The world is changing, and for businesses to keep up and stay competitive, they have to change as well. One of the biggest changes happening right now is how people interact with each other and the world around them.
Social media has become a trendy and vital tool for many influencers as well as traditional businesses. To capture the attention of those flocking to this social networking system, companies need to adapt their advertising strategies.
This calls for specialized talent. This talent is those people who know social media, how it works, and what are the best ways to reach its users. This new industry group is called social media marketing consultants.
They are dedicated individuals who know what to do to help your business draw in more customers. Social media marketing consultancy services can help you understand the what, why, how, when and where of marketing to help your small business or startup succeed online.
Who are social media marketing consultants?
The statistics state that the average American spends up to almost 5 hours of their day checking their social media accounts. That is a significant amount of time. The more time they spend looking at social media, the less time they have to look at traditional media outlets where most traditional businesses have a strong presence.
This is where the social media marketing consultant comes in. They know this trend and how to reach this growing group of people. This is a new group of advertising specialists who know the trends that are happening and may happen over social media.
They can help you construct and implement a strong advertising campaign that reaches those people during their 5 hours on social media platforms. In other words, a social media marketing consultant is just another name for an advertising executive.
They just specialize in social media and its users. This group of people can help you reach those social media users and make sure you get a strong presence on different platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other popular networks.
You know how to run a business, but they know how to reach a group of people you can’t reach through traditional advertising methods.
Why hire a social media marketing consultant?
Everyone is not an expert in everything. One person may be great at doing print ads, another at managing a company, and still, others are great at doing the nitty-gritty work that needs to be done for a business to be a success.
Social media marketing consultants are experts at advertising and marketing on social media. They can help in the following areas:
- When your business is having a hard time retaining or attracting customers
- The return on your investment is not paying off as you hoped
- Your own social media strategy is disorganized and not effective
- You and your employees are not great at doing social media marketing
Social media marketing consultants come in with the experience, expertise, and knowledge you need to build those weak and troubled areas up into strong business points.
They can spot where you are making mistakes and make the right suggestions to get your social media advertising campaigns on the right path. They can also make that strategy more effective.
This new group of advertisers or marketing experts can really make an impact on social media on your behalf. They know the people you are trying to reach and can get the job done right.
The Importance Of Social Media Consultancy Services
There is a different frame of mind between older generations of people and the new social media generation. As a result, they think differently and respond to advertising and products in different ways. That is where one of these consultants can really make a difference for your business.
Here are some important reasons why you should consider hiring a social media marketing consultant:
- They Take An In-Depth Look At Your Business– These consultants take a hard look at your current social media presence, your brand, the industry you conduct your business, your competitors, and your target audience. It is a thorough investigation as their research also looks at your goals for a social media presence and what you want to gain in return.
- They Suggest The Perfect Social Media Platform– There are literally dozens of different platforms you can advertise your products or have a presence. They pick the best ones that will help you reach your target audience in the best way.
- A Social Media Marketing Consultant Can Help Build Your Brand– With their suggestions and strategy, you can build better brand recognition among your target audience. Plus, they can help build customer loyalty for you at the same time.
In doing this, these consultants can refine your voice, making it ideal for social media audiences. What having a clear voice on social media does for you is:
- Attract audience attention
- Engages your audience with the right posts
- Moves your target audience towards conversion through getting them to visit your website or business location
- Builds audience interest and develops loyalty
Wondering what you should expect?
5 Ways Social Media Marketing Consultants can Help Your Business
This is the key purpose why you hire these professionals. You want them to help your business be more successful than it already is. These consultants have the experience and expertise to help your business grow and develop a very loyal customer base. Here is how they can help your business:
- Develop A Strong And High-Performing Strategy
They figure out what is or isn’t working with your current online advertising campaigns. Plus, they will look for areas that can be improved upon to make your ad campaigns more effective.
- Help Develop Better Social Media Goals
The consultant will look at your objectives and design smarter goals for your ads. Then they will help devise the strategy that will help your campaigns go beyond those goals to greater success.
