7 questions to ask before engaging a social media agency
The world of digital and social media has exploded in its importance over the last few years. And if you’re like most organisations we work with, it’s occupying more of your psyche than ever before - thanks, Covid! The reality is that most decisions are made online, and the battle for your customers is occurring in the digital sphere. If your game is not on-point, you’ll lose without even knowing why.
So - you’ve reached the stage where you’ve found that having ALL the resources in-house to deliver meaningful results is not practical nor affordable. You know you need to bring in the big guns; it’s agency time! If you’re anything like most of our customers this brings a cold sweat to your brow and recollections of below-par delivery from a past slick operator surrounded by abject juniors. So how do you avoid the agency pitfalls?
Here are seven key questions to ask of yourself and the agency to determine whether engaging a social media agency is the right move for you. If you like the answers you hear, then you’re likely to have found a partner that will help your business thrive, cost effectively, without the jargon and bull$hit.
1. Do you have a clear idea of what you want?
Success starts with knowing what you’re trying to achieve, and not getting distracted by the latest shiny thing. To do this you need to know exactly what you want to get out of engaging an agency. If you’re vague about what you want (eg. I want someone to ‘handle’ it for me) then you may not be able to articulate exactly what you need ‘handled’ for you. That’s ok - a skilled agency operator will ask you all the right questions to find out what you mean by this; but it really helps if you know what you want to get out of your agency. Do you know what your ‘north star’ objective is?
We love to work with real business goals and tangible metrics, like:
Increase online sales by X% by the end of the year
Generate at least X leads per month
Increase our website traffic by X% month-on-month
Handle all of our community messages and comments
Produce a blog and send an email to our database each week
Grow our database by X% by March
You get the idea! Tangible, measurable, real goals that have a meaningful impact on your business give an agency something solid to work towards and they will be able to create a strategy that will achieve those goals.
2. What is the background and experience of the agency team?
How did the founder find themselves owning a social media agency? Have they worked with a variety of clients in industries analogous to yours? Who will you be dealing with on a day-to-day basis? What is their background? Have they had broad commercial experience? Are they certified by Facebook and/or Google? Who will manage your account - is it a founder/director, or an account manager? How much contact will you have with the senior people at the agency? It’s important to know that you have people with the right skills and experience to be able to expertly navigate the complex digital landscape, with your business objectives at the forefront. We suggest you do some background checks - even if you just spend five minutes on LinkedIn and phone someone you know who may be able to shed some light on the agency or their people!
3. What is your budget?
There are a couple of components to the typical investment in your social media and digital marketing activities. You’ll typically pay a monthly retainer or project fee to the agency for their expertise and technical work. Then you’ll also need to budget for whatever the paid component of your activity is - that’s your ads, your “boosted posts”, your amplification budget - whatever you’d like to call it. The level of expertise and the size of the audience that you can access will be determined by how much you’re willing to invest. A good agency will be able to clearly show you the return on your investment!
To give you an idea of what “best practice” is for your marketing spend, in New Zealand, businesses typically spend between 6-12% of their annual revenue on marketing. Smaller companies with revenue less than $5m per year spend more as a percentage, and those with larger turnover spend less as a percentage. How you split that total will be different depending on your specific situation, but these days, an ever-increasing portion of marketing budgets are favouring highly measurable online channels.
4. What are your in-house capabilities?
What is your own understanding of the complex and ever-changing world of social and digital media? What are the expectations of your board or team to deliver results in this space? Most business owners and marketers find this space very challenging and too hard to stay up to date with. This is why outsourcing to specialists adds so much value - it’s their job to know what the latest updates to algorithms mean for their clients, how to use the latest new tools and tactics to achieve real-world results, and can explain it all to you in a way that helps you understand how it works for your unique business case.
The agency/client relationship is one best served by a team, some of them supply-side (that’s the agency) and one or two people in-house (that’s your business). Ideally you will have a point-person at your business who can direct the agency, keep them on their toes, and be responsible for any approvals, sign-offs, and queries from the agency.
Do you have someone on your team who can produce content, or not? If you don’t have a graphic designer, copywriter, photographer/videographer, then you will need an agency that has that capability to do it for you, or perhaps outsource to skilled freelancers in order to supply great content. Some agencies (like ours) have specialist content creators on their team, and other agencies outsource that work to third-parties. It’s completely up to you - you may have creators that you prefer to work with, but if you need it all handled for you, then seek an agency that has the capability.
5. Can the agency provide case studies or proof of results?
Nothing speaks to experience like results. It's unusual you’ll meet an agency that doesn’t have a pretty/slick/smart salesperson or partner… But you should dig deeper beyond that. Ask the agency if they have case studies to show the effectiveness of their work for other clients. They should be able to show you past or live campaigns that delivered excellent results for their clients. Pay close attention to the results they generated for the objective of the client or campaign. Were they meaningful? Did they really ‘move the needle’ for that business? A great agency will be able to provide evidence and will be proud to share these with you.
Also, what do their current clients say about them? If an agency has clients who rave about them, that’s a great sign! Check out their client testimonials or even ask for a direct reference from someone they currently work for. Hearing from someone in a similar situation to yours (a business owner or marketer) will help you understand what working with the agency is like. What’s their communication like? How has the agency helped their business grow? Would they recommend the agency to others?
6. How do they measure results?
You need to know that there will be clear, understandable reporting and insights available for you to be able to determine whether your efforts are working. These should always tie back to your initial key objectives (eg. sales, or leads, or audience growth etc). Be wary of anyone suggesting that Likes or Follows are important (they’re not really, unless you’re doing this for vanity reasons). How transparent are they? Can they clearly explain what these metrics mean and why they’re important to your business without hiding behind a barrage of confusing technical jargon?
7. Do they make it easy for you?
What's their process? What software or tools do they use? Where's their secret sauce?! Ultimately, will engaging this agency make it easier for you to get on with running your business? That’s the key question. We’ve all experienced the ‘experts’ who claim to know our business but then simply ask us what works then do more of that. A great agency partner will understand what your pain is and how to solve it, they ADVISE not ASK. They offer new ideas, fresh solutions, and will guide you to success!
Now you know what to ask, where to from here?
If you’ve read this far, it’s likely you’re quite keen to know whether we might be a good fit for your business, and that’s cool! By all means please do ask us these hard questions - we’re an open book! We welcome the scrutiny. We’re proudly transparent, we have a great reputation, and that is backed up by loads of real results and raving fans (our clients)! And if we’re not the right fit for your business, then we can point you in the right direction. We’re good like that.