11 Benefits & Reasons Why You Should Hire A Social Media Agency

On the fence about hiring a social media agency?

We’ve drilled down the reasons why hiring an agency to manage your social media presence could be one of the wisest investments your brand can make.

Sure, you could do it yourself, but that takes time, effort and if you don’t know what you’re doing, a lot of money. Most people do this, and it’s why their social channels don’t get the results they want and eventually fizzle out.

Instead, hand over the reins to an experienced team dedicated to bringing you results. It’s less stressful, saves you money and gets you more returns than you could’ve hoped to get on your own.

Successfully marketing your business on social media takes planning, goal setting, testing, an exact idea of how you want to present your brand and a sprinkle of creativity to tie it all together.

When you hire an agency, they’ll do all of this for you. Using their experience and resources, they’ll navigate your brand through the stormy seas of social media.x Leading to your brand reaching more target customers and getting a greater return on your investment.

1. They’re experts at what they do

There’s a learning curve to social media marketing. It takes a lot of time and testing to understand it, let alone succeed at it. When you hire a social media agency, this skill-set is assured.

On top of this, social media is constantly changing. What works one day may not work the next. Social media agencies keep their eyes on these changes like a hawk and adapt appropriately.

Hiring an agency takes this burden off your shoulders. They use their expertise to successfully manage your social media accounts, allowing you to focus on the other areas required to grow your business.

2. You’re hiring a team of professionals

When you hire an agency, you’re not only hiring a single person. You’re hiring a whole team of professionals—each an expert in their field.

See our team at The Social Shepherd, which was taken pre-lockdown, and have now added several more members to our herd!

Their fields of expertise range from knowing the best media buying strategies to designing the most eye-catching creatives. Working together, they produce social media campaigns that bring fantastic ROI for their clients.

Here’s a glimpse of the roles inside an agency:

• Social account manager
• Paid social manager
• Social media strategist
• Copywriter
• Videographer
• Graphic designer

3. They have dedicated resources

A social media agency will have everything needed to produce your campaigns under one roof. You won’t need to subscribe to any new software services or buy any equipment. They’ll have it all. For example, at The Social Shepherd, we have our own in-house video production studio.

It isn’t just the physical resources that you’re gaining. You’re getting the specific insight that an agency has gained from experience working with multiple accounts and the research they’ve gathered.

4. You save a lot of time

Crafting a profitable social media strategy and managing your social media accounts to keep in line with this strategy takes a heavy time investment if you choose to handle it yourself.

You can quickly rack up the hours fine-tuning your social media content and fiddling with your media buying settings. Or, you could rest easy knowing that an expert team is working to keep your social media presence desirable for your target audience without taking up half of your week.

A social media agency uses paid advertising or organic content production on various social media platforms to achieve your business goals. Or, in some cases, they’ll do both.

Essentially, they use their expertise and strategies to handle your social media accounts effectively while getting you better results than you could get on your own.

5. They achieve your goals on social media

Social media agencies aim to achieve your social media marketing goals. However, many businesses spend money on social media because everybody else is. They do this without having any clear goals or strategic insight. It’s a recipe for disaster.

When you approach a social media agency with your goals, they will lay out the strategy for achieving them. These goals could be growing your audience, fulfilling a specific return on your ad spend or boosting sales in a particular region. For successful campaigns, find the agency that best fits your goals and offers the services you need to achieve them.

6. Eyes on the prize

Being able to grow an account to 50,000 followers in a month may seem easy to many people. “Just go on Fiverr and buy followers” or “run giveaways”, they’ll say. This is wrong. Most of those followers won’t be relevant to your brand and are unlikely to interact with or buy from you. Not to mention, your account could be flagged and removed from the platform.

An agency will determine the best platforms to focus on, the type of ads to produce that will best connect with your target audience and the most suitable influencers for promoting your brand. They do this by keeping up to date with the ever-changing best practices on social media and the ways different demographics interact with social media.

This results in a larger and engaged audience who care about what you have to offer.

7. Report and feedback

It’s in the social media agencies’ best interest to get you the best results possible because if they’re not performing, they’ll lose clients. As such, they’ll keep you updated on the progress and results you’re getting on social media. In this reporting, they’ll clearly define the key metrics that show your social media marketing is growing your business.

Using this feedback, they can improve and strategise. For a simplified example, their reporting may find that advertising on LinkedIn isn’t very productive, but on Instagram, it’s overwhelmingly positive, with a 10x the return on ad spend. So the strategy will move towards focusing more on what’s working on Instagram.

Social media is an advertising platform, just like TV and radio. However, the difference between those and social media is that the latter doesn’t require a substantial upfront cost to showcase your brand. And, unlike traditional mediums, you can precisely target who you want to reach with social media ads.

When approached with the right strategy, you can grow your brand and attract the audience you're aiming to reach. As you continue to grow this audience of customers and prospects, social media allows you to engage with them authentically and measurably.

Social scales

Unlike traditional marketing channels, social media allows you to scale faster, more efficiently and effectively. This is because they allow you to control your brand’s growth and target your advertising directly to those most likely to respond to it.

With traditional media advertising, say magazines, you can’t do this. You couldn’t ask them to print more copies of the issue with your advert inside. However, you can scale up your social media ad spend to target more people at a whim.

See some of our recent client results, scaling them up using paid social advertising:

Get direct feedback

Unlike traditional media, social gives you instant access to the results of your efforts, allowing you to test and adapt before launching a huge campaign.

For example, you may be planning to launch a big Instagram campaign. Before going full speed, you can A/B test two different creatives, each focused on a different pain point. If there’s a clear winner, you’ll go with that one for the campaign. This makes your advertising far more efficient.

Social also allows you to speak directly with your audience, giving you direct insight into what they prefer and what they resonate with. All of this insight can, and should, go straight into your future advertising and content marketing efforts.

Build an audience

Through organic and paid social media marketing efforts, you can build a dedicated audience on your social media accounts. By constantly creating and posting the content they enjoy, you stay in the forefront of their minds when shopping.

Once you’ve built an audience, they can, and often do, start making their own content for you. Perhaps they post a picture wearing your branded clothes or record a video reviewing your service. This can create a snowball effect of their audience following you, buying your product and making their own content too, and so on.

For example, the Royal Academy regularly encourage audience participation by sharing drawing challenges. It’s light-hearted, fun and allows them to link to their content in a more engaging and successful way.

We're a results-driven agency and combine our substantial experience in paid media buying with raw creative output to make brands like yours grow faster.

On the media buying side, we routinely bring brands a higher ROI on ad spend while helping them rapidly scale across multiple social media platforms. So much so, that Meta has named us as one of their business partners.

And on the creative side, we use our in-house video studio to produce scroll-stopping video creatives that capture your audience’s attention and drive them to convert into paying customers. Like the award-winning campaign we produced for Beebombs.

To find out how we can help your brand grow through social media, book your free strategy call here.