In doing both #1 and #2, the consultant will also develop strong tactics you can use that are custom-made for your business and help you create a better sales result.
- Get A Better Return On Your Investment (ROI)
Getting back more than you put in is what business is all about. A consultant will help you achieve that business ideal. In addition, their work should help create a stronger and larger social media following.
They do this by teaching you how to build your community and engage your followers better. They do this through developing content and strategies that create interest in your products, keeping in contact with leads, and helping persuade visitors to buy your products.
Getting the right social media marketing consultant is crucial because it takes close to 8 visits to your website before you make a sale.
- Give You The Best Advice
These consultants are experts in their advertising area. They know social media, and what works and does not work. Their advice comes from the experience they have gained through the years of working in this portion of the advertising field.
Also, a consultant can provide a fresh set of eyes and a new perspective to the work you are already engaged in. This new way of looking at your current strategies helps bring new solutions that can help get your business new customers.
They can also use their experience to lead you to the best practices your business can use.
- Work On The Analytics
Not everyone has a head for numbers. This is where the consultant can come in and help you understand what those numbers mean. Tracking your social media performance is vital to the success of your ad campaigns and business ROI, and 95% of successful businesses rely on analytics to implement their strategies.
Those analytics can be hard to understand at times, but they are essential. They help you see if you are reaching your goals and conducting successful ad campaigns or not. In addition, these numbers will tell you if you should leave things alone and let them run the way they are or if they need some fine-tuning to make them better.
The social media consultant can help decipher those numbers and see how well you are doing in easy-to-understand language. Once the numbers are in, they can revise old strategies or develop new ones to bring those numbers up to where they should be.
How To Get Started With A Social Media Marketing Consultancy Services
There are several critical criteria that you should use to help you filter out the bad from the good consultants. Here are some of those keys to help you get on the right track to getting the best consultant for your social media presence:
- Ask Them The Right Questions
This is a very important filter. If the following questions cannot be answered by the consultant you contact, then you should move on to till you find the one that can answer those questions:
- First, who should be the primary audience for our social media strategy?
- Secondly, which social media networks should we employ?
- What type of outcomes do we hope to achieve with social media?
- What social media platforms are competitors using?
- Is it a good idea to collaborate with influencers?
- Do we want to put advertisements on social media?
- How much money do we want to put into social media advertisements?
- Which tools, if any, do we intend to employ?
The answers to these questions will help your consultant develop the right campaign for your business and keep it realistic.
- Determine The Type Of Consultant Your Business Needs
This is essential as there are different types of social media consultants and they all are not going to be ideal for your company or its goals. You can start this quest by determining where you need the help.
Then you need to decide on the role the social media marketing consultant will have in your company. Those roles include but are not limited to the following options:
- Strategy- This is where the consultant is only an advisor. They still do their research and create different concepts, personas, and strategies to use and then provide training and advice over the coming months.
- Project Manager- This is more of a hands-on role where the consultant does all the work a regular manager does in different departments of your business. They will create and maintain timelines, budgets, resource allocation, and more.
- Execution- The consultant takes on the full management role and helps implement everything they have created. They do the hard work involved in this ad direction like any executive would in other departments.
- Select Your Goals
This is important as you can determine if the consultant is the right fit for you or not. Your goals give the consultant their starting point to construct their data and strategies. If they can work with those goals, then you should have a good fit.
But if you are not sure what goals you should set for your social media marketing campaigns, then the consultant can help you develop those goals. They just have to be in line with your business ethics, etc.
- Share Important Documents
These are previous analytics and other data you want the consultant to know about. These documents or reports will be on your social media efforts from the past or other more recent years.
You need to share the most useful information possible to help give your consultant a good and informed start. Having all the pertinent information ready will help your consultant make their work easier, and get your social media strategies a fighting chance.
