Agencies : Stand Out on Social Media w/ These 13 Strategies
Remember Myspace?
You know, the O.G. social media platform where you customize your profile with all sorts of randomness and/or use it to talk to your crush.
The site had 100’s of millions of users at its peak.
But Myspace is ancient history, thanks to Facebook.
Shockingly, Myspace still has just shy of 10 million monthly active users, according to Statista.
But that’s a far cry from the 2.89 billion on Facebook.
The social media times, they are always a-changing. (Cue Bob Dylan song…)
Now, if you’re a growing agency (or even a blossoming startup), your social media strategy constantly needs to be refined.
You’ll need to tap into the power of big data and the various ad-tracking tools.
According to Statista (again), nearly 4 billion people are out there on social media waiting to buy your client’s products or services.
Becoming a master in social media strategy won’t happen overnight.
But at least you can learn from the best.
With this resource I put together for you below, we’ll walk through:
- 13 social media strategy examples that bring results and success in the form of happy clients if you’re an established agency—or even if you’re just starting out
- I’ll teach you why these strategies worked for the brands researched
- How you can apply these strategies to your own social media master plan
Without further ado, let’s get into the first social media strategy...
In a rush? Want to download this article as a PDF so you can easily take action on it later? Click here to download this article as a PDF guide.
#1 Social Media Strategy for Your Agency: User-Generated Content (UGC)
According to a Stackla survey, consumers are 2.4 times more likely to say UGC is authentic compared to branded content.
And about four out of five people think UGC influences their purchasing decisions.
Apple knows all about the benefits of UGC.
Their 2015 #ShotoniPhone campaign encouraged Instagram and Twitter followers to capture their best photos. A panel of judges declared the winners.
And people love to get attention.
In the end, the campaign has gone on to be mentioned by opinion leaders tens of thousands of times.
Also, #ShotOniPhone was heavily featured outside of digital realms as well, like billboards and big social events.
And it generated over 15 million posts, according to Social Samosa.
#2 Social Media Strategy for Your Agency: Give Away Free Stuff
Your digital agency should be carrying out promotions such as giveaways, contests, and sweepstakes to give consumers a chance to receive a product or service for free.
And people don’t like anything more than free stuff.
In one study by Tailwind on Instagram contests, the researchers found that:
- Nine out of ten posts that had 1,000+ comments were from contests
- Contests get 3.5 times as many likes as regular posts
- Contests get 64 times more comments than regular posts
Further, Wishpond says that emails tied to contests have a 5.55% higher CTR than normal email campaigns.
And a 3.73% higher conversion rate.
With those numbers, you’d be well on your way to driving more qualified leads.
As another example, photography software company Topaz Labs, grew its social media following by 14,206 with their contest using email to promote it.
#3 Social Media Strategy for Your Agency: Find Some Influencers
Influencer marketing is an estimated $13.8 billion industry per Influencer Marketing Hub.
So does it actually work?
Well, 80% of marketers surveyed by Mediakix say it’s effective.
In general, influencer marketing is a trusty, go-to strategy for any digital agency.
When Sony wanted to show off its Playstation VR headset in Canada, they partnered with lesser-known micro-influencers on YouTube and Instagram.
As a result, Sony’s PlayStation VR micro-influencer campaign in Canada generated…
- 3.65% engagement rate on Instagram
- 3.19% engagement rate on YouTube
#4 Social Media Strategy for Your Agency : Relate to Your Audience with Real-Time Moments
A lot of things in life come down to timing.
Timing can land you a new job.
Timing can lead to a lifelong marriage.
And timing can help you grow your social media presence.
Meghan Craig, of Empower, says “Tap into culture. Seize real-time moments that get your audience to say ‘Wow, they read my mind.”
That way, you resonate with your audience.
During the pandemic, Coors Light eased the tension that everyone was experiencing by giving out 500,000 free beers.
The company’s #CouldUseABeer campaign made its customers very happy while getting attention from newbies.
Do you remember when the lights went out during the 2013 Super Bowl?
Well, Oreo took advantage of the timing by sending out its “You Can Still Dunk in the Dark” tweet.
And by doing so, they put all the million-dollar Super Bowl ads to shame. Wait, Oreo has a Super Bowl ad too—but let’s pretend that didn’t happen.
Before the Super Bowl, Oreo’s Twitter account only had 65,000 followers. Yet the tweet had over 10,000 retweets by the time the lights came back.
Oreo also took advantage of timing with its Daily Twist Campaign on Facebook. For 100 days, Oreo posted a cookie that aligned with a current theme.
With a 195% engagement rate increase, it’s safe to say the social media strategy worked.
