Given the tenuous state of the economy and the fact that companies are seemingly announcing sweeping job cuts every day, now seems like the right time to talk about when to use an agency, for what and how to get the most out of your agency relationship.

Before you hire an agency

Quite simply, use an agency when you need help. You might need help because you don’t have enough in-house hands on deck. Or you because you need a deeper expertise in a certain area of social. But the first thing you must define when exploring using an agency partner is what you need their support with.

Don’t start reaching out to agencies with vague ideas like “We need help with social media.” Be specific.

Do you need help developing a strategy? Creating content? Managing your channels on a day-to-day basis? The “what” should determine the type of agency you look for and also how you screen your candidates. There are even agencies that specialize in certain industries or sub-areas of social. You set yourself up for failure if you cannot clearly and specifically say what kind of help you need. Agencies are very good at taking direction. They are not as good at making up their own direction and hoping it hits the mark.

Another common mistake companies make is putting someone in charge of shopping for an agency who doesn’t understand social media. Let’s put it this way: If I was hiring a new chef at my restaurant, would I ask another chef to interview the candidates, or the hostess who never sets foot in the kitchen? To hire a social media agency, you need someone who knows something about social media to help you select one.

It’s pretty easy for agencies to talk a good game if they are talking to someone who doesn’t have the experience to discern the posers from the real ones. Even if you have to hire an outside expert to help you vet your candidates, that’s still better than making an uninformed choice and hoping it works out. (By the way, people also make this same mistake when hiring internal roles.)

When to use an agency

Given the current state of things, these are the ways I most commonly see agency partners being used in an effective and impactful way:

Strategy

If your organization does not have a fully baked social media strategy, this is one area where agencies can really help. Find an experienced agency that has designed corporate-level social strategies for clients like yours. Ask for examples and references. Look for a partner that has experience that is applicable to your company, your industry and what you do.

Content creation

Unless you’ve been blessed with an in-house creative team, one of the most valuable things an agency can do is free up your social media folks to do social and not make six versions of every post. This can also be a great area for agencies if you have video, animation, graphics or other more sophisticated content needs.

Editorial calendar management

I am a big fan of what I call the “air traffic controller” role on a social media team. That’s the person who watches the entire flow of content going out on your channels and serves as the final check and gatekeeper. This is a role an agency can fill if needed.

Governance

One area that often falls between the cracks is governance—basically control and security of your social media accounts. While this is important for any company, large enterprises are especially at risk. A hacked account can mean a ton of brand damage as well as a crisis to manage that is of your own making—the worst kind of crisis there is. Unfortunately, many social media teams are just stretched too thin to make this a priority, and it’s an area where an agency might be able to help.

Paid social

It’s no secret that paid social media is a whole other can of worms, and is increasingly a specialized area of expertise. If you don’t have a paid expert on your team, it might be something to outsource—to the right agency.

I have seen agencies incorrectly set up ads, mistarget them and waste budget. I’ve also seen agencies set up ad campaigns that basically compete for the same audience—driving up the auction and spending more of their client’s money because they are bidding against themselves. Check in on your ad campaigns, monitor their performance, double check the targeting and ask your agency for regular reporting about their efforts and results. If your agency is hesitant to offer you metrics, something isn’t right. Accountability is important, especially here.

Community management

It is possible to bring on an agency to manage your channels daily, but this is one I’d offer with a grain of salt. I don’t like trusting my channels and brand voice to just anyone assigned from the agency team. I also believe that outsourcing community management generally makes you slower and less responsive since it adds a layer of communication for every question that needs to be answered.

The other thing to consider is cost: Depending on what your agency charges, it may be cheaper to hire a part-time resource or a junior level staff member to do your community management. Do the math.

Invest in the right partners (and hold up your side of the deal)

If you rely on your agency for things outside of this list, maybe it’s time for a re-think. If your agency manages everything from soup to nuts with no oversight, no accountability and no input from you, they’re running the show instead of the other way around.

Remember, you are the paying client. You direct the work, and get to say what is acceptable. But that requires you to be involved and informed. I have seen way too many social media agencies run all over their clients because the clients didn’t know enough about the topic and the agency had too much free reign.

All of that said, I don’t want agencies to get a bad rap. I mean, I am now the CEO of my own agency so I better like them! It is totally possible to find a great agency partner and build a wonderful working relationship with them that brings value for your team and brand. But if your relationship with your agency is not like that, then you have some work to do.

With budgets tightening and expenses being scrutinized in board rooms globally, now is the time to evaluate your agency relationships. If and when you’re asked to defend the spend, you want to ensure the collaboration (and output) is worth fighting for.

Ready to find the best partner for your brand? Follow our template for creating a strong social media RFP.

The post How to work with social media agencies (and where teams always go wrong) appeared first on Sprout Social.

Consider your status check-ins, inquiries and of course, approvals. These everyday communications can make a huge impact on how your client understands your work. A few tweaks can completely transform a cumbersome process into an experience that positions your agency as a true creative partner.

