It’s a question that has been faced by most marketing directors and business owners at some stage. Do I hire people in who solely work for me to deliver our marketing and manage our social channels or do I outsource social media management to an agency?
I’m not going to spend the rest of this article trying to get you to buy into the agency model. For some clients it works, for others it doesn’t.
What I would say though is that some of our best client relationships come from a 'hybrid' approach. These are the sort of client relationships where we, for example, devise the strategy, outline the overall approach and provide guidance on the content creation. The internal team deliver the day-to-day management (writing and publishing) of the channels and manage internal relationships with stakeholders and content providers. This is a solution that ultimately works for those clients and if it sounds like something you’d be interested in, it’s probably worth reading on!
As we see it, there are a number of key benefits to this approach:
Time:
We know that for businesses with small teams who are trying to manage a range of marketing channels, social media is often the first thing that is dropped. And even if it’s not dropped, it becomes a task that is simply done for the sake of being done. Content can quickly become un-inspiring and before you know it, social really isn’t performing for the business. The beauty of a hybrid approach is that an external agency can take away all of the strategy, reporting and design elements, leaving the internal team to focus on other things. It means the quality of the approach remains high, the delivery is cost effective and it doesn’t encroach on other marketing activities.
Experience:
We’re not here to bash junior staff but if we had a pound for every time there’s a 'junior' left in charge of social media... we’d be very rich people indeed. We aren't an agency where simply posting up content to get ‘likes’ is enough. Social goes far beyond that. We want to ensure that a brand's presence on social networks has a positive impact on the business. Everything we do is based upon marketplace insights and has an objective behind it. We deliver our services for a variety of different organisations, big and small, which gives us the ability apply learnings from one sector to deliver an impact in another. All of this is something you are unlikely to get from an internal junior marketing person. But it’s not about us taking over from them, we support them and give them everything they need to deliver the best results they can and work with them to better understand your brand's culture and requirements.
Support:
Staff get sick, they take holidays, there are emergencies that they need to deal with in the business. Whatever it is that takes the focus away, the result is that the social media output often drops first. This is where an agency can be on hand to help. If we’ve written the strategy, we understand the business and therefore can easily step in to keep things going no matter what happens internally.
To summarise, if you have looked through our site you’ll see there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. There are no packages stating a number of posts or hours worked each month. We understand that the requirements of each individual client are just that, individual. It’s about working the clients and their teams to establish what approach delivers the best return for their budgets/resources. If you'd like to know more, feel free to call us on 0141 530 1236 and we’ll be happy to chat about a solution that works for you.