#5 Social Media Strategy for Your Agency: Keep Things Human with the Audience
These days, far too many companies come off as pretentious and with little character on social media.
Instead, you should be trying to communicate to the audience with a unique personality. Use humor. And invoke emotions.
Above all, engage with the audience.
Taco Bell did just that when it realized its social media strategy wasn’t working.
They began to use a charmful and witty messaging tone on Twitter. This gets people to look at the company as a friend instead of some corporation that only cares about money.
In the end, Taco Bell surpassed Burger King’s Twitter followers by three times as much, says Hallam.
#6 Social Media Strategy for Your Agency: Social Listening
Listen in on micro-communities where you think your audience would hang out. Are they talking on Twitter? YouTube? Reddit?
And take note of common complaints and talking points.
Social listening is still severely underutilized.
In a survey of 200 leading brands by Socialbakers, only 51% said that they use social listening.
That being said, this is an opportunity for your digital agency to differentiate itself.
Luckily, there are some great monitoring tools out there to use that go in depth.
Let’s look at Voltera, a company that specializes in providing social media insights to its clients.
But they were having trouble extrapolating meaningful data from social media.
By using the monitoring tool Avario, they were able to track all the conversations that its target audience was having.
Additionally, they tracked what people were saying about competitors too.
Compiling all this data can help prioritize what content to focus on and which audiences should be targeted.
With social listening, you gain:
- Information about customer pain points
- New audiences to tap into
- A more refined targeting approach
- Insight into growing consumer trends
#7 Social Media Strategy for Your Agency: Incorporate Your Content Strategy
To stand out, the brand must do more than promote itself and re-tweet funny cat videos.
Use your content to your advantage to drive clicks.
In 2020, Content Marketing Institute's research found that 69% of the most successful B2B marketers use content marketing.
Only 16% of the least successful organizations have an active content marketing strategy.
With those stats, it’s no surprise that content is king.
Once, I had a markeitng internship for a headhunting company. Each week, 70,000 professionals in the education sector would read an article that discussed new topics.
Our strategy was that once each article gets published, we would promote it on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook to increase our reach. In turn, our social media following would increase.
We did the same with a lead magnet PDF.
By creating content, the audience saw us as a thought leader and trusted us.
We weren’t coming off as salesy. Instead, our organic promotion gently pointed the audience in the right direction.
When you promote content on social media, make sure you use more than just text. People prefer a visual component.Pilot did a good job of creating a high-quality webinar promotion on LinkedIn.
#8 Social Media Strategy for Your Agency: Email Promotion
For many companies, its email list is far greater than their social media following.
In general, email is more effective than other marketing strategies.
For one thing, emails are actually seen by more of your audience.
According to We Are Social, only about 5% of your Facebook fan base will see your organic posts.
In contrast, the average email open rate is over 21%.
Interestingly, the first online activity for more than half of consumers is checking their email, per Exact Target’s research.
Chances are high that a lot of your email subscribers are not social followers.
So raise more awareness by promoting your accounts in email.
For example, EyeBuyDirect invites new sign-ups to follow them on social with their welcome email.
Segment your pre-existing email list by who’s already following you on social media and who’s not.
Then, send out emails that incentivize people to follow your social accounts.
Say you’re holding a contest that encourages user-generated content. You would make sure to notify your email list about this to entice them.
This will cause a domino effect in which friends of your customers will be exposed to the brand too. Social media and email can work very well together.
#9 Social Media Strategy for Your Agency: Post Case Studies and Testimonials
Case studies are used as a primary form of content strategy by 13% of marketers, per HubSpot’s 2020 State of Marketing Report.
Well, that’s surprisingly low considering how often I see them featured on company homepages.
Now case studies differ from testimonials in that case studies are much more in-depth. In a case study, you’ll identify the problem, solution, and the end results.
And there are usually some visual components like graphs and charts.
You’ll have a dedicated page for case studies that you promote on social media.
On the other hand, testimonials are quick quotes or clips of customers vouching for your business.
Below is a comparison between a case study and testimonial.
As you can see, a case study is much more elaborate than a testimonial. But they are both effective nonetheless. Case studies are more important for B2B sales.
Now consider this.
According to a Wyzowl survey, 84% of consumers have had their purchasing decisions influenced by watching a video testimonial.
Clearly, people want to hear from your client’s customers before checking out.
Go-To Skincare, a cosmetic seller, started an Instagram story that compiles all the customer testimonials they can find.
By posting testimonials, Go-To Skincare adds another layer of trust between the brand and its audience.
