It’s boom time for social media marketing!
Since the beginning of last year 43% of consumers say they are spending more time on social media. The amount of marketing budget brands allocate to social media activity rose sharply during the pandemic and, according to the 2021 CMO Survey, over the next five years senior marketers expect social to account for 24.5% of their budgets, compared to 15% today.
Brands need help from agencies like yours to plan and deliver all that social media marketing activity. Are you ready?
According to research carried out for Meltwater by Social Media Week, these are the top social media challenges for brands, and the biggest opportunities for agencies:
1. Researching & Creating Content
Content is the heart of modern marketing, and most businesses need external agencies to help them produce it. Whether it’s creating content to feed the brand’s owned social channels, or using social data and analytics to understand the audience better and find inspiration for multi-channel content ideas.
2. Targeting the Right Audiences
By using social analytics to research and segment online audiences, you can help clients give their content and campaigns a laser-focus and achieve better ROI, compared to taking a scattergun approach.
3. Staying on Top of Social Trends
Social is evolving all the time, with new platforms, features, and consumer behaviors appearing every year. Even more so, during this period of historic change. It’s hard for in-house marketers to stay on top of it all when they’re focused on doing their day-jobs, so they often need a trusted agency partner who can provide this kind of insight, in a meaningful context that helps them understand what the trends mean for their brand and what action they should take.
4. Showing ROI on Social Activity
It’s hard to justify allocating budget to social media if you can’t prove that there’s a good return on it. This is another area where clients look to external experts for help. Understanding how to measure the success of social media campaigns and map that against wider business objectives is a valuable skill.
5. Setting Social Strategy that Works
In-house marketers are often do not have the breadth of experience that comes from working across a wide range of brands, and this is why they hire agencies, because you bring expertise that has been developed by working with a lot of different clients. Being able to advise on social strategies that you’ve seen working for other business will make you an essential partner for your clients.
6. Engaging and Growing Online Communities
For brands, one of the most powerful strands of social media marketing is the ability to build a community of engaged fans who have opted in to hear more on their owned social channels. But nurturing and growing those communities takes a lot of skill and sustained effort, and it can be hard for businesses to find that kind of specialism internally. Agencies which can offer proven community management capabilities will be at an advantage.
7. Managing Social at Scale
Running social media marketing activity for a single small brand can be challenging enough, but when you start to scale it up to multiple larger brands things can very quickly become a huge headache. Helping businesses manage social media at scale, including selecting the best tech stack for that, can move agencies beyond being seen primarily as a tactical execution team for the client and on to a more strategic, consultative partnership.
8. Limited Internal Resources and Expertise
There are a lot of different elements to social media marketing, including creative, copywriting, community management, analytics and more. It’s very difficult for many businesses to recruit and retain the right mix of people to do it all successfully, and that’s why agencies are so valuable. If you can assemble a team of social superstars that can do all this stuff across multiple clients, your agency is destined for greatness!
Whatever kind of agency you work in, there’s always room to add social media services to your portfolio. Doing so will enable you to become an even more valuable partner to your existing clients, and give you the edge when it comes to winning new business.