11 benefits of using a paid social agency
Most businesses recognise the importance of social marketing. 71% of SMBs promote their brands on social media.
The trouble lies in getting it right. Common errors include:
- Focusing on organic reach
- Developing ineffective social strategies
- Navigating user privacy concerns
Paid social is the practice of using sponsored content to market your brand. It involves spending money on platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube to place ads that target specific users.
This article focuses on 7 reasons you should partner with a paid social agency to boost your B2B business. But first, let us touch on the advantages of paid social over organic social.
Why you should choose paid social over organic social
Even though organic marketing is free of charge, there are several reasons why you should incorporate sponsored content marketing in your business strategies.
1. Social marketing is highly competitive
Social media is insanely competitive, especially for companies. There are over 200 million business pages on Facebook, all created to drive brand awareness and attract customers.
Organic social marketing requires you to release content to get significant results frequently. Even then, growing a large audience will take months, sometimes years.
Plus, you will compete with other businesses in your niche using paid social tactics.
2. SMM is largely pay-to-play
Most social platforms will not promote your page until you place ads. After all, advertising is where most platforms make the most money.
For instance, Facebook has restricted the reach of business pages. To quickly get any large-scale engagement on the platform, you have to run Facebook ads.
Also, ranking algorithms restrict the reach of organic content. A non-promoted post on your Facebook business page will only reach 5% of your followers. Imagine what that would be for people who don’t follow you yet.
3. Paid social minimises turnaround time
Paid social drives large-scale results in less time than organic social. All you have to do is target the right keywords. It also reduces time-to-market because you can generate a ton of data and feedback in a short time.
4. Paid social offers easy testing options, conversion optimisation in real-time, and effective scalability
Even though you can monitor trends on organic posts to see what people react to and what they don’t, the datasets you’ll be looking at will be so small that they don’t mean anything.
Paid social puts your brand in front of thousands, even millions, of people. You can see how they react in real-time and what messages resonate with them. You can then tweak your campaigns and save costs.
Paid social allows you to test different headings on your audience and effectively scale the ones that work. In summary, paid social gives you a ton more data to work with fast.
5. Save recruitment labour and costs
Aside from working with an agency, you have other options, such as hiring full-time employees and working with freelancers.
Hiring employees is a tedious process. Think about browsing through hundreds of resumes, onboarding employees, and setting up payment structures.
Even if you decide to find a freelancer, you have to post a job ad and sift through hundreds of applications to find the right hire.
Working with an agency saves you all that headache because the agency usually has several employees, all specialising in paid social advertising. Secondly, agency contracts are typically flexible. You can sign contracts for as long or as short as you like.
6. Access to specialists
Several agencies have people in other fields working with them. The paid social agency you hire would have a copywriter who writes the copy, a graphic designer who creates the visuals, and a marketer who runs the ads and optimises them.
You never have to know what happens under the hood. You sit back and get great results.
Usually, you don’t have to pay separately for these other skills. All you do is sign a contract.
7. Fresh thinking from outside your industry
When you work with an agency, you partner with people who know how to craft the right message points to convert a cold audience.
They know how to find customer touchpoints, rapidly release ads, test them, and optimise them in real-time. They can also tie in paid social strategies with prospect journeys which are incredibly important in the B2B space.
When you hire an agency that works with businesses in your niche, you are more likely to get great results. Chances are that the agency is already familiar with your ideal customer and knows what messages resonate with them.
8. Awareness of platform policies and trends
Social media policies are constantly changing. You have to put out different types of content on various platforms and keep in touch with changing policies.
For instance, the recent iOS 14 update blocked advertisers from getting ad tracking data unless users opted in. As a result, social marketers lost access to much data from Facebook and other companies.
They found other ways to measure ad optimisations via URL parameters, customer touchpoints, and attributions.
When you work with a paid social agency, you don’t need to worry about policy changes. The agency is responsible for monitoring trends.
9. Expert audit and development of paid social media strategies
Paid social can be expensive when running long-term campaigns for large audiences. You stand to lose a lot of money if you don’t know the right audience to market to, how to monitor ad campaigns, and how to tweak and optimise them to get better results.
A paid social agency will help find out:
- your ideal customer,
- where they hang out online,
- what keywords and topics they engage with on social media,
- how they engage with content,
- what content formats they prefer,
- what times they are likely to be found online.
The agency can also audit your current social marketing strategies to determine what works and doesn’t.
A good paid social agency will develop a strategy tailored to your ideal customer and brand.
10. An agency has the resources to maintain ad campaigns as you scale larger
As your brand grows and you reach more and more people, you need to keep a tab on all your ad campaigns. You should be aware of the results each one has gotten you before and after optimisations.
An agency will have a dedicated account or folder for your brand. There will be all the campaigns you’ve run, both successful and unsuccessful. You can get an overview of the history and look at the trends of your campaigns.
Over time, you’ll get a sense of the messages your customers respond to, and what types of headings are most likely to drive engagement.
11. Easily add on other services as you need them
You’ll usually need services like SEO content writing, email marketing, landing page writing, etc. You may want to integrate your paid social campaigns into sales funnels that have to be filled with the right content at every stage.
Agencies often have several people of different specialities working with them. They may even offer a complete package with paid social as one of the services.
Even when they are super specialised and offer no other service, agencies are often plugged into networks of other professionals they can easily reach when you need them.
Choose the right paid social agency for your B2B brand
Paid social is the fuel to supercharge your brand’s growth via social media. You must create magnetic social ads and copy to convert a cold audience into long-term paying customers.
Based in Warwickshire, UK, VirtualROI is a paid social agency that has been helping clients deliver social campaigns on LinkedIn since 2009, working with companies from right across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. We can help you with paid social, LinkedIn campaigns and targeting, banner designs, social messaging and much more. For more information, speak to us now.