Top Social Media Marketing Agencies

What Is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing (SMM) is a process of managing social media accounts to market specific products and services, and to raise brand awareness.

This type of marketing provides your company with the following core benefits:

• Building connections: Social media marketing can provide your company with both B2B and B2C connections. Whether your company uses content platforms, social sites, or microblogging services, be sure that you can reach your target audience.
• Engaging with audience: After connecting with your audience, you will have an opportunity of an on-going engagement. This gives you higher possibility of conversion from leads to sales.
• Gathering data: A well-structured social media marketing strategy can deliver valuable information about how your audience responds to your brand. You can extract the key information, turn it into market analysis and move to further strategizing your social media plan.

What Is A Social Media Marketing Agency?

This type of agency is in charge of representing your brand across different social platforms with the aim to enhance your online presence.

These platforms may include:

• Facebook
  
• Twitter
  
• Instagram
  
• LinkedIn
  
• Pinterest
  
• Snapchat
  
• And more

These companies use social media channels to connect you with your target market, increase brand awareness, drive website traffic and boost your sales.

They are strategic, data-driven and creative. Depending on their unique offering, some may even provide content writing and graphic design services.

These experts determine your most important KPIs. Then they set clear goals and run different campaigns to help you achieve your goals.

The number of social media users is constantly on the increase and by 2025 it is projected to grow up to 4.41 billion.

This is why more and more businesses are using social media as a means of a marketing channel. In fact, in 2019, 91% of businesses used social media services to accelerate their business growth. (Statista)

What Does A Social Media Marketing Company Do?

These specialized companies conduct a variety of brand-building tasks, such as:

• Leverage the proper network: Although it’s true that a brand should be present on all available social media channels, not all of them will yield the same results in terms of user engagement. That’s why the best agencies will know which ones to focus on and align its user base with your goals. They’ll also adjust content for different platforms.
• Focus on visual branding: Branding must be unified across multiple social media. These specialists understand this and will create visual branding consistent across all channels.
• Create a consistent voice and message: Much like the visuals, a consistent voice will also help your brand grow a personality and develop a unique feeling that your target audience will associate you with. This is done via message post, copy and all other forms of written material. Brand voice is achieved through consistent character, tone, language and purpose across all channels.
• Post regularly and frequently: The audience on social media has a short attention span and is bombarded by hundreds and thousands of similar pages they are following. If you don’t post updates on a regular basis, your business may be forgotten and social marketing companies are there to make sure that doesn’t happen.
• Connect with other influential brands and influential users: The circle of influence is important on social media. Connecting with established brands that have hundreds of thousands if not millions of followers can help your business grow too.
• Engage and interact with users: This step could be vital. While posting should never be neglected, it’s answering people’s comments and messages where the brand is made. This gives your brand a humane dimension. People love to see less automation and more ordinary, human interaction behind products and services.
• And more

What Are The Different Types Of Social Media Marketing Agencies?

Based on the social media marketing services they offer, we can classify these agencies into several categories:

• Consulting: There are some companies that mainly focus on providing you with tips and advice on how to manage your social accounts the right way.
• Campaign management: Some of these agencies are only responsible for managing social campaigns. Their tasks include planning, running ads and measuring results by tracking different metrics.
• Publishing: These specialized agencies particularly focus on publishing content on social platforms consistently. They follow best practices like posting at the desired time, targeting the right audience, incorporating branding elements, etc.
• Content creation: Some of them, on the other hand, have a skilled team of designers, writers and editors who help you with creating original and high-quality content.
• Community management: These companies manage your leads and their primary responsibilities include engaging with them, solving their problems and answering their questions with the aim to turn them into loyal clients.
• Full-service management: These agencies offer a full range of management services that help you establish or strengthen your online presence.

In addition, we can also divide them according to the platforms they specialize in.

Thereby, some of them deliberately choose to provide strategies for particular channels like Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, while others are qualified in the most popular platforms on the market.

How Much Do Social Media Marketing Companies Charge For Their Services?

