How to Outsource Social Media Marketing for Positive ROI

Reach. Engage. Convert. 

That’s what social media marketing can do for businesses: small, medium, or large.  With the proper social media marketing strategies, businesses can reach the target market and boost engagement. This may also help construct a positive online presence, thereby accelerating conversions. 

In fact, a 2021 report states that social media marketing proved effective in helping 77% of marketers reach their firm’s goals. How are you able to achieve social media marketing success? More than expertise, your team requires “time” to ideate, create, publish, and track content on multiple social channels. Considering the competitiveness, managing day-to-day tasks with social media marketing can turn out to be difficult. The solution? Outsource social media.  Social media outsourcing services can ensure a positive ROI and boost your small business growth.

In this post, we are going to discuss the advantages and best practices of social media outsourcing to help your firm thrive. 

Let’s start. 

Here are the highest advantages of social media outsourcing for businesses.

• Access Advanced Tools and Technology: Outsourcing social media enables businesses, especially SMBs, to access premium, big-budget digital technologies and tools. For instance, they will use advanced analytics tools and gain vital insights, akin to the source of leads, top-performing posts, social platforms, and more. This may also help the firm bring an entire digital transformation without spending 1000’s of dollars and achieve high ROI. 

• Strengthen Customer Relationships: Outsourcing helps firms handle customer queries, concerns, and feedback on social channels without hassles. Agencies can respond to customer concerns, check precious interactions, and more in real-time. This can boost social media response time and deliver a stellar customer experience.

• Save Your Team’s Valuable Time: Your in-house team needs to perform several responsibilities. With social media outsourcing, business owners can remove stressful tasks of social management from their team’s plate. The marketing team can utilize the time to perform other crucial activities while ensuring peak performance.

• Reduce Hiring Expenses: Business owners can reduce the expenses of hiring a social media expert or a completely latest team. For instance, they will lower your expenses on worker payroll, healthcare, physical space, and other aspects. We will discuss the pricing later on this post. 

Overall, outsourcing social media marketing may also help businesses save money and time, while also improving the standard and effectiveness of their social media marketing efforts.

Now that you simply’ve understood the advantages of social media outsourcing, let’s discuss the proper way to do it. Outsource social media marketing using the below-shared suggestions to reap the very best advantages.

1: Set Your Budgets and Goals

Do you wish to drive traffic to your website via social channels? Generate leads? Or increase brand awareness? – Outline the goals that you simply want to achieve.

Analyze your existing social media strategies and results and determine SMART goals.

Here’s an example explaining the SMART framework.

• Specific – A business wants to achieve 3x engagement on social channels.
• Measurable – They can track the progress with crucial metrics like shares, clicks, and more.
• Achievable – The goal is realistic.
• Relevant – Achieving 3x engagement on social channels may also help improve the business ROI.
• Time-bound – The business has set a deadline of 1 month to achieve this goal. 

This approach can establish clarity and make it easier to take actionable steps for successful social media marketing. 

Next, settle on a budget to outsource social media. This step may also help narrow down your research for agencies or freelancers for the job. 

Understand the services and reach the very best agency or freelancer according to your budget. This can save effort and time through the decision-making phase. 

2: Choose an Agency or Freelancer

There’s an enormous pool of agencies and freelancers out there.

What do you have to select?

It’s natural for a business, especially SMBs on a good budget, to hire a freelancer for $10/hour relatively than an agency that charges $50/hour. While hiring a freelancer to outsource social media can seem cost-efficient, it might impact your long-term ROI. 

Here’s how – 

Agencies that tackle such projects are well-equipped with advanced analytics tools and a team of experts. They can brainstorm and help create the very best strategies for your small business. 

On the opposite hand, freelancers often lack experience and use free-of-cost tools with limited features. So, they might fail to deliver high-quality content and handle social media efficiently. This can impact your brand image and ROI.

