5 Things to Expect from a Social Media Marketing Company
Your business recognizes a need for professional social media marketing assistance. You start the search for service providers, contact a few and wait to hear back.
Unfortunately, however, you might not be exactly sure what you should even expect from a social media marketing company. You might be asking, “What should their role be?” Or, “What are some baseline judging factors for their offerings?”
Here are five things you should expect from any company claiming to do social media marketing to assist your search:
1.) A Proven Process
First and foremost, you should expect any prospective company to have a proven process of approaching digital communications.
- What are their action steps for leading you to success?
- What resources does that require?
- How has it worked for other clients?
Social media marketing is not a random fire fight of communications. Yes, you should look to spark and engage in two-way conversations with your audience, but these interactions should stem from a researched and implemented strategy based on a proven process.
The Top Hat IMC Process
Our process is well researched and is driven on knowing: what platforms your audience is on, when they are on and what their preferred content looks like. We gather this information to create content that delights your audience and best reaches your business goals.
Based on those business goals, we define our social media marketing efforts with a formalized purpose statement. This makes our strategy easy to follow and constantly focused on hitting the mark.
We’ve proven and refined our process with several notable clients such as the Pittsburgh International Auto Show.
2.) A Distinct Style
Obviously, a social media marketing company should tailor their approach to your needs and your audience.
Beyond that though they should have a distinct style that sets them apart from competitors. This is ultimately important because it will set you apart from your competitors–especially those using third-party social media help.
So, what does a distinct style look like? I’ll give you an example.
The Top Hat IMC Distinct Style
We focus our efforts on creating customized content specific to each client we work with. We define customized content as the love child of marketing research, photography/videography and graphic design.
Our style also includes integrating your social media content with other aspects of your marketing. Have an ongoing campaign? We continue to push it with digital flair. Have an organizational announcement? We find a way to make it work on the social airwaves.
3.) Availability
Events, circumstances and situations within your business are constantly changing. These could affect your planned social media efforts–even to the point of crisis–so you’d better be able to reach the company in charge of organizing them.
A few questions I recommend people ask are:
- How can I best reach you?
- How quickly can you respond and/or modify content?
Top Hat IMC’s Availability
Whoever is your point of contact for social media campaigns is readily available. I personally make it a policy to respond as timely as possible according to the situation and am well-known for putting together and scheduling “breaking news” content within 10 minutes of a message from a client.
4.) Measurement Methods
A big question on your mind should be, “How do we know how we’re doing?”
Anyone you work with should have this down to a science.
Top Hat IMC Measurement
The way we measure is driven by the formalized statement I mentioned up above. We use logical business standards to our performance. For instance, if we’re looking to help you sell cars then we compare social media analytics with how many leads or cars have been sold.
5.) Reporting
With all of the above in mind, how should you make sense of everything that’s going on? The aspect of reporting is incredibly important, especially as you continue to evaluate your return on investment in using a social media service provider.
What I find to be most important is how sensible the reporting is. It should include a straight forward overview of measurement/growth, a list of activities, goals and important observations to forecast what’s coming. The frequency of this report is up to your business.
What do you expect from a social media marketing company?