As an external agency, we offer an outsourced solution to our clients, but is it the right answer for all businesses?
These are the big questions that business owners and marketing managers need answered.
Will the content you generate be congruent with our values and beliefs?
A good agency will work with you to understand all these aspects of your business and this will run through all the content generated on your behalf, whether that’s a social media post or an article for a magazine or journal.
How will you maintain our branding and image?
One of the first things we ask is ‘do you have brand guidelines?’ If you don’t have this document for your business yet, you can give us the colour references for your brand, the fonts you want used (although in the text areas of social media, you get whatever the platform provides) and the way you want your logo to appear.
If we have something that needs posting quickly how fast can you take action?
Definitely within 24 hours, but usually within an hour or two. We have a WhatsApp chat for each client that all our team have access to and this is monitored most of the time and anything urgent can be popped into that for fast response.
Who decides what to post or write?
This is a collaborative process, usually the result of a chat about your current focus and social media posts are created for you to review, while other written material such as blogs, articles, opinions, newsletters, etc. are the result of discussion – and, as we get to know you, we’ll suggest ideas if you run dry.
How much time will we need to give each month?
You will need to talk to us for 30-45 minutes each month, usually a regular monthly slot by phone or Zoom. You’ll also need to review material we’ve created to sign it off before it’s made public.
Couldn’t we use AI to generate our content?
You could, but you’ll need someone to work with it to programme all the information in, so at least a part-time member of staff. Material generated by AI needs to be checked as it isn’t reliably accurate.
We have a lot of events that we want to feature in our social media and in blog posts. How do you ensure that material about these is posted promptly?
There are two options – either we can provide templates for you to post this kind of material on social media yourself live from the event, or if you put all the photographs and video into a shared folder we can work with that material to create posts the same day or the following morning if it’s an evening event.
What are the alternatives to outsourcing?
You could:
- Train one of your existing team to create and post social media.
- Employ a commercial copywriter to be a permanent full or part-time member of your team.
- Get an apprentice and train them to be your marketing assistant, but they will need to learn marketing and copywriting skills.
Having someone in-house has advantages in that they are on the ground and can capture instant information, but long-term these options will probably cost you more than a monthly retainer for an outsourced agency.