The price your business will have to pay for quality specialized services depends on these:

• Their location (onshore or offshore)
• The number of services you’d require from them
• The type of your business
• The platform used
• Influencer targeting
• Their hourly rate

As for the last bullet point, these firms usually charge anything from $15 to well over $120 an hour. This depends on the level of experience an agency has.

The least experienced agencies charge at a rate of $15 to $50 per hour, and those with medium experience charge at $50 to $100/hr. The agencies with 5 to 10 years of experience will exceed the $120/hr mark.

Social media campaigns usually run on a monthly budget of $400 to $5,000+. This, obviously, varies vastly from agency to agency. Some agencies charge a fixed monthly fee, some charge per hour and others opt for a per-project approach.

Our all-encompassing list of top specialized companies above contains time-saving info on exact rates for each entry and their average hourly costs.

5 Reasons To Hire A Social Media Marketing Agency

There are numerous ways you can optimize your business strategy with social networks, from acquiring high-quality leads to establishing your brand in the digital world. To reap the most fruitful benefits of social media, it is advisable to hire experts who can deliver the planned results.

Here are the top five reasons to outsource these leading services:

1. Following The Best Practices

58% of social media users prefer to see visual over written content according to Sprout Social.

The key to maximizing your social media presence and getting the most out of your campaigns is following the best practices.

However, since every social platform is different and has its own guidelines, best posting times and post types, you may not be able to be in pace with the changing methodologies that are proven to work.

This is where social media experts can be quite useful.

They always keep track of algorithm updates and are up to date with emerging trends. So, these experts know what are the best methods and tactics to incorporate into their strategies and grow your brand.

For instance, you probably didn’t know that social users like to see more visual than written content in their news feeds or that tweets containing visual content are 94% more likely to be retweeted, did you?

2. Having Access To Premium Tools

On average, the best Facebook posting time is 9 a.m. across all industries according to HubSpot.

It takes a great deal of premium and expensive tools to deliver an effective social media strategy and measurable results, tools that not everyone can afford to use.

Social media firms spend thousands of dollars on image libraries and editors, grammar checkers, reporting platforms, analytical, scheduling and a range of other useful tools.

These resources will allow your partner agency to understand your target market well, successfully implement campaigns, provide you with important metrics on your brand performance and improve your ROI.

For example, some tools are able to tell the best posting times and days across all platforms. Knowing when to share something new each day is important in making sure that your audience sees your posts.

3. Gaining A Competitive Advantage

This type of agency is qualified in managing your presence on social platforms. And its job does not only incorporate sharing posts just for the sake of being active.

But, one of its main responsibilities is to promote your products, services, benefits or solutions on an improved level than other players in your industry.

It is able to deal with competitive environments. By doing an in-depth analysis of your competitors, they will find out their strengths and weaknesses and use them to create a strategy that will push you a step ahead of them.

Thanks to their specialized expertise, you can gain a competitive advantage and increase your profit.

4. Receiving Meaningful Reports

These top-ratted specialists always track important metrics to analyze your brand’s performance and monitor its strategies. So, they will provide you with analytical reports from time to time.

They are important for you to follow because they will give you an insight into how successful your campaigns are, how much website traffic they bring, how many conversions they make and more.

So, these specialists will focus on tracking your:

• Share of voice
• Reach
• Engagement
• Influence
• Acquisition
• Conversion

These metrics and reports require specialized knowledge and need to be provided by experts who have the proper skills to leverage them in order to improve the strategies and contribute to your business growth.

5. Increasing Productivity

Giving your industry competent employees the tasks to handle your social media management can reduce their productivity and lead to burn-out.

They don’t have the required skills to manage your social platforms and provide social media tips to grow your business. And while you believe you are reducing your costs by asking them to do so, you are wasting time and money since they may struggle to cover all the responsibilities social media marketing demands.

Handling these tasks to a professional company, on the other hand, will improve your productivity and remove all the stress from your people.

