What does a social media marketing agency actually do?

It’s kind of like hiring a lawyer: we work in your best interests based on your goals. Because we’re not morons, we base everything on your audience and meet them where they are at. So we figure out your goals, what success looks like and how we’re going to measure that. Then, we create the strategy, produce whatever content or other materials you need to achieve those goals, then get it to your audience by whatever means necessary.

TL;DR: Make stuff people like on behalf of your brand then make people look at it.

How do you build a custom social media strategy for a brand like ours?

Any brand can be successful on social media. We figure out who your audience is, what resonates with them, post it in a place where they’ll see it, when they are most likely to take the action you want them to take. It’s marketing 101: right people, right message, right place, right time. But based on the data available, the place people spend the most internet time is social media, so we usually make social media. Not every brand should be on every platform, the same way you don’t sell boating supplies at a hospital trade show (though, doctors do love boats…note to self).

What platforms do you specialize in — Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Meta Ads, etc.?

Whether you like it or not, everything is becoming more like TikTok. Video-first content, real & authentic feeling content, the content that wins is the most relatable and shareable. Video shoots have historically been really expensive for brands because they want everything to be super perfect and polished so they hire these big, bloated film crews and pay for their agency’s creative director to play on his phone and order pizza on your dollar because they want to apply for some fake award somewhere. Good news is, those fancy film shoots don’t perform well on social unless you’ve got a really wild and interesting concept, so we do super scrappy, run and gun production. Our background in PR means we can help guide real people in your organization into becoming the stars of your content. Then we can take that content and tailor it to the look and feel of each social media platform.

Do you offer both paid and organic social media services?

We sure do. The same way investors don’t put all their money into one vertical (apparently, I’ve been broke my whole life until now), you would invest all of your marketing dollars into just organic or just paid. I would say we’re organic social first, we want true resonance with people, building a connection over time; but if you want someone to go to your website, you’re gonna want some paid media in the mix. It’s kind of like sex: you can flirt and date (organic social) or you can succumb to your primordial urges and pay for gratification (paid social). One is more meaningful, but it also takes more time…and you might need to rub one out every once in a while.

Can you integrate influencer marketing or PR into a social strategy?

I would highly recommend it. When we break down the sales funnel into awareness, consideration and conversion, each tactic plays a different role.

Where paid media, including influencers to some extent, is about reaching new people, making them problem aware and solution aware (ie. your brand); things like organic social and traditional media PR are much more about nurturing leads in that research phase.

The most recent study on the consideration/research phase was admittedly a couple years ago from a Neil Patel talk at Collision in Toronto, but they claimed the consideration phase was getting longer, with about 14 days (on average) of consideration time. When consumer spending seizes up in a recession, that consideration time is going to get even longer, especially if you’re selling something expensive.

The same thing is true with B2B marketing: business budgets are often decided based on the previous year’s sales, so if consumer sales are down, they are going to tighter on cash. B2B consideration times are always pretty long because there’s usually a lot of different stakeholders that have to sign off on the decision, right? For example, if I’m selling a SaaS product and it’s going to impact HR, field sales, office managers and each department head, you’re going to need buy in from each of those people. And to get that buy-in, there are going to be different sources of influence with different messaging based on each of those stakeholders’ concerns. This is PR 101, but most social media folks seemingly don’t have the wherewithal to think of social the same way we think about other PR. People go too far the other way to and end up being boring as hell on social because they want to play it super conservative and safe, but that’s another story.

Do you provide community management or just content creation?

Most of our clients want to give us the keys to their socials so they don’t have to think about it, including community management and page management.

There are strategic benefits to us running community management at the same time. Across all video channels (Instagram, TikTok, YouTube Shorts), you can respond to comments with videos. To me, this is one of the best ways of generating relevant content and authentic engagement with consumers. We can also see in real time when something is relevant and trendy so we can jump on momentum (if you’re a classic PR head, think of this as media monitoring and newsjacking).

Can you handle media buying and ad budget planning for us?

We tend to do a lot of media buying, especially on social, for our clients. If we get brought on to build out a strategy, we will do any ad budget planning — helps if you have a budget in mind for us to build out a plan, but we can also tell you what it costs to do things the right way.

Now I’m going to be fully transparent, we do all our ad buys in-platform; we don’t use an ad server or any of those fancy things (I’m happy to refer you to people that do that kind of buying). In my experience, most Canadian brands are spending well under $25K per month in ad spend on social so if they go to one of these big media buyers with all the bells and whistles, they’re going to be giving away 30% of their budget for something that doesn’t super improve results. And if you wanted a full scale programmatic program, you’re probably going to go to StackAdapt or something like that.

If you want that complexity, I’m happy to manage relationships with those subcontractors and speak their language so it’s one less thing on your plate, but you’re not saving money your ad buys.