The sources of your testimonials come from:
- Quotes
- Social media comment, replies, and posts
- Interviews
- Customer videos
#10 Social Media Strategy for Your Agency: Think Outside The Box
Most of the time, traditional brand social posts feel generic.
There’s no authenticity.
According to Sprout Social, 70% of consumers feel a better connection with a brand when there’s a face associated with the account.
It makes the brand more relatable and real.
Even more, half of consumers will spend more money on a brand’s product or services when they feel that connection.
When the marketing team at National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum were stuck at home due to COVID-19, they didn’t shrug their shoulders and call it a day.
Instead, they got creative with their social media strategy.
Rather than posting tweets from home, they handed over the reins to the head of security, Tim.
He’s an older gentleman and wasn’t familiar with using social media.
But each post he took was done in a charming way that resonated with Twitter users.
He gave people a look inside the museum and used humor in his messaging.
As a result, National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum’s Twitter account amassed 269,000 more followers, according to Sprout Social.
So don’t be afraid to challenge the status quo when you’re working on your social media strategy.
#11 Social Media Strategy for Your Agency: Define the Right KPIs Before a Campaign Begins
When you start your social media campaign, you need to make sure you’re going to measure the right metrics.
But this depends on what your goals are and what platforms you want to monitor.
Does your agency simply want more social media exposure?
More exposure to a particular demographic?
Do you want more people to sign up for your weekly newsletter?
Or is it sales that is driving you?
Whatever the case, don’t gauge success and failure based on metrics that don’t matter.
For example, having a million likes for an organic post doesn’t mean that your PPC ads are working. Keep everything in context.
Before you start a social media campaign, talk to your team. And discuss what your key performance indicators (KPIs) will be.
Admittedly, there are so many different metrics out there. But you must narrow it down to the ones most relevant to your campaign.
GatherUp had a client come to them in 2016 who wanted to target people locally.
So the KPI’s they decided to measure were:
- Contact form fills
- Facebook messages
- Click to call
- Driving directions requests
They found that the overwhelming majority of leads came from Google.
This told the agency that they needed to focus on Google advertising. Also, it told them that Facebook and Yelp are not strategically important when it comes to local customers.
In turn, they saved money by not using platforms that don’t work for them.
#12 Social Media Strategy for Your Agency: Retarget People You Initially Lost
According to MarketingCharts, 45% of marketers think that remarketing or retargeting is the most effective way to really improve social media and search advertising performance.
And AdRoll says that this strategy can result in a year-over-year revenue increase of up to 147%.
Retargeting allows your agency to offer personalized ads to social media users who have shown interest in your brand in the past.
According to research by Criterio, its retail partners increased conversions for consumers who abandoned their checkout carts by 297% with a retargeting strategy.
As a good example of a successful retargeting campaign, let’s look at digital agency Pacific54.
When their client, Traffic Shoe, came to them, they decided on a dynamic retargeting strategy on Facebook.
Retargeting ads were specific to the products that the customers had abandoned at checkout.
The result of the campaign was:
- A 17 % increase in website traffic
- 301% boost in retargeting sales in one year
#13 Social Media Strategy for Your Agency: Provide Exceptional Customer Care
Today, consumers have the luxury of being as picky as they want.
If you offend them in any way, they have plenty of other options to choose from.
Here are the stats:
- 60% of consumers that complain on social media expect a response within an hour
- 54% of consumers prefer social media customer service over phone or email
- You could lose 15% of pre-existing customers due to poor customer care on social media
- Social media customer care costs, on average, 1/6th the cost of a call
To illustrate, I’ve always heard good things about Spotify’s customer care. They reach out to you within 24 hours. And they seem genuinely concerned about customer pain points.
Spotify shows customers their empathetic side using social media. So can you.
And it’s easy, too. All you need is:
- Compassion
- Patience
- Knowledge of the brand’s products and services
- An understanding of how customers interact with the brand
Conclusion
Download the “Agencies : Stand Out on Social Media w/ These 13 Strategies” so you won’t forget to take action on it later. Click here to download it now.
As you can see, with these 13 social media strategies, you’ll be able to grow your subscriber base and increase conversions.
Far too many brands get lost in the shuffle. And today’s consumers are more skeptical than ever. So you need to find ways to entice them without being too pushy.
Luckily, these 13 social media strategies bring you one step closer to acquiring new customers.
If your digital agency has been looking for new ways to improve upon its social media strategy, I hope this resource has been of value to you.
And in case you require a little extra help, you can run a quick audit with Growbo today and get your social media strategy on track!
Were there any examples that stood out to you?
Let me know in the comments below.
Keep Growin’, stay focused.
Mark
