Best things to look for in a social media marketing agency

As your brand grows, you may be looking to enlist the help of a third-party company to manage various aspects of your work. This is a time when many brands turn to a social media marketing agency to take over their digital strategy and launch it to new heights.

A great team to work with

There are too many specific skills involved in social media marketing management for one account manager to master them all. The team you partner with should have available experts like graphic designers, writers, SEO specialists, someone who monitors analytics, and possibly even a photographer.

It’s understandable if you as the client might not have direct communication with each of these people. That could get very messy, very quickly. But if you’re going to hire an agency, there should be more than one person working on your account behind the scenes.

Well-versed in your industry

If you’re a salon owner, your social media marketing agency needs to understand the various services you offer, how they work, the benefits, the culture of your industry, the terminology, and so on.

If you’re working in a more sensitive industry like law or medicine you need an agency familiar with the language and those areas of practice. One wrong move here could land the agency, and the client, in hot water.

This isn’t to say that you need to find a social media marketing agency that works strictly with salon owners. The point is to find an agency in a position to become very familiarized with your industry.

Quick and efficient

Quick communication is extremely important considering that these days, many of us work purely digitally with companies that aren’t local to our area. 

Keep in mind that when you’re working with an agency, they’re working with other clients. If you don’t get a response in minutes, take a breath, because it’s okay. Patience is still a virtue.

Proactive and not reactive

They should actively be doing as much as they can to prepare and prevent things from ever going wrong in the first place.

For instance, they should be keeping up with trends and algorithm changes so that they can adjust their methods accordingly. As a purely hypothetical example, let’s say Facebook announced they were permanently disabling their messaging feature. (Again, this is hypothetical.) If your brand heavily relied on chatbots, your agency should be ahead of the curve and planning how to evolve with such a massive change in the platform.

Your agency should immediately acknowledge it and confirm with you how they’re going to fix it. The world of social media moves entirely too fast for any of us to be slacking.

Check their social media

An agency’s social channels serve as a portfolio of sorts. The quality you see here is what you can expect of the quality of work they’ll provide for you. 

Look for all of the things you’d want to see on your page: lots of activity and growing engagement, high-quality posts using a variety of text, images, and videos, crystal clear branded graphics, and so on.

You might even consider asking agencies what specifically they’re doing to grow their pages and what their strategy looks like.