One of the most impactful changes of the 21st century has been the meteoric rise in social media use.
With the average person spending roughly 2 hours and 24 minutes on their go-to social media app every day, our love of socials has birthed a multi-billion dollar social media marketing industry of third-party agencies and consultants helping brands bridge the gap between their audience and their products or services.
If you have plans to launch your own social media agency in the future, or you’ve been in this space for a while and want to ensure your value proposition is up to scratch, here’s five social media services that agencies should offer their clients.
1. Strategy, Planning, Measurement
One of the key reasons that brands fall short of their social media marketing goals is that they fail to develop a clear strategy before launching their campaigns. This is one of the core areas where agencies can bring value to the table and help their clients move the needle in their social marketing KPIs.
Providing strategic social media services will involve identifying competitors and carrying out thorough market research, defining markers for success for a given social media campaign, then developing a content calendar that ensures alignment with the client’s marketing goals.
As this strategy is implemented, you’ll also measure the success of your strategy based on established objectives, looking at key metrics such as an increase in brand awareness and higher engagement with social media posts.
By applying your social marketing expertise to produce an effective strategy, you’ll help your clients apply their social media resources more efficiently and achieve their goals faster.
2. Platform Management
Though most brands who invest in social media marketing will have a specific platform that brings in the most engagement and value, having just one social profile simply isn’t enough in the modern marketing landscape.
Most brands understand the importance of being present on multiple popular social media platforms. However, it can be hard to find the bandwidth to maintain profiles across all these different channels.
Small businesses can benefit greatly from the expertise of social media marketing agencies for small businesses that understand their unique needs.
As an agency, offering a platform management service will cover essential social media management activities such as:
- Making sure scheduled content is adjusted to the nuances of a client’s platforms.
- Community management tasks such as responding to comments and DMs, managing the client’s online reputation, and fostering closer engagement with their target audience.
- Using social listening to keep the client updated on audience sentiment across different platforms.
With a robust approach to platform management, you can help maintain your clients’ reputation across multiple touchpoints, and steadily build their brand equity in the eyes of a diverse social media community.
3. Content Creation
Similarly to the issue of platform management, most brands understand the importance of social media content marketing, but aren’t able to meet the high demands of time and resources required to produce content up to a competitive standard.
As an agency, quality content creation is one of the most valuable social media services you can offer your clients. This will not only involve focused ideation to fill their content calendars with unique, interesting concepts, but using your knowledge of different platforms to tailor these concepts to the appropriate channels.
Content creation services can also focus on repurposing a brand’s best content to make it suitable for different social media channels.
If, for example, a client has an “ultimate guide” blog post on their website that gets a lot of traffic and engagement, you might want to leverage its success through content creation that adapts to the sensibilities of different platforms.
This might involve using key data sets to create a “mini infographic” for an Instagram post, breaking the blog up into different points and using each one for a series of LinkedIn posts, or using opinions stated in the original content to spark a stimulating conversation on X/Twitter. Effective Twitter marketing services are essential, and these specialized agencies can deliver the results your clients need.
As AI tools become a bigger and bigger driving force in social media, it’s likely that businesses will also seek out agencies who can share expertise in AI content creation and the role this should play in their strategy. Utilizing the right tools to enhance services can make all the difference, ensuring that your agency delivers top-notch results.
4. Research and Analysis
When brands start out managing their social media marketing in-house, their view of their campaigns’ impact is often limited to the basic likes and comments on a given post, alongside the in-built analytics dashboards maintained by social media platforms themselves.
Where the lack of bandwidth means that getting a third party tool isn’t worth the investment, outsourcing research and analytics to an agency is often the best way to build useful insights on their campaign and make incremental improvements.
With a tool like Highperformr social media analytics suite, for example, you’ll be able to help your clients with activities such as:
- Granular reports showing the visibility and engagement from different content and campaigns.
- Analyzing growth and engagement trends over a given period.
- Highlighting profiles that regularly engage with your social media accounts to identify potential influencers and leads.
- Using an AI assistant to receive tailored insights and recommendations that are likely to improve social media performance.
By sharing these analytics capabilities with your clients, you can help them towards a more well-rounded view of how their social media campaigns are performing against industry benchmarks, and develop powerful insights about their brand, their audience, and other variables to inform a more effective long-term strategy.
5. Training and Education
For many businesses, outsourcing social media marketing is intended to be a temporary bridge towards the ultimate goal of improving their in-house capabilities and spearheading their own social media campaigns in the future.
To make sure you’re accommodating for this need, it’s also a good idea to develop a service offering tailored towards training and educating your clients’ team members, thereby empowering them for more independent campaign planning, analysis, and other activities.
Some examples of training courses you can develop include:
- An introduction/overview training module that covers all the basic concepts of social media marketing along with best practices.
- Developing a social media strategy.
- Creating effective social media content while respecting the nuances and audiences of different platforms.
- Platform-specific courses, for example LinkedIn marketing, Instagram marketing, X/Twitter marketing, etc.
Aside from these types of courses, agencies can also take a more bespoke, consultancy-style approach to their training modules, charging a retainer to be on-call to a client’s marketing team and help them with specific projects and challenges as they arise. When it comes to LinkedIn marketing services, these agencies know exactly how to leverage the platform for your clients.
Many new agencies stay away from training and education modules, believing that they’ll push clients towards a state where they won’t require your core agency services. On the contrary, having a consultant’s unique view of a client’s business can open up great opportunities for upselling to solve the challenges and shortcomings you identify.
Supporting brands’ social media marketing as an agency can be a hugely fulfilling and lucrative way to apply your expertise, and focusing on the right social media services will help you develop a strong value proposition and close more deals.
If you’re looking for robust analytics, scheduling, community management, or AI tools to develop your social media agency’s tech stack, sign up to Highperformr for free today!