Optimizing your internal and external processes will benefit your end-to-end social media approval workflows while still instilling confidence in your work. In this article, we’ll go over how these day-to-day interactions can strengthen agency-client relationships.

How approval workflows strengthen agency-client relationships

Some 92% of agencies offer social media management as part of their overall service package, according to Sprout’s Agency Pricing & Packaging Report. As social becomes a core part of agency offerings, you need to have the infrastructure to operate smoothly at scale.

Post approvals are a small but powerful step in any social media service offering. At their worst, they can involve a lot of follow-up, creating a time suck for you and your client. At their best, they can create client stickiness. Agency-client relationships get stronger when these processes become mini-opportunities for collaboration. Here’s how:

1. Demonstrate the value of social with a routine touchpoint

Social is your world, but for your clients, it’s just a fraction of their day-to-day. Approval workflows promote more active collaboration between you and your client’s teams.

Think of it this way: Your social performance reports summarize the results of all the hard work you’re putting in. Your social media approval workflow gives your clients a peek behind the curtain, providing a more granular view into your posting schedule without a heavy time investment.

This helps your client gain a deeper understanding of the strategy work you’ve put into developing their social presence. The more your clients understand your strategy, the better equipped they are to work as a creative partner to your team during content brainstorms.

2. Prevent mistakes with internal approvals

A good reputation is hard-earned and—given the speed of social—easily damaged. While successful client-agency partnerships are typically supported through your performance against deliverables, sometimes it’s what you don’t do that counts.

Maintain a strong foundation of trust by building quality assurance into your publishing process. In Sprout, this is done by adding an internal review step to your workflow to ensure your work is “agency approved” before its time for client review.

Adding an internal review step to your social media approval process can serve as a safeguard that prevents costly mistakes or off-brand messaging from reaching your client—let alone their social media profiles. These measures ensure your client only sees quality work which helps build trust and a positive rapport.

3. Communicate with external stakeholders fast

After your work has gone through quality assurance, it’s time to send it off to the client for feedback. Sprout’s external workflow feature enables seamless client communication.

Exchanging communication feedback on several channels like Google Docs, a spreadsheet or an email thread can cause important details or context to get lost.

When agencies and stakeholders are passing social content back and forth on these platforms, it’s easy context—like how a post will look with an image and copy once published—to get lost. But Sprout’s approval workflow shows network previews, so external approvers can see what posts look like once published.

Sprout also enables external stakeholders to review and give feedback on social posts directly in our platform—even if they aren’t a Sprout user. The external approver doesn’t need to learn how to use our user interface or log in. This streamlined process, similar to the features offered by a social network manager app, ensures efficient communication and collaboration.

They can simply verify their email address, review the posts, comment with feedback and approve/deny the posts.

If internal approvals and commentary are still underway, external clients can’t see the conversation, allowing agencies to only share relevant information that’s important to their clients.

Plus, Sprout will send external approvers automated reminder emails leading up to the deadline if an approval hasn’t come through yet. This not only saves time and effort, but it alleviates the common pain point of remembering to follow up.

Social media marketing agencies also benefit from this external workflow feature because it simplifies managing multiple clients and stakeholders. Instead of using multiple platforms to communicate and review deliverables, agencies have one source of truth for execution.

4. Promote collaboration in times of crisis

Typically, you’ll be working with a set approval and publishing schedule. But when a crisis strikes and your schedule is thrown out the window, post approvals help support sudden shifts in content production.

When COVID-19 shelter-in-place mandates took effect in March 2020, Communicators Group had to revisit all of its clients’ social calendars. The agency had to work quickly to establish a strategy for publishing timely updates, many of which were being announced by the hour.

To publish important updates quickly and accurately, their team used Sprout’s Message Approval Workflow to draft, review and schedule new content.

“For several months, we completed 100% of our posts directly through the Message Approval Workflow feature simply because I could no longer plan out a month in advance,” said Raven Gill, Social Media Manager at Communicators Group.

“We’ve gotten to a better position where I can go back to monthly planning. But for some clients, we’re still working out of approval workflows because of how consistently things are changing.”

Communicators Group was able to act as a true partner, simplifying an already stressful situation for their many clients. Designing your approval workflow with crisis prevention in mind can help you do the same.

With Sprout’s external approvals, agencies can get client feedback on crisis communication posts fast. After client approval, the agency can make the changes and publish without leaving Sprout’s platform. Workflows like this during times of crisis will strengthen your agency-client relationship because they eliminate any risk of crucial messages getting lost in translation.

5. Retain and grow your business

Some 67% of digital marketing agencies say the reason clients choose them is because they establish themselves as strategic partners. By promoting collaboration, efficiency and quality, your social media approval workflow can strengthen your client-agency partnership and your business.

Strong client relationships drive referrals. Word-of-mouth referrals are one of the most popular ways agencies drive new business. Having operations that streamline collaboration within your existing client relationships can ultimately fuel your new business strategy.

