Pros and Cons Between Doing Social Media Marketing Yourself
Daniel Kelly
Web Design & Digital Growth Specialist
A lot of businesses, brands, and individuals have embraced social media platforms such as Facebook or Instagram so that consumers can notice their product or services online. Social media allows you to reach people locally and as far as internationally. If you are a business owner planning to run your own marketing strategy, it is important to have a good understanding of the characteristics of your target audience so you will be able to personalize your messages and resonate with them appropriately.
Social media platforms can boost your brand’s overall visibility. However, handling your marketing strategy across the different platforms may be overwhelming. Should you hire an agency to do the nitty-gritty work for you? Let’s find out.
Your Website: To DIY or Not
Role Of A Social Media Marketing Agency
In order for companies to have an active digital presence, they need an active social media presence plus a good marketing strategy to reach their business goals. This is why the creative experts at social media agencies have a big role to fulfil. What jobs and responsibilities do they perform on a daily basis?
- Create a monthly content plan for different clients from different industries
- Keep up-to-date on the latest industry news and trends
- Engage with users online, replying to their comments and queries
- Come up with new post/blog ideas, schedule, and publish them
- Follow up on emails and calls
- Find ways to gain higher engagement metrics
How a Social Media Agency Can Benefit You
A social media marketing agency handles a business’ social media publishing activities including the creation of social media content such as blog posts, videos, and events. How can they help business owners like you?
- Gives you more time to run your business by taking care of the projection and maintenance of your brand value. They are experts when it comes to creating association and fostering trust with your company, product, or service, promoting the positive images of your brand, without compromising brand values.
- Saves you money by eliminating the need to having your in-house marketing team. Hiring new employees with full-time salaries can cost you a lot more as compared to having a fixed monthly cost with agencies.
- Saves you time by eliminating the need to have your people trained since agencies already have an extensive set of expertise and experience and know their way around social media. They are also used to working with different kinds of industries.
- Are always collaborating, generating new ideas, and coming up with specific marketing strategies to achieve your business objective. Every business needs a customized strategy and that’s what they do.
Establishing a partnership with a social media agency will allow you to scale up your specific goals and grow your business.
Pros of DIY Social Media Marketing
- Cuts a major cost in your expenses. Doing your own marketing, having a small in-house social marketing team, or outsourcing an employee will save you money.
- Allows you to learn and come up with everything from scratch. You will get the chance to think of a unique idea and plan an effective strategy. You’ll also get to design creative layouts and write your content, publish posts, communicate with your audience and reply to their comments.
- Gives you the chance to learn how to analyse your own campaign data and other social media marketing metrics and statistics.
- Lets you spend more time with your followers thus giving you mandatory time for social activities. Engaging with your audience will build their trust and make them more aware of your business.
Cons of DIY Social Media Marketing
While handling your own social media marketing may sound grand, it does have its downside:
- You have to do everything all by yourself. Although there are social media marketing tutorials that can teach you how each platform works and what type of content to produce for each of them, you have to hustle double-time to learn the process while still having to focus on your products and services. This will take valuable time away from you and sacrifice both ends.
- It gives unrealistic expectations. In doing your own social media marketing, you have to set appropriate key performance indicators (KPI) in order to meet your target return on investment (ROI). This entails time, commitment, effort, and interest. Lacking in any of these will lead to less productivity and poor results.
- It’s costly than you think. Once you learn how to publish posts on social media, you’ll learn that running ad campaigns aren’t free. Social media agencies have the right tools and are knowledgeable on social media expenses which will cost you much less in the long run.
Conclusion
DIY social media marketing may be rewarding but is a very tedious responsibility for business owners. With the time required to run a successful marketing plan, you won’t have much opportunity to focus on the more important stuff, which is ensuring your business is running smoothly and efficiently. So entrust a dedicated social media agency to do the work for you and they’ll constantly bring in newer and more valuable insights to create compelling campaigns and achieve real-driven results for your company.
FREE EBOOK
5 Ways to Double Leads on Your Website