When working with these highly qualified experts, no employee training is required and no time for their work is taken. Instead, you allow them to focus on their other important duties where they can use their strengths and potential to the fullest.

How To Choose The Best Social Media Marketing Company

Here are a few tips that can help you pick the right partner for your business needs.

1. Account Management

Your team of dedicated managers and strategists will be the voices representing your brand across the entire Internet, determining the content to share and targeting the perfect demographics on every network.

Make sure you know how often they plan to work with you, the workflow structure, and what platforms they use to identify trends and schedule posts.

Plus, personal attention is important for this communication channel. 71% of consumers are likely to recommend a brand if they receive great customer service or community management on a social platform.

2. Expertise

Before you hire a specialized agency, take stock of your needs. Do you need full-service strategy and management, or are you hoping to focus on one or two channels?

Perhaps you have a strong everyday dedicated team in place but need assistance with large-scale campaigns. Regardless, there is an agency with a team of experts who are equipped to handle your personalized business objectives.

3. Portfolio

The best local and global specialized agencies will have concrete work that can back up their top tools, analytics, and marketing buzzwords.

Research their clients, campaigns and general community management to make sure they can deliver the results you want. Then, ask them specific questions about their prior projects and results.

4. Audit

The best way to determine if a company is the right fit for your brand is to watch them in action with your brand. Request an audit or trial period for their services to see what they suggest to determine objectives, grow your brand and reach your business goals.

Keep in mind that many great agencies won’t give away all their knowledge without a signed contract. However, worthwhile firms will be able to produce partial audits, concrete advice, and enough strategy suggestions to show whether or not they have the skills and expertise to produce results.

25 Questions To Ask A Potential Social Media Marketing Firm

1. How will you determine our demographic on each social platform?
2. How do you determine a strategy to turn social followers into consumers?
3. How will you find trending content that should be shared? How will you determine the channels it will perform well on?
4. How do you determine the right influencers for brands to partner with?
5. Do you have a team of designers or videographers on hand to create images, graphics, and social videos? Will they cost extra?
6. How do you identify goals for each social platform and large-scale campaign?
7. How do you plan to determine timelines and deliverables?
8. What tools do you use to manage daily social media activity and community management?
9. What resources help you identify trends and popular content for various networks?
10. What clients have you worked with in the past?
11. What social media tactics do you have experience in (strategy, daily management, community management, dedicated campaigns, cross-platform campaigns, influencer marketing, etc.)?
12. Tell us about some successful projects. What aspects made them so rewarding?
13. What projects have you worked on that didn’t produce the results you desired? What did you learn from those campaigns and initiatives?
14. How do your processes and results differ from other agencies? What makes your work stand out?
15. What programs do you use to track analytics? Will we have access to those tools as well?
16. What metrics do you report? What is considered a strong performance on the major platforms?
17. How often will you report to us on campaign success? What will be included in each report?
18. What process do you have in place for adjusting a strategy based on data?
19. Is your pay structure by hour or a flat fee?
20. Which team members will be dedicated to our account or project?
21. How many drafts of each project can we expect?
22. How many in-person and/or digital meetings will we have each week or month?
23. Are deliverables or meetings capped?
24. Will any day-to-day operations have any extra costs, such as labor, external public relations or program subscription fees?
25. If we execute a large-scale digital campaign, is there a possibility of extra costs?

How To Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy

Step #1: Establish Your Goals

Before starting your social media campaign, take into account the social media KPI (key performance indicator) that will lead you throughout your social media processes.

Creating a social media marketing plan is a long and detailed process that needs a lot of testing, previous experience in social media management, or at least in-depth research. Having all three would be the best option.

So, when establishing your social media goals, aim to understand how your previous campaigns won their audience. Also, do thorough research on how you can optimize your current ideas to establish a realistic plan for your company.

Step #2: Define The Budget

The cost to advertise on social media depends on the several business goals you set. Decide from the get-go how much you need to invest in different social media actions, such as:

• Content production
• Ads budget
• Campaign initiatives
• Social media tools
• And more

Step #3: Analyze Metrics

Ever wondered about what is social media analytics and how it can benefit your company?

