Social media has become an extension of us and is essentially how we connect with the world. You post about your day, kids, work, holidays and everything you can possibly ever think of on your personal social media profiles.
So why is it that you need an agency to do the same for your business?
In all honestly, if you have a small business, you will know about the product or service you sell more than any agency. You will know the pain points of your consumers, what makes them tick and most importantly, why they come to you.
You know best about your product, how it is different from the competition and what makes them standout. If you hire an agency, you will most likely have to pass on that product knowledge on a weekly basis or pay them handsomely to do the research themselves.
The key question is, why do you need an agency or a consultant to do the social media marketing for you?
To make use of social media marketing, you need to have a forward thinking social media strategy driven by data on your target market. Social media marketing is not just about posting. It is about posting relevant content that is useful to your audience. You need to keep changing your posting strategy based on real time insights to get a real return on investment. It’s a whole cycle of plan, set goals, test and review.
Talking about how good your product is, will give you nothing in return unless you say why it is good for the person who is listening. Social media marketing is much more than doing daily posts with good images. You need to post relevant, impactful and valid content within a larger inbound marketing strategy.
Social media is a stormy sea. Unless you know to navigate your way around, it is easy to lose focus.
Agencies have dedicated teams to get things done faster. They are pros at what they do. If you give them the product knowledge and let them add a sprinkle of expertise and creativity, you will most certainly get better results than you attempt it by yourself.
You need to hire a professional or an agency who will invest time to understand your product, market and consumers, build a content strategy around it and continuously monitor results and make changes. It is not just about graphic designing or using a scheduler to post them. It’s about posting the right content at the right time to get the attention of the right target market.
End of the day, it’s a trade off between time effort and cost. If you have the knack for social media, time to invest in research and the knowledge to develop forward thinking social media strategy, you can certainly do it all by yourself.
If you love social media, you can even try out a hybrid approach! Get the professionals to do the market research and build a strong keyword and persona led content strategy. You can then create the content, publish the posts and share the results with the agency for a recap.
They say, nothing like trying!
Interesting in learning more about content marketing? Here is how to use content marketing for sales growth for startups