Well-designed processes strengthen agency-client relationships by showing you can scale social efforts without sacrificing quality or brand voice. It may seem simple, but it’s also incredibly effective.

Creating a workflow that supports lasting agency-client relationships

Opportunities for agency-client collaboration can be found in surprising places. Take routine processes and use them as an opportunity to showcase the true value of your agency.

Sprout’s Message Approval Workflow feature can handle every step of your process in one integrated system. And with external approvals, communication with clients–especially during times of crisis– is faster and easier because your clients can provide commentary even if they aren’t a Sprout customer.

Build your approval workflow and see how else Sprout can support your growing agency by signing up for a free trial today.

Start your free Sprout trial

The post Strengthen agency-client relationships with social approval workflows appeared first on Sprout Social.

Agencies are expanding their services and teams to keep up with the ever-changing social media landscape. And creators and influencers are working with larger clientele, creating ad-hoc agencies to keep up with the demand.

In this article, we’ll give tips for those looking to create an agency and agency veterans looking to grow and hire top talent.

Starting your own social media marketing agency

If you’re looking to create an agency, this section is dedicated to you. If you already have an established agency, skip to the next section.

Here are five tips for starting your own social media marketing agency:

1. Define your niche and services

Before you move forward, you need to determine your niche. Tailoring your niche will help you define your service offerings and your potential clientele. Your agency can be industry specific (B2B, tech, beauty etc) or platform-specific. For example, many TikTok marketing agencies specialize in creative productions and talent management.

Once you confirm your niche, begin thinking about the range of services you want to provide. Modern agencies offer services that include creative, strategic and tactical support across social channels.

Publishing, strategy development, social media contest management, performance reporting and advertising campaigns are just a few examples of social media marketing agency services. Since agencies can offer a variety of services, specialization is very common.

According to our Agency Pricing and Packaging Report, 33% of agencies describe themselves as full-service:

Defining your social media agency services will also determine the tools you want to use and your pricing, which leads us to our next tip: set your prices.

2. Set your pricing

As you grow, you’ll be able to charge more and adjust your business margins, but here’s a glance at average monthly pricing based on our data:

Think about how you want to charge your clients as well. You can offer a la carte services, value-based pricing, packaged services or standard pricing with customized add-ons. You can also change per client.

3. Create a business plan

As they say, a dream without a plan is just a wish. The same goes for creating your social media marketing agency. You need to create a business plan to lead your decision-making as an agency owner. More importantly, you need a solid financial foundation to get started and continue operating.

4. Build and nurture your clientele

This is one of the most important parts of building your marketing agency. Note that the amount of clients an agency can service depends on its size.

Here’s a quick glance at the average number of clients by agency size, according to our report:

• Nearly 40% of SMB agencies average between 5-10 clients, and an additional 32% average 1-5 clients.
• Mid-sized agencies most commonly (31%) average 5-10 clients, followed by 28% that average 10-20 clients.
• A quarter of enterprise agencies average 10-20 clients, 19% average 20-40 and 16% average more than 40 clients.

There are several methods you can use to help grow your brand. Here are a few ways to build your clientele when you’re starting your agency:

• Pitch to clients within your niche
• Use your current network to secure clients and projects
• Attend conferences so you can network and create connections in person
• Pay attention to freelance websites for potential clients/projects
• Embrace social selling and use online communities like LinkedIn to identify prospects
• Run events like webinars to increase brand awareness
• Volunteer pro-bono or discounted services for a non-profit to show your brand values and earn experience

5. Hire employees

As you grow, you’ll need more employees. You won’t have a full team starting out and that’s okay.

You might only be able to handle a team of two to three people at first because your hiring relies on your financial resources. If you already have a team, evaluate the skills they encompass, then consider which roles are non-negotiable for you at the moment. A content writer, graphic designer, lead generation marketer and an accountant are some examples of good roles to help launch your agency.

6. Track your growth and improve your portfolio

Learning how to start a social media marketing agency won’t happen overnight. You’ll need to track your high and low points to determine the next steps for improving and scaling your business. Even the biggest social media marketing agencies evaluate their performance, so get into the habit of reviewing and tracking your growth.

Along with tracking how far you’ve come, make sure to continue adding to your portfolio. A good portfolio will illustrate why potential clients should work with your agency. Whenever your agency closes out a project, add it to your portfolio. Consider adding testimonials or case studies to strengthen your experience even more.

A case for growing your social media marketing agency services

Social media has quickly matured over the years, requiring marketing professionals to create more sophisticated strategies with efforts tied to business impact. Brands are looking to agencies to help them tackle complex challenges and stay ahead of their competitors.

Modern agencies are also grappling with the challenges of more brands shifting their marketing functions in-house. Thus, the range of services offered by social media marketing agencies has exploded over the past two years, becoming more specialized to meet the needs of today’s clients.

According to our data, over half of agencies have added new services in the past 12 months and more than a third have prioritized core services. Those that haven’t already created new services plan to do so within the next 12-24 months.

