I'll admit it. When I was a Creative Services/Marketing Director, I questioned the idea of paying someone to do my media buying. The concept of forking over money to go spend my ad dollars was a tough sell.
But then, I hired an agency.
Finally, I understood the knowledge, care, resources and negotiation power agencies have. That, along with the time it opened up for me to work on marketing strategy and execution, made paying for my media buying agency's services worth it!
Now, I get asked "why should I pay someone to do my social media advertising?" And, I get it! Since most platforms have self-service tools that are fairly user-friendly, it may seem unnecessary to pay an agency to manage it.
Here's why you should.
Social media companies and Google make it very easy to spend your money by setting up a campaign. But, those companies do not teach you (well) how to leverage some of the more complicated back-end tools that make your ad dollars more effective.
Some examples are creating a lookalike audience from a customer list, your website traffic or your page fans, or establishing a retargeting audience. These are crucial audiences to most businesses because they help target customers better than the basic demographic options provided by these social media companies. And let's not talk about the painful process of setting up and implementing pixels!
An agency knows how to do all of these things and can help you set them up.
Agencies also have other insights like creative performance. They can be nimble in the platform and pull a variety of metrics that show the complete story of the campaign.
They also understand the variations between platforms from targeting to performance. Facebook and LinkedIn are both really valuable for business to business marketing, but they operate very differently.
LinkedIn is more expensive, but reaches an audience Facebook has struggles to reach. And Facebook and LinkedIn are JUST a few of the social media companies that should be considered. Pinterest, Nextdoor, Twitter, TikTok, Snapchat and Reddit have advertising platforms (and probably as I write this a new one is emerging!).
The nuances of each platform are intense even for marketers, so imagine trying to go it alone to save a few bucks. Is it worth your time and the possibility you are wasting ad dollars on unintended audiences?
How much you should pay for social media advertising will vary from agency to agency. Most charge a percentage on top of spend. That takes into account the work setting up campaigns, including the less exciting audience creation and conversion tracking, as well as reporting and optimizing campaigns in-flight.
Recently, agencies are branding themselves as "performance marketing" agencies where they get a cut or percentage of every conversion you make, sometimes on top of a fee or minimum. This may be great for some larger businesses but not applicable to smaller businesses.
If you are thinking of advertising on social media and plan on spending more than $50 a day marketing your business, consider enlisting our agency to help you!
-Lauren
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