Outsourcing Social Media Marketing for Your Business

Things to look for when outsourcing social media marketing

Outsourcing social media marketing to agencies and freelancer is not an easy decision to make. But often, as busy business owners who wear several different hats every day and are often pressed for time, maintaining consistency and strategy with social media management day in and day out can be exhausting and quite franking unrealistic for business owners to DIY. But of course, there are things like business and agency vision alignment, work method alignment, work ethics alignment and affordability that make the decision so tough. Finding an agency or freelancer to outsource this essential marketing aspect that can make or break your sales numbers and brand image, thus becomes the very crux of the matter before you can actually decide to outsource marketing to someone else.

The three main things to consider when choosing a freelancer or agency to outsource social media marketing to are:

• Skill-Set & Clarity in Deliverables

If the freelancer or agency who has approached you giving you clarity on the exact deliverables from them to you? Are they giving clarity on the bifurcation between organic social media marketing and paid social media marketing (along with the the monthly paid ad budgets they expect to expend). Clarity on deliverables is very important as performance can be assessed through them. Whether you are looking for more reach, more followers or more conversions, whether your strategy is predominantly organic or paid, it is the target deliverables that will help you decide whether an agency or freelancer has fulfilled the promises made or fallen short on them. A way to assess they skillset is also to go through their past clients and any stats that they may have provided regarding their work for them.

• 2. Actual Services

In social media marketing, there are jack of all trades and then there are masters of some. Here’s what we mean. Some agencies specialize in Facebook and Instagram, others could be Pinterest marketing pros, and yet others could be paid social media marketing experts. You might get an agency with a team that does everything, even B2B marketing, such as say LinkedIn marketing. Depending on what you need and what services are on offer, that’s how you’d take a pick.

• Affordability

And then of course there is the price. Social media marketing is not cheap, and don’t let undercutting freelancers convince you otherwise. Not only does making scroll-stopping graphics, video reels, carousels, stories and everything else that the social media circus wants produced and posted, take time and skill and expertise. But it is also all about the strategy, that comes with experience and lateral thinking. Coming up with good ideas that work, is half the battle won on social media. And just churning out content with no direction is like letting loose a headless chicken and hoping it finds its way to the coop.

An Example of SayMe’s Monthly Social Media Marketing and Management Packages

An example of SayMe’s monthly packages for social media management and marketing looks something like this for a visual business, such as an online ecommerce store (that sells digital products or ships worldwide) or even a service that can be provided remotely (online service provider business).

• Manage daily organic growth and posts
• Follow a monthly social media strategy and create a content calendar to finalize the mix of content
• Build a community of engaged followers by engaging within the niche
• Create branded feed posts, reels, carousels and stories according to pre-decided schedule
• Cross post the created content on Instagram profile, Facebook, X (formerly Twitter)
• Post Monday to Friday on Threads and X (formerly Twitter)
• Repurpose short form content and post on Youtube Shorts, once or twice a week
• Repurpose short form content on TikTok
• Repurpose and resize existing content and create Pinterest pins (ideal requirement is of daily posting)
• Host a monthly virtual meeting to discuss content for the month to come and exact deliverables for organic and paid campaigns, along with budgets for paid ads (and finalizing the social media where the paid ads would run)
• Create a calendar for client requests – for client to send b-rolls for reels and stories
• Create a short and long term social media ads strategy and implement it with proper audiences and AB tests

SayMe only requires the client to set aside 1 hour a month for a monthly content strategy call and b-rolls featuring client’s products and services for creating month-long content.*

*This is an atypical, bespoke social media marketing plan for monthly SM marketing. It is not a standard one and is a top-end monthly package in terms of budgets. Standard SM monthly packages and prices can be found here.

This blog is part of Blogchatter’s A2Z challenge for April 2024.