To keep up with the landscape, many agencies are expanding their services from traditional executional work to more strategic advising and consulting. Although there’s still a need for executional work, three of the top five most offered social media marketing services lean toward strategy.

The most popular agency services include social media strategy (97%), content creation and publishing (94%), social media management (92%), paid social (87%) and social media analytics (86%). Hands-on services like social media engagement and community management are less popular compared to 2020.

However, expanding your services isn’t possible without the right staff on board. Once you have a talented team secured, your agency can grow and develop more social media marketing services.

Staffing your agency: 5 best practices to find and retain top talent

According to our data, during times of economic uncertainty, agencies focus on client retention and growth, refining agency expertise and lowering fixed costs. A whopping 80% of agencies say retaining clients is the #1 focus during economic uncertainty as well.

This is why retaining your current employees is so imperative. Your team can retain clients because they already have the experience required to do so. And strong, established relationships with clientele drive referrals—90% of agencies rely on word-of-mouth or referrals to drive new business.

Along with retention, staffing your agency with top talent is just as important. Expanding your team could help you address the growing amount of services clients expect and many agencies are incorporating. Plus, dispersing a workload across a large team can widen bandwidth and help your team avoid burnout.

Here are five best practices to help your discover and retain top talent:

1. Write relevant job descriptions

The good thing about hiring for a social media marketing agency is that your future employees are already online. The hard part? Crafting a job description that will attract ideal candidates and make your brand stand apart in the sea of applications.

A straight-foward, thoughtful job description will attract qualified talent because it shows you’re able to understand the requirements of the role. It also shows your brand has transparent communication.

Also consider if and how the job description includes inclusive language. We all have implicit biases that can sneak into the hiring process. Having a diverse team isn’t just about representation—it’s about having a diversity of thought, experience and skills necessary to build your brand. An inclusive description can encourage applicants from marginalized groups to submit their applications.

2. Take advantage of social recruiting and employee advocacy

Again, meet potential teammates where they are and utilize social recruiting. Job seekers are already following companies on sites like LinkedIn to find opportunities. Social media allows recruiters to find qualified candidates faster and can help narrow down the applicant pool too, so take advantage of it. Check out our guide on creative hiring post examples to learn how to set your brand apart in the marketplace.

Plus, if your agency implements social recruiting effectively, you give prospective candidates a glimpse into your company’s culture. Sprinkle in some employee advocacy content and you’ve increased your recruitment reach significantly. A current employee sharing a job listing while raving about working for your agency goes a long way.

3. Consider flexible working hours

Today’s job seekers are looking for positions that will allow them to work from home or work flexible hours. It’s the new norm in our post-2020 world and it isn’t going anyway. Potential candidates will be attracted to the flexibility, but it’s a win for your brand too. Widening working hours allows brands to cover different time zones, targeting a more diverse location range and hopefully more clientele.

4. Hire for specialized roles

The days of the jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none professionals are fading away. Clients are requiring more specialized services and your team will need to follow suit to keep up in the current landscape. Agencies are notorious for high-stakes, fast-paced environments, but this type of culture isn’t effective or sustainable, which leads to our next tip: help avoid burnout.

5. Help current teammates avoid burnout

If you’re interested in retaining your top talent, this tip is very important. If your current teammates feel frequently overwhelmed with their workload or feel unheard, they’re at risk of burnout. In extreme cases, they could even pursue quiet quitting.

Only 29% of social media marketers say they’re comfortable talking about burnout with a direct manager. Creating a culture of transparency, trust and support can motivate your current team to continue doing great work.

Elevate your social media agency services with social listening

Understanding the current agency climate and how to attract and retain top talent is just the beginning of scaling your brand.

To learn more ways to grow your business, read our guide on social media marketing agencies and services and discovery why businesses are looking to hire them.

The post How to start and grow a social media marketing agency appeared first on Sprout Social.

After all, the expertise and time required to run social campaigns involves more than most companies can handle in-house.

This is especially true for smaller marketing teams struggling with social growth.

That’s why outsourcing social media is so common for brands big and small.

Because putting your online presence in experts’s hands ensures you’re seeing actual returns for your investment in social.

This guide breaks down the benefits, challenges and key considerations for anyone on the fence about social media outsourcing.

The biggest benefits of outsourcing social media

Defaulting to doing social in-house might seem like the right move.

However, consider these key benefits of contracting out your social marketing we’ve outlined below.

Instant expertise and more scalability

Much like you’d hire an SEO expert to improve your search rankings or a sales rep to close more deals, seasoned social experts can produce meaningful results for your business.

Although some critics might label social media an “easier” channel that any marketer can handle, they’re mistaken. Given social’s importance when it comes to lead generation and customer retention, you can’t afford to treat your presence as an afterthought or leave it in inexperienced hands.

Through outsourcing social media, you can:

• Identify opportunities and shortcomings from your current social presence
• Produce specific outcomes such as more leads, faster replies and greater brand awareness)
• Grow your presence on specific social platforms (think: getting more Instagram followers, managing a community on Twitter)

Seasoned social media experts have the resources and know-how to accomplish all of the above. With instant access to their abilities, you can scale your business faster.