So, we recommend you select a longtime agency according to your budget. This may also help reap positive results and strengthen your social media presence. 

Digging through the plethora of agency profiles is daunting. 

Here are a number of features to consider while finalizing the agency to outsource social media. 

• Check the digital agency’s portfolio and past track record to understand the standard of services.
• Assess their clients’ testimonials and reviews on platforms like Google, Yelp, and more to gauge their capabilities.
• Create a practical budget for the project. 

Pro Tip: Count on Digital Agency Network (DAN) to discover an acceptable digital marketing agency. 

DAN is an all-in-one platform offering a listing of over 3,300+ industry leaders in digital marketing across countries just like the USA, the UK, Canada, Europe, Australia, MENA, and Asia.

 Select an acceptable region, city, and social media outsourcing service to start. 

Source

3: Create Your Brand Style Guide 

A brand style guide is a reference tool that helps a brand establish and maintain its persona. Simply put, it’s a rulebook that states how a  business should present itself to the target market through logos, images, color, font, and more. 

With a brand style guide, anyone within the team can be sure that the brand looks consistent and translates its vision, mission, and core values into its design. 

Notice the brand style guide of Spotify, a renowned audio-video streaming services provider. 

Source

This guide focuses on graphic design rules to help professionals create a consistent persona aligning with the brand to boost customer engagement.

As agencies work with different sets of clients concurrently, providing them with such a brand style guide can ease their hassles. They can refer to the style guide and make sure the social media posts resonate together with your brand. 

In short, a brand style guide can keep your team and agency on the identical page while ensuring the posts convey the brand messages in the proper tone.  

4: Collaborate to Build and Improve the Social Media Strategy 

Outsourcing social media doesn’t mean you can take a backseat. It’s crucial to stay involved within the decision-making process. 

For instance, it is best to share details just like the target market, competitive evaluation reports, top-performing posts and social channels, popular content format, and more. This can equip them with crucial insights to construct a successful social media strategy.

That’s not it. Be proactive throughout the journey.

Track social media campaign KPIs like engagement, clicks, conversions, and more, and supply feedback. The collaborative effort may also help the agency improve social media practices and achieve goals.

5: Ensure Clear and Consistent Communication

Be upfront about your expectations. Establish ways of communication, discuss strategies, set deadlines, share feedback, and more. This will allow the agency to understand your perspective and dealing style while helping you ensure quality work.

Here are a number of things to share through the initial meeting –

• Share the communication channels, akin to Slack, email, Zoom, and more, with the agency.
• Give out the list of team members they will connect with for guidance.
• Discuss how often you want to the agency to share progress reports.
• Describe what the approval process shall be like. 

This approach can allow you to communicate and delegate social media marketing tasks without micromanagement. 

The cost to outsource social media varies depending on the next aspects.

• Type of Outsourcing Social Media: Freelancer (least expensive), digital agency (inexpensive), or enterprise (highest)
• Monthly Deliverables and Channels: How many social channels do you wish the agency to manage? The more social channel and posts, the upper the value.
• Social Media Advertising Budget: Organic marketing can take an extended time. So, the general pricing will increase depending on ad spend.

However, as we mentioned, the fee shall be cheaper than recruiting a dedicated team of experts. So, outsourcing social media can prove a game-changer for your small business.

Wrapping Up

Social media marketing goes beyond just creating and scheduling posts.

Businesses should invest time in understanding the ever-evolving customer expectations, tracking their brand mentions, monitoring and responding to conversations about them, and more.

Managing all these features takes rigorous effort, which may lead to work-related burnout in your marketing team. So, outsourcing social media will be the very best bet for businesses.

Leveraging the social media outsourcing suggestions shared on this post may also help achieve the very best business outcomes. So, define your goals and implement the mentioned tactics to scale your ROI. Looking to take your social media marketing to the following level? Consider partnering with considered one of the highest social media marketing agencies within the USA, and watch your online presence soar.