Social media marketing, when executed well, can increase brand awareness, engagement, traffic to your website and ultimately bolster your business in a multitude of valuable ways. And what with billions of daily active users world-wide, it can connect you with your perfect customers.
That said, is it realistic for just one employee to successfully manage an online marketing campaign? Or should you consider outsourcing your needs to a third-party social media marketing agency instead? Read on for an honest view…
What is social media marketing?
First, what is social media marketing? As its name suggests, this form of marketing uses social media platforms to drive traffic, engage customers and increase brand awareness.
Social media has a tremendous presence and power in the world today. Facebook alone has around 2 billion daily users and around 3 billion users monthly. That’s a huge percentage of the globe in one place – many of which could be desperate to buy from you (if they knew you existed).
The right social media marketing agency or comprehensive in-house plan will aim to identify your target audience and successfully resonate with them. Once you know who your audience is, you can then effectively promote your products, generate leads, and ultimately increase conversions through your website.
Social media marketing is constantly evolving and involves huge levels of research, time and engagement often across multiple platforms in order to successfully leverage its true potential.
What kind of tasks are involved?
As you can already start to see, there is a tremendous amount of work that has to go into setting up and maintaining the right social media marketing strategy. Just keeping up with comments and replies can be time-consuming enough as it is, never mind actively crafting content and everything else in between.
Here are some of the key tasks you’d have to carry out for successful results:
- Research your target audience
- Choose specific platforms to target customers
- Establish important metrics
- Research your competition
- Create interesting and high-quality content
- Create a schedule for this content
- Publish content sticking to your schedule
- Reply to messages
- Engage in debates
- Evaluate your performance per post and platform
- Seek ways to improve your social media marketing presence and so on.
So, is it better to outsource to an agency?
Honestly? Unless you are a large corporation with the available resources to hire top talent and establish a dedicated in-house social media marketing department of your own, keeping it in house is rarely as beneficial as outsourcing to a reputable agency.
Again, using social media effectively is highly time and resource intensive. If you are serious about tapping into social media platforms and trying to really make the most of all they have to offer, you have to be realistic about what can be achieved by one person or a small in-house team.
On the other hand, you can save a lot of money by outsourcing the requirements to a dedicated agency and leverage their resources and expertise instead. This approach is almost certainly best for smaller businesses with a limited budget to allocate to social media.
