How Our Social Media Agency Grew From A Team Of 2 to 9

Growing a Social Media Agency isn't easy.

We certainly didn't expect to be where we are today.

It's our second year in business, and we couldn't be happier with how it's gone.

Luckily for our clients and us, it turned out to be the strongest year yet.

This article will break down some highlights and what's happened in our agency during these peculiar times.

Let's get stuck in.

A Team of 2 to 9

January 2020, it was just myself and Zoe (my co-founder) working away in a tiny office together, knowing it was our time to take on our first full-time team member.

Along came Izzy, our first full-time hire!

Then came Mario, Will, Millie, Jacob, and Elysia.

Plus, a special note for Martin (our finance & accounts manager who is with us 2 days a week and joined us in 2019)!

The rapid growth meant for quite a strange year when it came to offices.

We ended up being in 3 different offices in total. Now all working from home, but soon to be searching for the next office we can grow into.

Bringing everyone on has enabled us to solidify and strengthen our service offering completely, so we can continue to deliver the best in industry work while adding to our growing portfolio of clients.

We’re unbelievably proud to have all of these guys on board, and can’t wait to bring more people onto our growing herd!

Looking back at our numbers and finances, our revenue grew by 232% year on year - which is fantastic to see.

Our MRR (monthly recurring revenue) is up around 400% in November/December compared to that of the previous year.

How has this happened?

1. Bringing Mario, our Video lead, into the team has allowed us to drive more revenue through our video production services, which we didn't have this time last year.
2. Winning some key client accounts of super high-growth DTC brands.
3. Always putting client results first, which keeps our retention high & revenue growth across accounts.

We foresee continued strong growth as we begin to launch our own marketing plan in 2021 - which I’ll go into in more detail below.

I’m super excited to get started marketing ourselves. Sounds funny saying that, being a marketing agency.

Often is the case, agencies are great at marketing their clients, but not so much themselves.

So time to change that!

Our Paid Social & Facebook Ads team smashed it.

Incredible growth on our overall paid social spend, with most being spent through Facebook.

We have also bought media across Snapchat, Pinterest, TikTok and Google.

Some other stats regarding our Facebook Ad spend:

Revenue directly attributed to our campaigns - £8,511,135

ROAS - 5.14x

Impressions - 526,513,979

Link clicks - 4,948,160

and here's the proof!

We’re now a Meta Business Partner, and you can see our listing on Meta here.

Next year we believe we can 2-3x this figure, and deliver even better results for the brands we work with.

Zoe and I applied to two industry awards when it was just the two of us in our tiny box office.

Expecting absolutely nothing from them...

We couldn’t believe what happened.

For our work with Beebombs (check their case study out here), we won:

Best Paid Social Campaign of the Year at the Biddable Media Awards

&

‘Highly Commended’ Best Paid Social Campaign of the Year at the Performance Marketing Awards.

What a feeling!

For just two of us, going up against agencies with 100s of staff and massive brands under their belt.

I think our advantage comes from being a small, agile agency, as it allows us to focus a lot more attention on our clients than anyone else possibly can.

Revenue & Marketing Growth

So this is where my focus will be, whilst Zoe remains client side.

We plan on rolling out a full marketing plan, to accelerate our growth to the next level.

Using various channels, such as:

• Paid Search
• Paid Social
• Organic Social
• Content Marketing

Paid Search - we’ll bid against search terms/keywords across our core services.

Paid Social - we’ll drive traffic to case studies, plus distribute our video and written thought leadership content to build our authority.

Organic Social - we’ll produce content across FB/IG/LinkedIn to engage our community and stay top of mind.

Content Marketing - we’ll create written & video content about topics that will genuinely help brands deliver better results for themselves.

It’s fair to say we’re going to practice what we preach.

But we'll use a phased approach to ensure we don’t grow too fast, to allow us to keep our service quality high throughout, and not overload any team member.

We will always put client results over everything else, especially before trying to bag loads of new clients.

Our business grows as our clients scale up, so that's where a lot of our revenue growth comes from.

But overall, we want to grow our portfolio, which will mean constant hiring throughout, which will only strengthen & add to our service offering too!

We aim to grow our revenue by 250% in 2021.

Team Growth

As I’ve discussed above, we plan to recruit in 2021 to continue growth heavily.

We're currently sitting at 9 of us—7 full-time and 2 part-time.

Our goal is to reach 20 full-time team members by the end of 2020! (plus Martin, our finance & accounts manager).

This will include more across paid media, creative & video, and social strategists who can bridge the gap across all services for our full-service clients.

We will also continue to put plans into action to continue developing our team's individual careers, as there's nothing better to see them flourish & be proud of the place they work.

My thoughts going forward

I will continue to write these as an open diary to reflect in the years to come and see how our journey unfolds.

Plus it's important to us as an agency to be transparent and really show what's going on behind the scenes (whether that's good, or bad).

I am beyond excited for 2021, even though I expect another unpredictable year.

I appreciate your time reading this article to the very end, and hopefully, I can deliver value through our blog & future agency updates!

Jack