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Social media agencies can deliver spectacular results. But so often I’ve heard about situations where expectations were not aligned, scope wasn’t clear, and the client walked away with a sour taste from the experience.
Over the last 10 years, I’ve run a social media agency, I’ve worked client-side with both marketing and social media agencies, and today I’m in a much larger, integrated strategy agency. All of that combined experience means I can now guide you through what you should expect from a successful client relationship when you’re working with a social media agency.
Let’s go on this journey together. We’ll start with you meeting your social media agency, deciding what ‘good’ looks like, and identifying any potential red flags.
Then we’ll consider a scenario where you’re talking to a few different agencies and you need to figure out which one best aligns with you.
Finally, we’ll cover how to make your decision and start the relationship with a smooth onboarding process.
There’s a real variety in the type of social media agencies you can choose. It ranges from small to very large agencies. Small agencies involve a lot of outsourcing and asking people to do things for you. It almost feels like freelancing to an extent. Whereas a much larger agency can provide a strategic and more holistic service. They should be able to think and execute for you.
You’re going to have agencies with different business model setups. This means they care about the client and the quality of client work in different capacities.
The best way that I could sum this up is that there’s a real contrast in my mind between doing social media and actually doing social media in the depth that it should be done.
What you see with a huge number of social media agencies is that they just talk about posting content. And when it comes to social media services, that is maybe one-tenth of what you should be doing.
Look at all of those bullet points. All of these other elements go into posting content on your social channels. In my mind, that’s what ‘good’ looks like for a social media agency – when they’re considering all of this.
When we work with a client at StrategiQ, we’re looking at this full service from start to finish. It’s not just that we’ll take over their social pages and post content. We don’t think we can do good social media marketing unless we know their business and industry insights.
We need to understand their customer and their customer personas in a lot of detail. We also have to do a review of the current activity of their social media and an analysis of their competitors.
Once all that upfront prep is done, we look to create the social media strategy. Set up the channels for best practices.
Maybe there are bios that could be optimized more. Or cover photos that have old branding on them. We look at the content pillars that we want to post about, which may include copywriting, graphic design, video editing, and so on.
Then, and only then, we get to posting content.
We split content up into strategic content you can plan out a month in advance. That’s your evergreen, always-on kind of content. But you also have reactive content. You need to be monitoring trends to react to what is happening in the news or in popular culture.
As we post content, we look at social media as a two-way relationship between you and your audience. This part involves page management and community engagement.
On top of all that, we help clients with social listening and value reporting as well.
So I’d recommend asking this question to any agency you’re speaking to: where do these elements come into their service?
Because in my mind, you can’t do one part of social media without looking at multiple of these other parts. This is coincidentally also why you’ll hear social media managers talk about having to wear so many different hats during their day-to-day.
There’s a lot that goes into it. But it means that you need a skilled agency to do it.
If you are in a situation where your social media agency says they post content, but it feels like it’s more of a box-ticking exercise for them, then that’s a complete red flag.
Likewise, if you have a social media manager on the agency team who isn’t talking to you about social listening or asking about your customer personas, that would indicate a lack of passion for this area and for the industry in general.
You should have people who are really interested in research and behavioral science. That’s ultimately going to benefit your business the most in the long run.
A lack of passion might sound like an agency saying they’re going to do X number of posts per month for you. It also happens to be the wrong way to structure a social media service.
Imagine they’ve already done those X posts per month for you, but then a really cool and reactive opportunity comes up. You could put a post out and get so much engagement and traction. Instead, the agency tells you they’ve hit their quota here for the month, so you don’t get any more posts. That makes no sense to me.
We understand that if something reactive comes up that could benefit our client, we should work on it. That’s just the way social media needs to run.
Another problem is when a social media agency doesn’t cover community management.
I’d think of that as a complete red flag as well. Community management would be when your audience comments on those posts you put up or they send you messages.
In our social media department, we handle community management and engagement for clients because we want to learn about the audience, respond to comments and help posts get more engagement.