Working with an agency isn’t just the work hours being allocated so your specialists can focus on business growth, but it’s also the tools, expertise, and knowledge. Particularly with social, it’s an intersection of design, writing, storytelling, and community management. Not to mention the platform-specific knowledge and nuances. All these moving parts come together as an ongoing conversation with your audience. As it changes and evolves, it can be hard to understand what’s lacking or where to go when you are too close to the business.

Bowie Fan
Social Media Marketing Specialist, NVISION

Access to premium marketing tools

Another added bonus of social media outsourcing is the chance to take advantage of some seriously powerful digital marketing tools.

For smaller brands, premium analytics, reporting and advertising tools are often out of reach. That’s because they require either a big budget or specialized knowledge to manage.

On the flip side, agencies rely on powerhouse tools, including Sprout Social, to encourage their clients’ growth. When you work with an agency, those tools become “yours” in a sense.

Gain crucial insights into your social presence

Piggybacking on the point above, agencies can provide invaluable insights via reporting and analytics tools such as:

• Where your most valuable social leads are coming from
• Top-performing content and social platforms
• Opportunities to optimize your audience targeting

Working with an agency gives you a sort of gut-check and a second opinion on your social strategy at large. They can tell at a glance what’s working and what’s not.

Increase your social media response time

If you don’t have the bandwidth to handle your customer questions and concerns, outsourcing social media can help manage these relationships.

Increasing your social media response time is essential for customer retention and standing out against competitors. Rather than let your most valuable interactions go unchecked, agencies have the ability to handle real-time concerns and set up automation to follow up with customers.

Free up time for your in-house talent

If nothing else, social media outsourcing can remove time-consuming and stressful tasks from your marketing team’s plate.

We get that marketing teams often juggle a variety of roles. That said, being an expert email marketer or content creator does not make you an expert in social media (and vice-versa).

It’s important for the sake of employee engagement that your workers focus on their strengths.

5 questions to answer before outsourcing social media

Let’s be clear: not every company needs to outsource social media.

Managing social in-house is obviously fair game for teams with the right talent and processes in place. Also, consider that outsourcing means much more than just handing over the proverbial keys to your social presence and expecting results.

Even if you’re fairly confident in your decision to outsource social media, make sure you answer the following five questions first.

1. “How much time does my business have to devote to social media marketing?”

Chances are you’re interested in outsourcing due to time or resource restraints, right?

But agencies aren’t mind-readers or miracle-workers. For starters, you should expect to provide them with:

• Brand assets and creatives
• New pieces of content
• Guidance in terms of goals and KPIs

Remember: as a brand, you’re responsible for establishing expectations and empowering whoever you hire.

2. “Have we defined our brand voice and values?”

Agencies work with clients of all shapes and sizes.

But how social experts approach any given client in terms of messaging varies wildly from brand to brand.

For example, a fashion brand targeting Gen Z on Instagram is going to be totally different than, say, managing a community of older small business owners on Facebook.

To establish your mission and uniqueness and to make any new hire’s job easier, defining your brand voice should be a top priority. So should hooking up your agency with a style guide that highlights how to talk to your target audience.

3. “What are our social media marketing goals?”

Simply put, you need to figure out what your end-game of social media outsourcing is.

Brand awareness? Better customer service and support? Leads and sales?

There are no wrong answers here. That said, your answer will ultimately influence both your budget and the strategy of the agency you hire.

4. “How much of our social media strategy is documented?”

Keep in mind that there are different degrees of social media outsourcing.

Sure, some brands might need an agency to brainstorm their social presence from scratch.

But others could benefit from integrating a freelancer into an existing workflow or approval process. The more you already have documented, the better.

5. “Has our social presence plateaued? Do we need a fresh perspective?”

The answer here should be pretty straightforward.

That is, are you moving the needle on your most important metrics of KPIs? If you’re not sure what those even are, you probably need a helping hand.

The challenges of social media outsourcing

Again, outsourcing social media isn’t as easy as flipping a switch.

And we’ll bite: hiring an agency can be a headache (but it definitely doesn’t have to be). Let’s quickly break down some of the struggles that businesses face when working with an agency.

Finding the right talent (at the right price)

There’s no shortage of agencies and freelancers out there.

But there’s a huge difference between hiring a freelancer on Fiverr for $15/hour and working with an established agency. There’s likewise a massive gulf in the required social media budget to see positive results from outsourcing.

Digging through profiles is daunting. When browsing agencies or freelancers, stick to the following pointers:

• Look at their portfolio, testimonials and track record
• Assess their specialties in terms of platforms and brands they work with
• Establish a realistic budget (but be wary of the lowest bidders)

The fact that businesses are spoiled for choice in terms of talent means that you can afford to be picky.

Maintaining your voice and values

The importance of conveying your voice and values to an agency can’t be stressed enough. This is particularly important if your hire works in any sort of frequently client-facing role.

