by

Seeing as though social media has been around for several years and shows no signs of slowing down, your agency can no longer ignore this incredible marketing vehicle. Putting together a strategic marketing plan for your agency that includes social media will be vital to your agency’s success in the future. While this sounds relatively simple, it actually takes more energy and time than you may initially realize.

One key factor to assembling a successful strategy is by first understanding your audience.  Marketing will only be effective and produce a significant return on investment if it’s aimed at the correct target audience. Once your audience is realized, you need to understand that each social media site has different users, so you need to strategize to successfully reach these potential customers.  People who use Vine may not use Facebook, just like some of us may use LinkedIn and never venture onto Pinterest. Because of this, you need to strive to include as many social media channels as possible- something we refer to as a blended strategy.

Furthermore, each social media outlet has its own unique structure, and because of that, your audience differs accordingly. For example, our postings on social media sites like LinkedIn are completely different than those we post on our Facebook or Twitter accounts.  Since LinkedIn is a business-centric site, we keep our posts very professional, but with sites like Facebook and YouTube, we can showcase our agency’s fun and personal side. It’s the agencies who utilize this difference to their advantage are who see true and real results.

Putting together this blended strategy is also about making sure we do not ignore our prospects. I recently had a successful meeting with a prospective client because I learned about them through their Pinterest account and was able to make our meeting much more personable.  Without this social avenue and our agency’s blended strategy, I can assure you this meeting would not have been as successful as it was.

So what key social media accounts should an agency have? A Facebook fan page and Twitter account are a must, and then branch out from there into Google +, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, and Vine. You can’t limit your agency to only one or two of these sites, otherwise you will be limiting your agency’s ability to reach out to prospective customers. And if there’s one thing to remember when communicating through social media, it’s this: social media is not about you or your agency. It’s about everyone else. If we keep that in mind, we will not only have a successful blended strategy but we will also have a great return on investment.