate reviews.
You almost want to see a couple one-off poor reviews to ensure that these reviews were left by legitimate clients, but of course you don’t want to choose an agency who has a majority of bad reviews.
Find an agency that has favorable reviews on average on third-party websites to ensure you’re partnering with an agency that has a positive success rate with its clients.
5. A Measurement of Success That Makes Sense
You want to make sure that the social media marketing agency you partner with measures success the same way you do.
You don’t want to spend $15,000 on an agency and have them call your campaign successful when you got half a million views but $0 in sales.
Make sure you know from the start that the team is going to be working towards the goals you want them to and measuring the success of their efforts the same way you are.
6. A Clear Path of Communication
Even if you want to be a hands-off client, clear communication is still important and unfortunately, not always a given with every agency.
Before partnering with a social media marketing agency, you want to know how often you all will communicate and via what means.
Will they send you a monthly report via email? Will they be available to go over that report via a phone call?
Will they be available to chat on the phone more regularly than every 4 weeks in case something urgent comes up?
Establish what your communication would look like before signing on with them.You also want an agency that’s going to be proactive in their communication and overall marketing efforts.
If you find that you’re having to chase them and follow up with them on everything already in the beginning stages, that’s not a good sign.
With a marketing agency in particular, you want to partner with someone who is going to take the initiative in producing innovative, effective marketing strategies and communicating them to you.
7. Agency-Grade Tools
One of the perks of partnering with an agency is that you get access to and/or the benefit of agency-grade tools without having to pay for them outright.
Because agencies work with multiple clients, they can reasonably pay the high cost of in-depth social media marketing tools.
These tools provide more insights than basic social media analytics would, but they can be too expensive or uneconomical for a standalone business to pay for them out of pocket.
Make sure the agency you’re partnering with actually uses some of these tools to ensure you’re getting the most bang for your buck in employing their services.
If the agency does not have any in-depth social media marketing tools, it could be because it’s not economically viable for them either, which makes you wonder how successful their agency really is.
8. Success With Their Own Social Media
You can look at their case studies, testimonials and reviews for hours, but sometimes, the ultimate tell-tale sign of whether they’re a good social media agency or not is to look at their own social media.
If the agency only has a couple hundred followers, or no proof of leads generated from their own social media, that’s a bad sign. Why should you be expected to believe they can generate more with your social media than they’re generating with their own? You want to see a reasonable amount of followers, engagement and high-intent action on the agency’s social media pages. |
You can look at their case studies, testimonials and reviews for hours, but sometimes, the ultimate tell-tale sign of whether they’re a good social media agency or not is to look at their own social media.
If the agency only has a couple hundred followers, or no proof of leads generated from their own social media, that’s a bad sign. Why should you be expected to believe they can generate more with your social media than they’re generating with their own? You want to see a reasonable amount of followers, engagement and high-intent action on the agency’s social media pages.
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9. Straightforward Contracts & Agreements
Small business owners cannot afford to get bogged down with a complicated service agreement. At minimum you should be able to read and understand your contract.
If you need a lawyer to look over the contract in order for you to be able to understand it, the agency is probably hiding something.
The contract should be simple, easy to understand and harbor zero surprises.
Every agency is different, so you’ll need to make sure you are clear on whether it’s an annual contract, a month-to-month contract or what have you.
You don’t want to engage in an annual contract, where you’ve legally agreed to pay for a year of services, and in month 3 you hate the results and can’t get out of it.
Make sure the contract protects you as the client and not just them as the agency.
How do I choose a social media platform to advertise on?
You choose a social media platform to advertise on by determining which platform your specific audience spends the most time on.
How do I choose the right media for advertising?
You choose the right media for advertising by identifying which media-type your target audience responds to the best, which is likely short, vertical videos like Reels or TikToks.
How to choose the right social media channel?
You choose the right social media channel by knowing which channel your target demographic spends the majority of their time on.
What are the 5 pillars of social media marketing?
The 5 pillars of social media marketing are strategy, content creation, engagement, analytics, and advertising. If you partner with a social media advertising agency that executes all of these with efficiency and expertise, you’ll find your business profiting from social media in no time.
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