Having someone speak on behalf of your company is a massive responsibility. Getting your voice across represents a collaborative effort and both parties need to be on the same page.

The ability to communicate what your brand is all about might seem straightforward to you. However, an agency bouncing between several clients can benefit from some much-needed direction on your part.

Delegating without micromanaging

Ideally, you can work with an agency in a positive, proactive way. That means clear communication and expectations.

Establish upfront how you’ll manage the relationship and what discussing feedback and expectations will look like. Whether it’s working via email, Slack or face-to-face meetings (or a combination of all of the above), you should ideally be able to delegate and communicate minus any micromanaging.

How to choose an agency (or freelancer) for social media outsourcing

Let’s say you’re ready to outsource your social media.

Excellent! So, where do you find your talent? And how do you choose?

Firsthand experience and recommendations can help you hone in on top-tier talent quickly. Ask around your own network on social media, for starters. You don’t have to look hard to find recommendations for agencies on LinkedIn.

When you’ve got your list of candidates, pay close attention to their areas of expertise and testimonials. If someone feels too much like a generalist or can’t back up their claims, you can likely move on.

If you’re just starting on your social media outsourcing search, look no further than our own Agency Partner Program that can match brands with agencies based on budget, skillset and necessary tools.

How could social media outsourcing transform your business?

Outsourcing social media may very well be your best route to scaling fast.

Whether you’re struggling with your own presence or simply don’t have the time or talent to budget in-house, there are so many social media experts out there that can help.

Just make sure that you take the time to document your strategy and define your social media goals so you get the results you’re looking for.

The post Is social media outsourcing the best way to grow your presence? appeared first on Sprout Social.

We don’t have to tell you: the agency world has been turned upside down over the past 18 months. Some shops’ client bookings have dried up and projects have been put on pause, while other agencies have seen exponential services growth and launched new offerings to meet client demand. Even agencies that are thriving in 2021 face an unexpected challenge: how do you scale your agency business without compromising output, client satisfaction and team happiness?

To help us figure that out, we’ve called in industry expert Drew McLellan, CEO of the Agency Management Institute, where he helps agency owners increase revenue, attract better clients and employees and successfully manage their agencies. As an agency owner with over 30 years experience working in advertising, Drew knows first hand what it takes to efficiently and effectively scale an agency business. 

Join us to learn:

• Which strategic decisions to make now that set up future agency scalability
• What successful agency owners and leaders are doing today to ensure profitability and growth
• The opportunities–and lessons–from growing and developing thriving agency talent
• And more!

Join our Agency Partner Program to gain access to the rest of the sessions, exclusive for agency partners.

The post Building a Better Agency in 2022 [Webinar] appeared first on Sprout Social.

In this webinar, you’ll learn:

• How to set and report on the right campaign goals
• How to choose social channels that best connect with your target audience
• Real examples of success from various campaigns 

The post Build Smarter: 5 Steps for Running End-to-End Social Campaigns [Webinar] appeared first on Sprout Social.

No one likes building decks.

They’re tedious, time-consuming and patience-testing. But they’re also an inevitable part of #AgencyLife. And like it or not, presentation matters.

For slides that sell, you need a deck that’s clean, professional and engaging.

Download and use this deck to add structure, visual interest and variety to your current presentation template, or use it as a starting point for your own branded deck. You can adapt it based on your agency’s needs in just a matter of clicks.

The post [Free Template] The Only Agency Pitch Deck You’ll Ever Need appeared first on Sprout Social.

Social media case studies are often used as part of a sales funnel: the potential client sees themselves in the case study and signs up because they want the same or better results. At Sprout, we use this strategy with our own case studies highlighting our customer’s successes.

Writing and publishing case studies is time intensive but straight forward. This guide will walk through how to create a social media case study for your business and highlight some examples.

What is a social media case study?

A case study is basically a long testimonial or review. Case studies commonly highlight what a business has achieved by using a social media service or strategy, and they illustrate how your company’s offerings help clients in a specific situation. Some case studies are written just to examine how a problem was solved or performance was improved from a general perspective. For this guide, we’ll be examining case studies that are focused on highlighting a company’s own products and services.

Case studies come in all content formats: long-form article, downloadable PDF, video and infographic. A single case study can be recycled into different formats as long as the information is still relevant.

At their core, case studies serve to inform a current or potential customer about a real-life scenario where your service or product was applied. There’s often a set date range for the campaign and accompanying, real-life statistics. The idea is to help the reader get a clearer understanding of how to use your product and why it could help.

Broad selling points like “our service will cut down your response time” are nice but a sentence like “After three months of using the software for responses, the company decreased their response time by 52%” works even better. It’s no longer a dream that you’ll help them decrease the response time because you already have with another company.

So now that you understand what a case study is, let’s get started on how to create one that’s effective and will help attract new clients.

How to write a social marketing case study

Writing an effective case study is all about the prep work. You’ve got to get all of the questions and set up ready so you can minimize lots of back and forth between you and the client.

