When you work with a social media agency, you harness the expertise of a professional person (or team) capable of transforming your online presence and building customer relationships.
Social media is one of the most valuable environments for online promotion, with around 420 billion people active on at least one channel as of 2020. Unfortunately, no matter which platform you choose for your social strategy, you’re going to have a multitude of tricks, tips, and rules to learn before you can start to see results.
Social media agencies help companies to bypass the typical learning curve associated with online success. While the best social media agencies still encounter challenges on the road to success, they also have proven strategies to ensure nothing stands in the way of your online growth.
Let’s look at the 5 biggest challenges social media agencies face and how they overcome them.
What Is A Social Media Agency?
A social media agency is a professional company responsible for handling some of the most complex parts of your social strategy. Depending on the kind of service you pay for, your agency might handle things like coming up with social media marketing plans, publishing content at the right time to reach your target audience, and running audits to examine the outcomes of your campaigns.
Some of the most common tasks handled by social media agencies include:
· Competitor analysis: Your agency will examine your competition for insights into how you can outshine other similar companies and take advantage of strategy gaps.
· Analytics and reporting: Social media agencies give you deep-dive insights into your social media strategies, so you know where to invest for your next campaign.
· Strategy creation: Social media agencies can help you to build strategies for multiple different social platforms and link those channels together.
· Content creation: Many social media agencies will be able to handle things like post creation and image design for your social strategies.
· Customer research: Some social media agencies can offer insights into your target audience, helping you to reach the right people more effectively.
5 Biggest Challenges For Social Media Agencies
Every social media agency will have challenges to face when it comes to making their client successful on their platform of choice. Your Instagram manager, Twitter specialist, or TikTok expert will need to overcome these challenges to ensure you get the right results.
Here are some of the biggest challenges facing social media agencies and how they overcome them.
1. Setting Marketing Goals
To ensure you’re generating the right results from your social media campaigns, you need a clear vision of what you want to achieve. Unfortunately, many marketers still struggle with setting clear, practical, and realistic goals for their campaigns. Around 43% of marketing teams currently cite goal setting as their biggest challenge.
Without a clearly defined goal, it’s impossible to determine whether your marketing efforts generate the right results.
The Solution
The best social media agency will overcome the headache of setting marketing goals by talking to your company about your “big picture” ambitions. Your agency might ask why you’re currently on social media (e.g., to build brand awareness). From there, you can start to set SMART goals for specific campaigns. These goals should be:
· Specific, including details on the platform and type of engagement you want
· Measurable, with access to detailed metrics and information
· Attainable, through both organic and paid campaigns
· Realistic and reasonable for your brand in a particular time frame
· Time-bound: Know when you want to achieve your goals
After you’ve set your marketing goals, your social media agency will be able to plan a strategy for how to reach them and provide information to show how much progress you’re making. Instagram Insights and third-party analytics tools will be ideal for demonstrating your performance.
2. Knowing Which Social Channels To Focus On
It used to be that the only obvious social media channel to advertise on was Facebook. Now, there are dozens of social channels available, from TikTok and Snapchat to Instagram and Pinterest. Each of these channels has their own unique benefits to offer, but not all suit every company’s specific needs.
Struggling to determine which channel to focus on for social media results could mean that you end up spreading your budget too thin across a host of platforms that don’t deliver results.
The Solution
With an insight into your goals and a deeper knowledge of your company, your social media agency should be able to match your business needs to specific channels. For instance, if you want to establish a personal connection with your younger audience, TikTok is a good bet.
If you’re looking for a way to improve your position as a B2B thought leader, you’ll go to LinkedIn. A great social media agency will take the time to evaluate your situation carefully, getting to know your target audience, and examining your competitors for insights into which channels work best. Since these professionals will already have a deep knowledge of the kind of demographics most common among different channels, they should be able to pinpoint the right channels for you. Insights and analytics from each channel will help show which platforms are working best.
3. Establishing A Target Audience
Sometimes, companies requesting the assistance of a social media agency will already know who their target customer is. Other times, growing brands need a little extra help figuring out who they should be targeting and where those customers spend the majority of their time.