We don’t just want to post and ghost people. Any agency that’s not interested in community management is really missing out on learning from the audience.
As an agency, we talk a lot about chemistry during the sales process. It’s an incredibly important part of picking the best agency.
You always need to look at the agency’s skill set and its team. Can they do a good job for you?
From my perspective, the key aspect to consider here is that it’s a relationship. You’re going to speak to the people working at the agency once a week or more. It might be a call, an in-person meeting, or just a lot of emails.
Are you going to be dreading every email and call invite you receive from them? Or is it going to be the best call of your week or the email you look forward to that day?
You want to make sure you feel naturally aligned with the agency you choose. They should have good energy and lift you up, not drag you down. The agency is there to make you and your business better.
The second point here is whether you get the sense that they care?
A really good example of this is a conversation we had last week with a potential client. We asked them at the end of the call if there were any other agencies they had spoken to about this.
Apparently, they messaged four or five other agencies. Some of those agencies never got back to them, while others said they could maybe take a call, but only in a couple of weeks.
This potential client got in touch with us on Monday. We got back to them and scheduled a call on Tuesday. Then, on Wednesday, we sent them a proposal and a scope of work for how we could work together.
All of those little touchpoints that you have early on with agencies indicate how much they care about you and your business. It all matters – how much effort they put into that first call, how quickly they want to schedule the call, and how many people they bring to the call.
When you speak to an agency, you’ll know if you like these people and if you have chemistry with them. And remember, you can ask questions to figure out if they seem likely to go the extra mile, Or whether there are any signs they’re not that interested in your business early on.
Another way to look at it is by assessing values. As a company, I’m sure that you have a set of different values and words or phrases that you’d hold all of your employees to.
I find it’s useful to think about how your values, as a client, align with the values of the agency. The values of an agency tell you how their people operate and what they believe in as a company.
So you want to think about this in a couple of ways.
You’ve got your own direction and pace. Say you’re a startup and you want to get things done really quickly. Your values might be ‘fail fast’ or ‘let’s break things but learn from them’. But you’re talking to an agency that’s got 300 people and they do perfectly beautiful creative work. That’s not a natural alignment.
You’re going to want to move really fast and ship things that are good enough. They’re going to want to work until things are 100% ready, taking months and months to do it.
Instead, you’d be better suited to work with an agency with similar values around pace and experimentation.
You also want to think about the size of both companies. Generally, I think you want to match the agency size to the size of your company. That’s going to work favorably on budgets as well. If you’re a really small and growing business, you’re not going to be able to work with a big agency.
Likewise, as a client, you want to think about how important you are for your agency. Are you going to be one of the biggest clients or a smaller one? How much attention are you going to get from them if you’re a smaller client?
Once you decide on an agency, it’s time to get going. You sign on the dotted line and now onboarding is everything. I think you can tell quite early on, from the quality of the onboarding experience, whether the relationship will work long-term.
There are a couple of really common pitfalls to look out for at this stage.
First, social media is always on. You always need to be putting posts out every week.
Let’s say you may have one agency scheduled to finish their contract at the end of May and a new agency starts in June. There’s absolutely zero time for the new agency to start working and immediately get content out.
You’re basically asking them to start posting from day one without doing any of those other background elements that are necessary. They have no time to formulate the social strategy, review customer personas, or get to know your business.
You need plenty of time for your old agency to hand over everything to your new agency. At the very least, the handover should be arranged so that on the day your old agency finishes, the new one has done all the preparatory research. They need to get their content plans together and be ready to start posting in the same or similar tone of voice to what your brand has been posting previously.
You shouldn’t have a gap in the content that goes out. And you definitely don’t want your engagement and traction to drop. You also don’t want the tone of voice to look drastically different.
The second pitfall might sound like a silly one, but we’ve had three clients speak to us this last month about it. One client has actually paid us to help them sort it out with Meta.
You should have admin access and own all the passwords to your social channels.
Sometimes old agencies, that the client hasn’t worked with in years, have sole knowledge of the passwords to social media accounts. Or a previous employee has left and they didn’t hand over a password.
