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 right social media marketing strategies, businesses can reach the target audience and boost engagement. This can help build 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 can you 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 become challenging. The solution? Outsource social media.  Social media outsourcing services can ensure a positive ROI and boost your business growth.

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

Let’s get started. 

Here are the top benefits 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 can use advanced analytics tools and gain vital insights, such as the source of leads, top-performing posts, social platforms, and more. This can help the firm bring a complete digital transformation without spending thousands 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 valuable 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 an entirely new team. For instance, they can save money on employee payroll, healthcare, physical space, and other factors. We will discuss the pricing later in this post. 

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

How to Outsource Social Media Marketing the Right Way?

Now that you’ve understood the benefits of social media outsourcing, let’s discuss the right way to do it. Outsource social media marketing using the below-shared tips to reap the best benefits.

1: Set Your Budgets and Goals

Do you want to drive traffic to your website via social channels? Generate leads? Or increase brand awareness? – Outline the goals that you 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 can help improve the business ROI. Time-bound – The business has set a deadline of one month to achieve this goal. 

This approach can establish clarity and help you take actionable steps for successful social media marketing. 

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

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

2: Choose an Agency or Freelancer

There’s a vast pool of agencies and freelancers in the market.

What should you choose?

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

Here’s how – 

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

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

So, we recommend you choose an established agency according to your budget. This can help reap positive results and strengthen your social media presence. 

Digging through the plethora of agency profiles is daunting. 

Here are a few aspects to consider while finalizing the agency to outsource social media. 

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

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

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

 Select a suitable region, city, and social media outsourcing service to get started. 

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 is a rulebook that states how a  business should present itself to the target audience through logos, images, color, font, and more. 

With a brand style guide, anyone in the team can ensure 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 simultaneously, providing them with such a brand style guide can ease their hassles. They can refer to the style guide and ensure the social media posts resonate with your brand. 

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

4: Collaborate to Build and Improve the Social Media Strategy 

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

For instance, you should share details like the target audience, competitive analysis reports, top-performing posts and social channels, popular content format, and more. This can equip them with crucial insights to build 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 provide feedback. The collaborative effort can 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 working style while helping you ensure quality work.

Here are a few things to share during the initial meeting –

Share the communication channels, such as Slack, email, Zoom, and more, with the agency. Give out the list of team members they can connect with for guidance. Discuss how often you would like the agency to share progress reports. Describe what the approval process will 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 following factors.

Type of Outsourcing Social Media: Freelancer (least expensive), digital agency (affordable), or enterprise (highest) Monthly Deliverables and Channels: How many social channels do you want the agency to manage? The more social channel and posts, the higher the price. Social Media Advertising Budget: Organic marketing can take a longer time. So, the overall pricing will increase depending on ad spend.

However, as we mentioned, the cost will be less expensive than recruiting a dedicated team of experts. So, outsourcing social media can prove a game-changer for your 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 aspects takes rigorous effort, which can lead to work-related burnout in your marketing team. So, outsourcing social media can be the best bet for businesses.

Leveraging the social media outsourcing tips shared in this post can help achieve the 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 next level? Consider partnering with one of the top social media marketing agencies in the USA, and watch your online presence soar.