Despite the growing demand for personalized, relevant, and engaging content from brands on all social media channels, many companies still create content first and figure out their audience later. This often leads to wasted budget, and poor ROI.
The Solution
A social media agency may be able to work with you on creating buyer personas for your social strategy. These personas will offer a useful insight into your ideal customer, looking at things like age, gender, and geographical location. To help develop a better insight into your audience, start doing your research as early as possible.
Look at your existing customers and collect demographic and behavioral information about them. Where do these customers come from, and what kind of pain points do they try to solve with your brand? Examine the target audience of competing companies and see whether you’re missing out on important niches with your campaigns.
As your social media agency implements your marketing strategies, they’ll also be able to use social listening tools to keep an eye out for other customers you might not be targeting.
4. Determining The Best Ad Content And Placement
Whether you’re investing in IGTV monetization strategies to generate attention for your brand or you’re placing ads into Facebook carousels, effective ad content design and placement is crucial. Today, levels of organic reach on many social platforms aren’t as effective as they once were, and agencies need to leverage more paid solutions to ramp up success rates.
Of course, even paid advertisement campaigns don’t guarantee success. To generate the best return on your investment, you’ll need to ensure your ad is appearing in the right environments to connect with your target audience.
The Solution
For most companies, finding the perfect strategy for ad content and placement will be a trial-and-error process. Your social media agency will have a basic idea of the kind of content usually capable of appealing to your target audience in your specific industry. However, it’ll take some A/B testing and experimentation to see what really makes the best impact.
Experimenting with different kinds of popular content is a good way to get started, for instance:
· Video and Stories: On platforms like Facebook and Instagram, video and “Stories” are often a great way to generate engagement. You can design long-from videos with IGTV or have live video streams to connect with customers. Reels are becoming increasingly common too.
· User-generated content: This is an excellent way to connect with customers on a more human level. Using branded hashtags, companies can collect authentic content from their target audience and improve their chances of conversions.
· Multiple ad placements: Placing ads in different environments, from Instagram Stories to direct chat, will help you to examine which of your campaigns generate the best results.
5. Keeping Up With New Trends And Updates
The social media landscape is complicated for marketers because it constantly evolves at an incredible pace. Perhaps more than any other promotional space, social media is regularly changing with access to new features, different market trends, and new kinds of consumer preferences.
Failing to keep up with the latest trends can have a serious impact on the success of any social media strategy. Today’s companies need to show they’re on the cutting-edge of the industry to gain customer trust and stay ahead of the competition.
The Solution
The best social media agencies are constantly watching the marketplace to keep up with the latest trends. They’re the first to know about new hashtag challenges on TikTok, and new features emerging on Instagram, like Reels. As soon as rumors about a new feature begin, the best social media agencies are already training their teams on how to use these tools effectively.
Many social media agencies can even work with influencers and professionals in the social media space to learn more about upcoming trends.
Remember, when encouraging your social media agency to stay ahead of the trends with your social media marketing efforts, make sure they’re focusing on the trends that make the most sense for your industry and brand identity.
Why Your Business Should Consider A Social Media Agency
Achieving success online in the modern world requires a focus on social media. Whenever customers search for more information about the brands they’re interested in, social channels are one of the first places they’ll check. Unfortunately, learning how to leverage social media channels successfully can be difficult on your own.
A social media agency:
· Offers access to expertise: Because social media agencies focus exclusively on social media success, they’re always equipped to offer guidance and insights into the latest social trends and tools. You can save a lot of time by tapping into the knowledge of your social agency the next time you want to figure out which campaigns to invest in.
· Improve customer relationships: Social media agencies take the time to get to know your customers and your business, so they can cultivate stronger connections for your brand. The result is often happier, more loyal customers who are more willing to advocate for your brand.
· Better ROI: Above all else, social media agencies ensure you’re getting positive, valuable results from your social media campaigns. They get to the bottom of your social goals and come up with strategies designed to deliver quick and measurable results.
Master Your Social Media Presence
Social media is a must-have tool in today’s marketing kit, with companies from all industries and environments constantly looking for new ways to engage customers online. Working with a social media agency that knows how to overcome the challenges above will ensure you have what it takes to leverage all the benefits of social media marketing for your growing brand.