If you want to reach a wider audience, you should start by testing three different ads on a certain social media account. Most channels have analytics automatically measured, so you don’t have to use additional tools.

Then, extract the metrics that provide the number of reached accounts. Analyze them before choosing that one ad that fits your goals.

When working on your campaign, focus on social media metrics that matter for your company’s goals. This means that you should extract precisely specific numbers that give you output for repurposing your campaign.

5 Social Media Trends To Keep An Eye On

Social media can easily become the number one way to raise brand awareness.

It is of great importance to keep up with social media trends because activity on your online channels can influence your company’s conversion rate and attract prospective clients.

Below are some of the latest trends to watch if you want to succeed on social media:

Trend #1: Short Videos or Reels

Although YouTube is a leader when it comes to video, think about directing your video marketing strategy into some additional social media channels as short, snackable content.

You probably have created business accounts on the most popular social media platforms that support video content, such as:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• YouTube
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Pinterest
• Reddit

However, some social media networks may pick up traction at warp speed. You can leverage them to keep your company competitive in the market.

A good example is TikTok. This social media platform reached 740 million new users in 2021, according to Statista. Currently, small and large businesses alike are thinking of ways to promote their services or products on TikTok and appeal to younger audiences.

Trend #2: Community Building

When it comes to a long-term social media strategy, community-based activities are a great way to keep your audience up-to-date with your brand’s events.

By having a community around your brand, you create two-way communication with your audience, and your content gets the attention and engagement with its highly-targeted patrons.

So, always keep an eye out on social media platforms that help build communities, such as:

• WhatsApp
• Tumblr
• Facebook Messenger
• Flickr
• Medium
• Quora
• Viber
• Telegram
• Discord
• QQ
• And more

In addition, engaging with like-minded people in your industry makes the sales funnel easier to implement, and creates a higher conversion rate from leads to sales.

Think about the possibility to use some alternative social media platforms. As non-mainstream channels, these might bring you a fresh audience with similar interests to yours.

Trend #3: Social Responsibility

Enter a public discourse concerning social justice or environmental issues. This kind of sincere involvement can have a positive effect, especially on younger audiences who support the trend of business advocacy.

A strategy like this one serves to humanize your company through publishing content that your customers are passionate about, which increases their loyalty and trust toward your brand.

Trend #4: Customer Support

It is crucial to have a direct line of communication with the present customers to address potential issues in a quick and easy manner. Social media messages are an instant solution.

Also, it will benefit your PR when you respond to customers and help them out. Customers can tag your brand or comment on your official account to get your attention. Some social media networks have dedicated features like an automated response, a common inbox, or a chatbot.

Trend #5: Virtual Reality

Virtual reality can provide a full interaction of your customers with your product. This technological trend creates a sense of safety before purchasing the product itself, and can speed up the overall sales funnel timeline.

For example, Facebook already supports virtual reality with their hardware and software, and YouTube is experimenting with virtual reality by offering experiences such as watching concerts or doing sports activities.

It is time for your brand to jump on this train and see where it gets to lead you!

Last Tips To Consider After Hiring A Social Media Marketing Agency

The number of social media users is booming.

This is why businesses partner with social media firms to leverage their skills and knowledge to help them connect with their audience, increase their website traffic and boost their conversions.

To find the right agency for your business, go back to our table and compare companies based on their location, average rates and team size. Then, visit their websites and inspect their portfolios, reviews and testimonials.

Once you pick a partner and your project starts, make sure you:

• Dig into data: Always take into consideration every report you receive from your partner. They will not only give you an insight into how well your brand is doing online, but you will also understand whether the strategies work.
• Follow the latest trends: Social media best practices constantly change. So, following the latest trends will also help you understand what your partner is doing and why.
• Be cooperative: Sometimes your agency partner will need your cooperation. For instance, they will need info about your company, some news and even images of the working atmosphere. So, ensure you are always responsive and available to them.

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