It becomes very tricky to regain access to a page in this situation. You have to send so much documentation to Meta to prove it is actually your business and your account. So you can save yourself a huge headache if you make sure that you have access.
Any time you change the agency you’re working with, remember to remove access for your old agency and add your new agency to your accounts.
It’s extremely important to keep all that admin up to date.
If your agency doesn’t ask about any of the things above, it would suggest to me that they’re not thinking about your social media in as much depth as you would want them to.
StrategiQ is an integrated strategy agency. Social media is one part of what we do. Probably more than most other social agencies, we will look at a client and a brand as a whole strategy.
We don’t just want to do marketing for the sake of doing marketing. We always want to say to a client, “This is how much revenue we’ve generated.” Rather than just saying, “This is how many likes you have on this social media post”.
I’d say we go quite in-depth, but this is the level of what we think other social media agencies should be doing as well.
Under brand insights, you want to send any business information that is relevant to your agency. It could be a quarterly business report that you’ve just done. It could be that you’ve just set your revenue goals for the year.
Sometimes clients feel a bit uncomfortable sharing finances with the agency. But how can your agency do good social media for you if they don’t know your revenue goals? Or what areas of the business you want to grow? They’re not going to be able to properly put together a social media strategy for you.
Then you have your brand foundations. Why you exist as a brand, your mission, your USPS. You want to get your agency really excited about the journey that you’ve been on so far and what is still to come.
Customer profiles are also essential information for your agency. Again, how can your agency create good social media if they don’t know who they’re creating it for? If you don’t yet have customer profiles, that would be something the agency could look into for you.
Make sure that everything looks super on brand from a design point of view, but also tone of voice.
On the other side, you have the practicals. You want to make sure that your agency is super clear on who their day-to-day contact is, who they should get in touch with client side, who signs off on social media posts, and who signs off on strategy.
My advice here would be that you shouldn’t create a super lengthy chain of command for how the agency needs to get approvals.
Say you had a trending post that was going to do really well that day on social. But the account manager of the agency needs to speak to one person on the client side, then that person needs to speak to another one, and so on. That’s too much. If you get the post out five days later, it’s completely dead in the water.
So make it a smooth and really clear chain of command for approvals.
Let’s also consider channel access. You want to send that across in a secure way, using some kind of encrypted solution, like LastPass or One-Time Secret. It’s not a good idea to send passwords via email or WhatsApp.
If you had an agency that was asking you to send a password across on WhatsApp or email, I’d see that as a massive red flag. I’d question the security of how they’re handling client passwords and other confidential information.
Last but not least, there are your social media KPIs. You want to be really clear from the onboarding stage which KPIs your social media agency should be working to, and how they help you as a business.
I’d advise assessing those together because you want to have input. You want to make sure that you steer the social media agency in the right direction, rather than just letting them set the KPIs alone.
We have had clients that set the KPIs and they’re actually too easy. Or we don’t think that the KPIs are the right ones. It’s more useful to have that conversation together so that the social media and business experts can align with the client on what they’re aiming for and how to track it.
One of the things that our founder and CEO always says is that relationships should be 50/50 over time.
It might be that when a new agency joins your business, the relationship is more like 80/20.
You’re pouring 80% effort and energy into the agency, while they get up to speed. But maybe
there’s a week when you’re mega busy or you’re on annual leave and the agency has your back. They’re getting everything done. And then it’s 70/30 towards them and it’s lighter on your side.
Over time, that relationship should be 50/50. As long as it stays 50/50, it’s a positive relationship.
Remember that you’re there to set your agency up for success, just as much as they’re around to help your business succeed.
Corrie leads the savvy social media team at StrategiQ to create powerful and data-driven strategies for clients, leaning on her decade of experience in the fast-paced world of social. In that time, she’s worked on projects with big brands like NatWest, Virgin StartUp, and Cancer Research UK, as well as spoken at SEMRush’s Global Marketing Day in New York and on the BrightonSEO main stage.
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