Success Stories & reviews
PPC
Website
130%
Increase in Paid Ad Conversions
2X
Leads in 6 months
Social Media
71%
Increase in Contact Form Submissions
1,500+
New Social Posts Created
Finding The Right Social Media Marketing Consultant
Like any other industry and business in the world, there are more consultants than you can imagine. The hard part is differentiating the good from the bad ones. All consultants are not the same, and they may be good but not the right fit for your company.
Here are some tips to help guide your selection of a consultant:
- Relevance
Make sure that the consultants you are considering are offering the types of services you require. Check their websites to see who their former or current clients were or are, and don’t forget to check the reviews on their performance.
- Experience
This comes in two ways. First, does the consultant has experience in your industry? If they do, then it will be easier to find one that can construct the right strategies, etc. for your business.
If they don’t, then they probably do not know any of the tactics that will work in your industry. Second, the experience they need to have is in social media consulting itself.
While hiring those who want to get their foot in the door is okay, you still need to make sure those beginners have what it takes to do the job well. Hiring those with experience just makes everything go easier and smoother.
Check their credentials out and verify how many years of experience they have had doing this type of work. Also, check out what type of experience they have. For example, is it advisory only or hands-on and so on?
- Connections
It is not enough to just have experience. One key question to ask is what kind of connections they have. One example would be what links do they have to influencers. Another would be, who do they collaborate with and which ones are in play for your business needs?
- Check Their Examples
Get some examples of their previous work to see if the consultant is up to the task for your business. See what they have done for previous clients and if it is good enough for your goals.
Also, you can ask them for basic examples of what they will do for you.
- Cost
Always an important factor. Even in this area that promises a good ROI, the bottom line needs to be examined to see if the cost is worth what you are going to get in return.
More experienced consultants are going to charge more than inexperienced ones, so you need to take that into account when you are looking at paying this expense. Then, you have to decide if the cost is justified or not.
Key questions to ask are: is it an hourly rate or a tiered rates cost system? Is there a contract length minimum? Are their hidden or additional costs?
- Attitude
You do not want someone who will just tell you what you want to hear. While you want an enthusiastic and confident consultant, you do not want them to be overly enthusiastic or confident.
You want them to be realistic about their abilities and possibilities of helping you achieve your goals. Ask the tough questions. You will see that the good consultants will not be afraid of answering them and they should have good answers as well.
The Purpose Of Hiring A Social Media Marketing Consultant
In this changing world, it is important to keep your business relevant. It is also important to keep your competitors at a distance so you can be more successful. They say that if businesses do not change, they will not be in business for very long.
Keeping up with the modern trends is one way to stay in business. For example, a recent study suggests that over 75% of people use social media before they make their purchase decision. Refusing to go on social media or having a poor presence means that those same people will ignore your company and look to your competitors to meet their needs and make their purchases.
Social media marketing consultants help you and your business remain relevant and one of the companies online people will consider when making their purchase decisions.
They do this by monitoring your competitors and their strategies and providing the right advice to improve your own social media presence. Keeping up with the times and staying in people’s minds means developing a strong social media marketing campaign.
Add-on Social Media Marketing Options You Can Use
- SEO– Always a good strategy to employ. With top SEO devices in place, you can attract the attention of social media users and have them visit your website. The way SEO helps is that it boosts your rankings so searchers can see you in their results.
- PPC or Pay-per-Click– What this option does is help you understand your target audience a lot better. Then you can use that information to develop new strategies that appeal to your target audience or find the best social media outlets to use.
- Content Marketing– Good content helps convert visitors to your website into paying customers. This option works hand in hand with your social media and SEO strategies. Content is king, and the better the content, the better the results as your visitors may share it with others.
Not everyone is experienced or good at handling social media marketing, especially business people. They know business, but they are not always marketing experts, including the modern way technology has created.
It is a wise business move to hire social media marketing consultancy services because they are usually experts in this new way of reaching consumers. Do your research and see why this move will make sense for you and your business!
At Socinova, we are a team of hardworking and dedicated individuals providing social media consultancy services to our clients at the best price and that too without compromising on the quality of service. Our plans start at just$99/month. Get in touch with us to know more about our plans or any other information you need!
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