Looking for an opportunity to run your own business? Have you thought about a social media marketing agency?

In this post, we’re going to explain the main aspects and duties of social media agencies. Read the following sentences to know how to start an agency step by step.

Why social media marketing?

Social media has changed the traditional means of business, especially advertisements. Half of the world’s population is using social media networks.

So, brands have a great opportunity to expand their business and increase their sales. Social media marketing is the priority of many companies, especially small businesses and startups.

Because social media can reduce the costs required to build their brand identity and get the attention of customers.

However, marketing on social media and build sales funnels is not a simple task. This is why attitudes have recently shifted towards a professional social media presence.

In other words, marketing on social media is a project itself and needs a professional agency to handle it.

Why a social media marketing agency?

Running a social media marketing campaign and reaching a high ROI needs significant knowledge and experience.

If you search social media on sites like LinkedIn, Indeed, Freelancer, and UpWork you’ll face a lot of job openings.

Many companies are searching for skilled content writers, social media managers, designers, and marketers, to manage their campaigns.

Many of these job opportunities are also advertised by third-party agencies that market other companies’ products/services.

With the marketing competition getting hot on social media, brands prefer to assign responsibility to social media marketing agencies.

Which of them does appeal to you?

Being employed as a social media marketer or starting your own marketing agency?

Features of a good social media marketing agency

First, you need to know the main duties and responsibilities of these agencies. Here are what may distinguish a good marketing agency:

• Economic skills

The owner of a marketing agency should be an economist at first to have the following qualifications:

• Great analytical skills to review and analyze the financial results.
• Strong critical-thinking attitudes to spot mistakes and gaps.
• Competitive mathematical skills to calculate the ROI.
• Deep social knowledge to analyze the customers’ behaviors.

• Strategic thinking

A marketing agency should think strategically to be able to pass over the market’s ups and downs.

One of the most important duties of social media marketers is to build marketing strategies. Keep in mind that you won’t be successful in marketing without sufficient planning and a reactionary attitude.

• Tools

Fortunately, there is a tool for everything these days. Social media is also a tool itself. However, social media marketing needs many other tools along with social apps/sites.

A good social media marketing agency can’t get ahead of the completion without using these tools.

Here are several important tools a marketing agency should use:

• Social media automation and scheduling tools like Crowdfire
• Grammar and spelling correction tools such as Grammarly
• Plagiarism checker tools like Copyscape and Grammarly
• Graphic design tools like Canva and Adobe Photoshop
• Analytics tools such as Insights and Google Analytics
• SEO tools such as MOZ and AHREFS
• Influencer marketing tools such as Awario and BuzzSumo

• Community

The most important mistake of many marketers is that they want to get more followers at any cost even using fake followers.

Don’t forget that building a niche community will benefit you in a long-term view. On the contrary, gaining a lot of irrelevant followers will only work for a short period.

A good marketing agency focuses on building communities and establishing networks within the industry instead of gaining fake followers.

• Compelling content

Content generation is central to every marketing campaign. Social marketing agencies should therefore possess great content creators to broadcast the message of clients.

As you know, most social media users prefer multimedia content rather than texts. Generally speaking, the key to successful marketing is visual, creative, and informative content.

• Experiential marketing

Although online marketing has taken over business strategies, face-to-face communications are still important.

This is exactly why Live video features on social apps are becoming more and more popular. Live videos are meant to simulate face-to-face chats and show behind the scenes.

Remember that a friendly and authentic relationship with customers can’t be easily replaced by digital techniques.

Holding experiential marketing campaigns is another aspect that can bold an agency.

• Influencer marketing

An agency should have the ability to choose appropriate influencers related to the industries and building durable partnerships with them.

Social Tradia once reported that many social media influencers, especially on Instagram, aren’t highly-engaged. Based on this report, there is a trend of selling accounts on social media and you can’t trust any account that has many followers.

• Measurable results

Finally, an agency should represent measurable results so that clients can compare their performance with others’.

This is actually the most critical part of your task to convince them to contract with you.

Steps to start a social media marketing agency

Now that you are familiar with the main features of a good agency, you’d better embark on this career step by step as follow:

• Acquire the necessary skills

First, try to acquire the necessary skills we described in the previous section. It’s recommended to be in touch with professional people and learn from them.

It’s good also to spend several months as an intern in this area to practically sense the problems of this job.

• Employ skillful and creative staff

Marketing needs a group work environment and you can’t succeed in it without hiring good staff. Try to invest in content marketers, graphic designers, and social media managers.

• Define your style

Having a consistent and unique style is key to success in social media marketing. Try to take the time for this step and keep using it in all your campaigns.

This will help you build your brand identity and gain the trust of clients. However, this doesn’t mean that you should avoid creativity.

• Start with luxury niches

There is a trend towards luxury products/services on social media. So, starting with these trendy niches can help you pass over the initial difficulties that every business might have.

Fashion, travel, fitness, cars, etc. are some of the most sought after niches on social media.

• Devise various business plans

Remember that you’ll have a variety of clients with different niches and also different amounts of marketing budgets.

So, you can’t offer a solid plan for all of them. Try to have a handful of packages and different levels of partnerships.

We tried to summarize the main aspects of good social media agencies and the process of running one of them. Remember that this is an ever-changing space and therefore you need to constantly update your knowledge and skills.