4 Questions to Test Your Social Media Agency

As an independent digital growth agency, Nexa is often tasked with auditing  the social media performance of companies. By doing this, the company gets a 3rd party validation and verification of their in-house marketing performance, along with recommendations and advice on how to improve. At times, we’re asked to review the social media management of other agencies. Here’s a look at our findings based on these experiences, summed up under 4 questions. These questions will help you to evaluate whether or not a social media agency is the right fit for your business.

4 Questions to Ask a Social Media Agency, Plus the Right and Wrong Answer Cheat Sheet!

Question 1: What is the targeting strategy to link our website and social media channels?

Good Answer 1: We’ll focus on a retargeting strategy for your website visitors using cookies and other tracking tools via the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) that allows social media platforms to match your site's visitors with their account holders so that we can create campaigns targeting these specific people.

Good Answer 2: Our goal is to drive people from different social media platforms to your website so that we can start to track their activity and interests in your business. We’ll target these same users across Google's display network and social media platforms. 

Bad Answer 1: We're placing Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn widgets that either drive people to your company page on these platforms or allow them to connect with your platforms from within your site. 

While there's nothing wrong with this approach, it's outdated and not as strategically effective.

Bad Answer 2: Our strategy is solely focused on growing your community within the given social media platforms. 

As marketers, there needs to be cohesion across the marketing mix. Focusing on social media strategies in silo’s is not the best path to take and leads to many missed opportunities.

Question 2: We have a lot of very happy customers that we need to connect with on social media. What is the best way to go about this?

Good Answer 1: There are numerous things we can do. The first is to align the offline strategies with this initiative by raising awareness for the social media accounts when dealing with customers. The second is to use your customer databases along with the social media platforms list marketing services, which allows us to match customer databases with their user profiles so that we can communicate with them directly.

Good Answer 2: We’ll create a campaign that targets existing customers by creating online links in real time. The campaign can include the use of a database building tool that allows us to simultaneously learn more about the customers as well.

Bad Answer 1: It's can be difficult to find them so we’ll create an email marketing campaign asking customers to connect with us via these platforms.

Bad Answer 2: We can target customers from our platforms based on their interactions with the brand, from likes to comments and mentions, as well as manually following accounts we feel would be interested in the brand. 

These answers display a rudimentary methodology that won’t be as effective and will result in a lot of time being wasted. 

Question 3: How do you plan on growing our social media accounts?

Good Answer 1: We’ll post engaging content that your target audience will find interesting on a regular basis. We're also using tools such as Facebook's Power Editor to use Facebook's personal profiling capabilities to create campaigns that will drive awareness to each post. We are not just 'Boosting' posts as we want to target genuine potential and existing customers. Other possible strategies include influencer marketing and connecting with industry and community accounts to increase visibility and credibility. 

Good Answer 2: We'll create custom and lookalike audiences to ensure we’re targeting groups that are most likely to show interest in the brand. This strategy will create a much larger target audience with a high probability of converting and expanding the following. 

Bad Answer: To increase likes, we're boosting posts to gain new likes and fans. We’ll increase the ads in line with the allocated budget. We will post regularly, ensure our following list remains low, and reach out to influencers. 

Blanket strategies detract from the potential of reaching the highest levels of success. It is also important to note that engagement takes priority over vanity metrics. 

Question 4: How can I track deals generated via social media?

Good Answer: We can track individuals who engage with you on social media and then go onto your website from these platforms to either make a booking, download vouchers, send an enquiry to the business or make a purchase on your website using CRM technology, social media pixels, or Google Analytics. We’ll strive to create links between sales derived from social media and encourage customers to ensure that social media interactions forms part of the buyer’s journey.

Bad Answer: It's really difficult to track ROI from social media, but the analytics can be linked to increases in sales. With higher engagement rates, you can be confident that the social media marketing is effective. 

That wraps up the 4-quick questions you can ask a social media marketing agency or in-house team to test whether they are able to deliver the social media marketing success you’re hoping to achieve. Reach out to Nexa for full-scale social media services, from audits to management, we have you covered!