1. Prepare your questions

Depending on how the case study will be presented and how familiar you are with the client to be featured, you may want to send some preliminary questions before the interview. It’s important to not only get permission from the company to use their logo, quotes and graphs but also to make sure they know they’ll be going into a public case study.

Your preliminary questions should cover background information about the company and ask about campaigns they are interested in discussing. Be sure to also identify which of your products and services they used. You can go into the details in the interview.

Once you receive the preliminary answers back, it’s time to prepare your questions for the interview. This is where you’ll get more information about how they used your products and how they contributed to the campaign’s success.

2. Interview

When you conduct your interview, think ahead on how you want it to be done. Whether it’s a phone call, video meeting or in-person meeting, you want to make sure it’s recorded. You can use tools like Google Meet, Zoom or UberConference to host and record calls (with your client’s permission, of course). This ensures that your quotes are accurate and you can play it back in case you miss any information. Tip: test out your recording device and process before the interview. You don’t want to go through the interview only to find out the recording didn’t save.

Ask open-ended questions to invite good quotes. You may need to use follow-up questions if the answers are too vague. Here are some examples.

• Explain how you use (your product or service) in general and for the campaign. Please name specific features.
• Describe how the feature helped your campaign achieve success.
• What were the campaign outcomes?
• What did you learn from the campaign?

Since we’re focused on creating a social media case study in this case, you can dive more deeply into social strategies and tactics too:

• Tell me about your approach to social media. How has it changed over time, if at all? What role does it play for the organization? How do you use it? What are you hoping to achieve?
• Are there specific social channels you prioritize? If so, why?
• How do you make sure your social efforts are reaching the right audience?
• What specific challenges do organizations like yours face when it comes to social?
• How do you measure the ROI of using social? Are there certain outcomes that prove the value of social for your organization? What metrics are you using to determine how effective social is for you?

As the conversation continues, you can ask more leading questions if you need to to make sure you get quotes that tie these strategic insights directly back to the services, products or strategies your company has delivered to the client to help them achieve success. Here are just a couple of examples.

• Are there specific features that stick out to you as particularly helpful or especially beneficial for you and your objectives?
• How are you using (product/service) to support your social strategy? What’s a typical day like for your team using it?

The above quote was inserted into the Sprout Kettler case study. It’s an example of identifying a quote from an interview that helps make the impact of the product tangible in a client’s day to day.

At the end of the interview, be sure to thank the company and request relevant assets.

Afterwards, you may want to transcribe the interview to increase the ease of reviewing the material and writing the case study. You can DIY or use a paid service like Rev to speed up this part of the process.

3. Request assets and graphics

This is another important prep step because you want to make sure you get everything you need out of one request and avoid back and forth that takes up both you and your customer’s time. Be very clear on what you need and the file formats you need them in.

Some common assets include:

• Logo in .png format
• Logo guidelines so you know how to use them correctly
• Links to social media posts that were used during the campaign
• Headshots of people you interviewed
• Social media analytics reports. Make sure you name them and provide the requested date range, so that if you’re using a tool like Sprout, clients know which one to export.

For graphics, Sprout’s Reports make it easy to pull presentation-ready graphs to insert into the case study. All the client needs to do is export the relevant report and send it over to you to crop.

In the Keele University case study by Sprout, we examined how the university built their brand with Sprout. It includes examples of social media posts and the above graph to examine their year-over-year audience growth of 10.1% across their group.

4. Write the copy

Now that the information has been collected, it’s time to dissect it all and assemble it. At the end of this guide, we have an example outline template for you to follow. When writing a case study, you want to write to the audience that you’re trying to attract. In this case, it’ll be a potential customer that’s similar to the one you’re highlighting.

Use a mix of sentences and bullet points to attract different kinds of readers. The tone should be uplifting because you’re highlighting a success story. When identifying quotes to use, remove any fillers (“um”) and cut out unnecessary info.

Your copy should read somewhat like an adventure story: introduce the character, conflict emerges, a solution appears and the hero conquers the problem. Keep this story arc in mind while you’re assembling your copy.

Pinterest’s business advertising case study of Sweaty Betty clearly breaks down each section in a presentable way. Their headers are to the point so you can scroll to them. The body for each section includes short paragraphs and digestible sentences.

5. Pay attention to formatting

Case studies can be long so you want to make sure you keep your reader’s attention throughout the piece. In terms of copy, this means that you should give thought to your headline and subheaders. Then, identify quotes that can be pulled and inserted into the piece. Next, insert the relevant social media examples and metric graphs. You want to break up the paragraphs of words with images or graphics. These can be repurposed later when you share the case study on social media, email or sales decks.

In the Sprout case study of Stoneacre Motor Group, we added three statistics right below the header. They’re succinct and grabs the reader’s attention.

And finally, depending on the content type, enlist the help of a graphic designer to make it look presentable. You may also want to include call-to-action buttons or links inside of your article. If you offer free trials, case studies are a great place to promote them.

Social media case study template

Writing a case study is a lot like writing a story or presenting a research paper (but less dry). This is a general outline to follow but you are welcome to enhance to fit your needs.

