Essential Tips for Delegating To A Social Media Agency
Positive relationships are the building blocks of a well-run and efficient business. This concept rings true for every business relationship – from your closest colleague and confidant to the social media agency you’ve selected to work with your business.
Your relationship with an outsourced social media agency is an exciting opportunity to tap into the expertise they bring to the table to strengthen your online presence, grow your follower base and find new leads and sales for your business.
An outsourced social media agency will certainly take on your delegated tasks, and work to perform. They can be a creative source of new ideas as part of an ongoing conversation with your team.
This makes managing your relationship with a social media agency valuable opportunity in strengthening your social media presence now and into the future.
Let’s talk about some important tips for managing your relationship with a social media agency.
Tips for Managing Your Relationship with a Social Media Agency
Agree on mutual goals for success
When your chosen social media agency sits down with you, one of the first things to discuss is your goals. Part of your responsibility in managing your relationship with a social media agency is making sure those goals are properly defined on your end.
A social media agency’s team of experts will work to align as closely as possible to those set goals. This means that true success is only possible when goals are accurate, and properly outline your expectations.
Think about your overall business and sales objectives and what you hope to achieve. Goals should follow the SMART approach of setting goals. Your goals should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound.
Defining SMART goals helps the social media agency to align the proposed social media strategy in a better way. And This in turn allows them to deliver the results you’re looking for.
Properly managing your relationship with a social media agency also means ensuring that they are well aligned with your brand, offerings, voice and business model.
The better they can understand your brand and target audience, the better they will be able to market your brand to that specific audience.
Determine methods of communication
Great relationships rely on communication which is why regular communication with a social media agency is so important.
Make sure that you are clear on communication expectations ahead of time. This will help to make managing your relationship with a social media agency a more positive experience down the line.
If you already have preferred channels of communication in place, be sure to let your social media agency know about those channels in your initial meetings. It will also be important to determine who their point of contact will be for a consistent workflow.
Communication should also be clear on who will be managing which of your customer facing initiatives.
Will someone be handling customer inquiries internally? Will someone be posting on social platforms that are not delegated to the social media agency?
This is best clarified so that no communications are missed or doubled up on.
In addition, you will want to discuss how often your communication will happen. Social content and strategy updates can be discussed through email, over the phone, or in bi-weekly update meetings. Make these expectations clear.
Discuss expectations for ongoing processes, updates and reporting
As a client you can have any level of expectations. Whether that’s viewing every bit of social content that is to go out on your channels, or just making yourself available for a monthly update.
The choice is yours on how involved you want to be with the process, but it’s essential to determine and share these expectations at the very start.
Think about if you want to be involved in the day-to-day social media management. Internal communications between the social media agency team could also be daily. Consider if you would like to be copied on these communications as well.
Consider how often you would like to see updates and reports and how you would like to receive that information. Whether it is in a scheduled meeting, live dashboard, or basic email.
Setting up these expectations ahead of time paves a clear path for both you and the social media agency.
Putting your trust into a social media agency
It’s no question that your business is special to you and that the content put out on your social media channels is a direct representation of your business.
This may make it difficult to let go of the reins, but putting trust into a social media agency is essential to a strong relationship.
You didn’t hire a social media agency to simply delegate basic tasks too. You hired them to use their expertise in social media.
As experts they know what works and what doesn’t, and will be able to take your channels to the next level based on their experience. They will have insights on social media best practices that are likely unknown to you.
Acknowledge their expertise and put trust in them to accomplish your goals.
Achieving Growth Through Social Media
Your awareness in managing your relationship with a social media agency means all the difference in how you communicate with them. Your communication, expectations, and trust all contribute to how you delegate to them, and how much you delegate to them.
Deciding what to delegate to a social media agency is far more complicated than you might think. As you will learn through your relationship with a social media agency, social media marketing requires a lot of different expertise.
In fact, each social media task requires its very own expertise, resources, tools and capacity.
Social media is a multi-faceted opportunity to bring your company growth, and it plays a valuable role in developing your pipeline of new leads and sales opportunities. But each channel has its own personality and needs customized attention to get results.
Social media can be used at each stage of the sales pipeline, in attracting new audiences, helping to convert them into leads and then customers.
You must consider that social media campaigns are deployed for B2C audiences, differently from B2B audiences, before you align goals and develop campaigns.
Social Media: blend of art and science
A social media campaign is best described as a blend of art and science.
There is an art to creating high performing and compelling content that speaks to your targeted buyer persona. The science comes in the ability to understand what the post-performance analytics data is telling us about the content and its ability to support the marketing objectives.
Keeping an eye on your social media performance analytics allows for continuous improvements in content through an ongoing analysis and evaluation of post-performance. After all, you can’t manage and improve what you don’t measure!
Social Media Management: Many Parts Working in Tandem
A partner that is up to this task must be able to rapidly understand your business. They need to see your brand and what it stands for and bring valuable insights and creativity in planning out your growth on social.
As experts, our challenge as a social media agency is to ask the right questions and gain an understanding of your business’s critical success factors.
From there we can answer these crucial questions that you may be asking yourself: How much of our content should be devoted to selling? How much should be devoted to other purposes? How often should an offer be made, and what should that offer look like? Does paid social advertising make sense for your business right now?
What to Delegate?
Now that you understand just how difficult social media work is, let’s dive into the kinds of work that can be delegated to ease your own workload as a business owner.
Delegate Your Marketing Strategy
The first step in delegating your social media is getting the strategy right. You may have a great marketing team that has articulated the strategy already for you.
If you don’t have the in-house expertise to develop the social media strategy, then this should be the first work that your agency partner takes on.
A strong digital marketing agency partner will need to understand your brand promise, your culture, and your customer base quickly in order to develop an effective strategy. They already know this and will gather the details they need during their on-boarding process.