Headline

• Attention-grabbing and effective.
• Example: “How Benefit turns cosmetics into connection using Sprout Social”

Summary

• A few sentences long with a basic overview of the brand’s story.
• Give the who, what, where, why and how.
• Which service and/or product did they use?

Introduce the company

• Give background on who you’re highlighting.
• Include pertinent information like how big their social media team is, information about who you interviewed and how they run their social media.

Describe the problem or campaign

• What were they trying to solve?
• Why was this a problem for them?
• What were the goals of the campaign?

Present the solution and end results

• Describe what was done to achieve success.
• Include relevant social media statistics (graphics are encouraged).

Conclusion

• Wrap it up with a reflection from the company spokesperson.
• How did they think the campaign went? What would they change to build on this success for the future?
• How did using the service compare to other services used in a similar situation?

Conclusion

Case studies are essential marketing and sales tools for any business that offer robust services or products. They help the customer reading them to picture their own company using the product in a similar fashion. Like a testimonial, words from the case study’s company carry more weight than sales points from the company.

When creating your first case study, keep in mind that preparation is the key to success. You want to find a company that is more than happy to sing your praises and share details about their social media campaign.

Once you’ve started developing case studies, find out the best ways to promote them alongside all your other content with our free social media content mix tool.

The post How to write a social media case study (with template) appeared first on Sprout Social.

No matter the size or structure of your organization, implementing some of these workflows can help you and your agency proactively approach collaboration across multiple channels and touchpoints and will keep you from scrambling to catch up with clients.

1. Using Cases to Deliver Engagement Opportunities

Many agencies are used to being the “doers”—doing the publishing, the community management, the reporting—but as an agency scales and brings in new business, being the doer for every client isn’t always an option.

To keep the communication strong and maintain a heavy hand in a client’s strategy and engagement, you can assign Cases within the tool to act as a reminder for new suggestions, trends and opportunities.

For example, if you notice someone is frequently using a client’s branded hashtag, you can nudge the client with a notification in Sprout to say, “Hey, here’s a good opportunity to interact.”

It’s an easy step that lets your clients know you’re right there with them, monitoring their brand’s accounts, seeking out opportunities and providing them with actionable expertise, even in times that you’re unable to be the doer.

2. Take Full Advantage of the Asset Library

The Asset Library really simplifies collaborative publishing. In line with the promise of a collaborative workflow for client and agency, this feature lets you customize the experience of asset management.

Sometimes a client just needs to see what they need to see. So to avoid overwhelming them in the library, apply user permissions and organize assets with tags and filters. Within the Library you can even leave notes about when to use particular images or, perhaps more importantly, warnings for when not to use certain images.

Combined with the Asset Library’s integration with Compose, storing, editing and publishing is seamless.

It’s likely that your client has several Google Drive folders or Dropbox accounts to manage images and design assets. You streamline all that for them by working together to move and store everything in Sprout’s Asset Library.

3. Align on Customer Communication With Cases

You’re managing the inbox for a client, diligently going through each message and come across one from a disgruntled customer. Whether that message needs a carefully-crafted response or needs to be escalated immediately, the Smart Inbox is equipped to tackle that with both you and the client in mind.

Take advantage of assigning Cases in instances like these for a more collaborative workflow. Submit problematic social messages to the client as a case to align on healthy, on-brand responses easily.

It’s not lazy to send things to your client, in fact, it automates and streamlines the sometimes tumultuous and lengthy process of manual damage control. Just make sure the client is set up as a user in Sprout so you can assign a Case and include your suggestions for a response. An email with your note will be sent so the client can respond in Sprout themselves or send you back a note with suggestions. The reply will then pop up in Sprout’s conversation history so all communication on the matter is accessible from one spot.

Without fully handing over the wheel, you can ensure you and your client are making decisions together in the tool.

4. Stay Ahead of Client Asks & Showcase Value With Scheduled Reports

Clients seek different things when it comes to reporting. Taking advantage of Sprout’s scheduled, customizable reports makes it easy to continuously meet the unique demands for each and every client.

After building out your social data, quickly and directly share presentation-ready analytics with them using Sprout’s Schedule Delivery functions. Your client will receive an automated email on a cadence you’ve chosen and you can opt to white-label the email and PDF, including their own brand logo(s).

It’s normal to automate processes during particularly hectic times for your agency, but to still have control in an automated process with customization is a real win/win.

To make each report work for you, leverage Message Tags to showcase quantifiable successes. Not only is this action showing your client the types of content that are coming in and how they’re being received, but those tags are reflected in your analytics, allowing you to pull from the Tag Report to hopefully show some great numbers and how social campaigns are performing.

The success of working with clients doesn’t come down to who takes the lead. It’s about building the brand together, consistently and collaboratively. Making a few tweaks here and there within Sprout’s platform to adjust to not only your agency’s needs, but your clients’ needs too, is a big step toward just that.

The post 4 Ways to better collaborate with clients in Sprout appeared first on Sprout Social.