Delegate Time-Consuming Social Media Tasks
Some might argue right out the gate that delegating the most time-consuming projects is a financially bad move. Time is money, after all.
But isn’t your time worth more than what you’ll potentially be paying an agency for? The less time you must spend explaining and discussing things, the more time you have to dedicate to doing your job the best you can.
When it comes to social media, the single most time-consuming task is easily content development and creation. Businesses like Valerie’s fail when they don’t maintain a steady presence on social, and their posts are too heavily reliant on self-promotion.
Time must be spent developing a content strategy that goes beyond “look at our wonderful work,” or “check out our latest promo.”
When you tap the expertise of an agency, you benefit from more work getting done at a higher quality than you could achieve yourself, in less time. And freeing up time for yourself means saving money in the long run.
When you free up this time for yourself you can focus on your business strategy, refresh things where they are needed, and assessing results in real time.
It also gives you more time to focus on the most important thing – generating income for your business. After all, Content may be King, but Cash Flow is Crucial.
Delegate Tasks You Don’t Have the Skills For
As a business owner, you already know how important it is to know what your strengths are. With that in mind, it may be a waste of time for you to work out every intricate detail of your social and digital campaigns. Especially when you could get someone else to do it.
Today, everyone has a Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn account, along with their own mobile device (even your grandmother!). This has led to the expectation that everyone – especially those raised in this technological environment – should be an expert.
But crafting engaging posts and creating an effective campaign involves words and images.
Of course, as a social media marketing agency, we believe it’s a skill everyone should master. But we also recognize not everyone has the luxury of time, training, and the right tools to do it.
Rather, for start-ups, entrepreneurs, or employees with specific roles, there is a need to focus on their core skills. Learning the proper way to apply social media can be more time- and money-consuming than it’s worth.
Therefore, delegating social media tasks that your team lacks the skills for ends up being the most cost-effective option.
An agency will have the skills to complete whatever the task is better, quicker, and with fewer expensive mistakes. This frees up your time to focus your efforts where you and your team excel.
Delegate to Create Flow and Efficiency
When it comes down to the specific tasks you should be delegating, there are a lot of options. You can find where your bottlenecks are and outsource those tasks. Or choose the areas you don’t like working on, or don’t have the know-how to successfully complete. You can even outsource full work cycles.
Your agency can generate results for you, day in and day out, no matter how busy your business gets. If you’re not sure, these areas are a great place to start:
1. Formulating an Effective Content Marketing Strategy
Creating an effective content strategy takes that mix of art and science we discussed earlier. With research and insights into your target audiences, a social media agency can get into the psyche of each buyer persona.
They can then develop strategy using compelling content that speaks directly to the buyer throughout the sales cycle. What’s more, they can post it to the proper platform.
This generates new analytics and insights, which your agency can then use to refine the strategy on an ongoing basis. The process is iterative, and with the right person with the right skills at the helm, it will continue to improve over time.
2. Social Media Content Creation & Scheduling to Show Off Your Value
As we discussed earlier, content development and creation is often the most time-consuming social media task. With a strong content strategy as a guide, an agency can help you create added value through your social media presence.
An agency can help you show off your expertise in your industry with captivating and valuable content.
What’s more, delegating your content scheduling offers some valuable benefits as well. If you’re not an expert in social media, scheduling your posts can be just as time-consuming as creating them.
But delegating this task to a social media agency can take your scheduling to the next level – thanks to automation. Using automation tools, you get the benefit of knowing your content will be posted in the best places at the best times.
Scheduling posts can be a tedious task. Delegating it to an agency frees up your team for more focused thinking.
3. Social Media Community Management to Engage Your Audience
There’s no doubt that great content is how brands get noticed on social media – but it’s community management that sets the best companies apart.
With a solid community management plan, an agency can maintain your company’s reputation, engage and excite your audience, and keep an eye on attitudes and future opportunities.
That doesn’t seem so tough, right?
The fact is, as social media has expanded the role of a community manager has changed. Simply replying to comments and questions isn’t good enough anymore.
Today the best social media community managers are customer service reps, experts in your field, a friend to talk to, or even someone your audience can geek-out with. Add to that the need to respond quickly and always on brand, and you’ve got a massive responsibility.
4. Developing a Quality Follower Base
Do you notice when an influencer starts following you, or has shared your content long after you posted it? What about any true fans of your business who comment on or share practically everything you post? Don’t those people deserve a personal “thank you” from you?
It seems like a small task to delegate, but having someone else monitor your social media platforms can be valuable.
A social media agency can weed out the chat bots or fake accounts cluttering up your followers. They can also identify other followers of poor quality – like your competition who are likely spying on your strategy.
Delegating the development of your follower base to your social media agency allows them to make sure that you’re speaking to a high-quality list of followers. They’ll ensure that you don’t miss out on any opportunities to connect and engage with the best audience possible.
That is the point, after all.
Deciding on the best tasks to delegate to your social media agency can be difficult. It often depends on the needs of your unique business. But delegating even a few tasks can help free up your time to focus on what you do best.
Delegating can improve your online presence and reputation as a company, all while generating new leads.
Summary of Key Tips:
- Delegate strategy development if you’re not an expert: establish a strong start and key goals that align with your brand and compliment the other components of your marketing plan
- Delegate social media tasks you don’t have the skills for: let experts craft the words and visuals to grow your base, build engagement and generate leads
- Delegate the most time-consuming social media tasks: an agency partner can bring efficiency, scale and automation to labour intensive social media work.
In the long run, you free up time for yourself to focus on other business aspects.
If you’re looking to outsource some of your social media, or you simply have a few more questions about what should be delegated, book a free, no obligation call today.
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