Social Media Marketing Price: What to Expect When Working With an Agency
Last update: 12 March 2024 at 12:09 pm
3.00/5Social media marketing has become indispensable for certain businesses to generate leads, reach new audiences, and increase overall visibility.
But what does this latest kind of marketing mean in terms of cost? How much should your company expect to pay for an external service? Is it possible to have a social media marketing plan on a small budget?
To give you an insight into the kind of services you can expect from a social media marketing agency and how much you should expect to pay, we have created a thorough guide with agency testimonials to answer your most burning questions.
How Much Does a Full Social Media Marketing Service Cost With an Agency?
From planning to content production, and finally data analysis, for a basic social media marketing package, you can find prices such as the one from the agency ‘La Bise’ for €2,000 per month.
For this price, you can expect community management services that include:
- Writing of posts
- Production of content (video, media…)
- 3 posts per week on 3 different platforms
- Quarterly reviews
Because of the nature of digital marketing, and more specifically social media marketing, you shouldn’t expect to hire these kinds of services for only a singular month. Developing a strategy takes time and so does seeing results. That is why collaborations usually last, at minimum, a year.
One year of basic social media marketing services at La Bise would cost you: €24,000.
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Find an agency!What Kinds of Services Can I Expect From a Social Media Marketing Agency?
From the most basic of services to a full and complete package, a qualified agency will always provide you with a plan, production, and analysis.
Planning
Based on your detailed project brief, an agency will sit down and discuss with you a plan of action and possible changes to your overall strategy. The agency will then collaborate with your internal team (if you have one) and coordinate all the necessary people and tasks involved to take on your project.
A social media marketing strategy is a time-consuming and labor-intensive project with many persons involved. At La Bise, the agency organizes regular meetings between everyone involved to plan the upcoming month.
“Our agency will receive the briefs during [our initial meetings] and will ask all these questions to really understand all the topics that are addressed by the company. We will then propose editorial planning of publication on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin, all the social platforms that must be addressed, and then ask them to validate all our ideas of publication.“
– Julie Arnaud, Co-founder of La BisePublication and Advertising
Depending on the packages or agreements you have made with an agency with regard to your project, prices may depend on:
- Frequency of publications
- The platforms you wish to publish on
- Type of content (written, video, pictures etc.)
- Type of publications (paid advertising)
- Gathering of data
- Etc.
For the production of content, agencies will have specialists for the various necessary tasks that go into the creation of a post to make sure the strategy becomes a reality.
“We will write editorial plans on which we will propose ideas for posts, we will write the posts, we will write ideas for content, we will produce, we will work with graphic artists, motion designers also to produce this content. So the whole production part, basically, we can manage it to be able to put in place the digital ecosystem that we recommended in the strategy.”
Julie Arnaud
Social media now works with a wide variety of mediums and it is essential to have experts for each of these mediums as well as have the right resources to produce the equivalent type of content.
La Bise works on a format of freelancers meaning that on top of a small in-house group of experts in various fields of digital marketing, they have a larger network of freelancers who are specialized in the most niche of marketing expertise to help out their clients.
For all of their content production, they are able to provide all the necessary hands and resources for whichever project.
“[We] work with video producers to create video content on social networks, have a content manager that keeps a planning of production, have resources that will every time record, post-produce and deliver the video, have community management…”
Julie Arnaud
Reporting
It’s one thing to produce content, but it’s another to revise, report and rework it.
How far of a reach did your Instagram reel go? What was the main audience you were able to target? What are the main interests of those who saw your post?
Social media marketing is incredibly competitive, and it is all about getting the right post on the right platform in front of the right people at the right time. The only way to find out if this was the case is to look at your data, and adapt your content production to adapt either your product or ads in the future.
5 Reasons Outsourcing Marketing Is the Right Choice to Make
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It is already a daunting process for some to outsource marketing tasks to an outside agency that you may feel might not know as well what your company wishes to achieve. Fear not, the best way an agency can reassure you is through reporting, where you will get a good idea as to whether or not your collaboration is working and how to proceed in the months to come.
“…there’s a whole reporting and KPI monitoring part. This is something that the agency does just to really reassure its client about the added value it brings.”
Julie Arnaud
It’s not enough to look at how your social media marketing strategy worked at the end of your year collaboration with an agency. La Bise works on monthly reports to sit down and look at with their clients for both parties to have a clear vision as to whether the current strategy is on its way to achieving its OKRs.
Add Ons
Without a dedicated team working on your social media marketing strategy on a daily basis, it can be difficult to be up-to-date with the latest updates, trends, and tools.
“But it’s true that as agencies we do this for many clients, we have a lot of feedback every day and we’re always on the lookout. We always try to be aware before everyone else of the latest features that Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms will release. We’re in contact with influencers, we know exactly how to approach them and how the relationship with them is going? How do you keep them loyal over time? How do you make partnerships? We really have the experience. We have the modus operandi.”
Have you ever heard of social listening? Maybe you have, or maybe you haven’t…but do you know how to use it to your advantage? Did you know it can save you thousands off of your budget on useless posts? Did you know that it’s not worth the investment for small businesses?
Social listening is one type of add-on that gives companies an idea of who is talking about them and on which platforms. If your business is heavily talked about on Twitter but not really on Facebook, it may be time to focus your efforts into insightful tweets.
Maybe a micro-influencer mentioned your brand in one of their Instagram posts that’s generating some engagement…could be time for a collaboration….
What Benefits Do I Have From Working With a Social Media Marketing Agency?
It’s one thing having an overview of what a social media marketing agency has to offer, but it’s another to visualize their benefits.
We’ve already mentioned keeping up with fast-moving trends and that an in-house team may not have the time and resources to always be in the know. At an agency, they devote all of their time across a multitude of experts just to this, and best of all, they are constantly working on projects from which they learn.
Our creatives and our consultants, we are all hyper-aware of what is happening on the networks. As soon as there is a new feature we test it, we surf on it and these are platforms that change ultra fast. It’s a big part of my job…[In terms of social media marketing], we do nothing else but that, and as a result, we learn a lot of things because we work with a lot of clients and we have a lot of different subjects. And so, in fact, it allows us to build up learnings and to have feedbacks that allow us to understand very quickly what digital and social networks are for and to be much more able to recommend, in fact, what people should do.
Julie Arnaud
To further emphasize the importance of keeping up with the exponentially, fast-changing environment of social media, Julie adds: “Actually, in social media, what you absolutely must avoid is routine”.
But I Use Social Media Every Day? Doesn’t Thank Make Me an Expert…?
It’s true that the majority of us not only use social media every day, but it is one of our most time-consuming activities on a daily basis. Does that not mean that we are all social media experts? In short, not. Personal, social use of social media does not prepare you for you to manage a business account.
Professional use has nothing to do with [personal use], and so I’ve found myself sometimes with clients who didn’t really know how it worked or had never really had any professional experience using social networks.
Julie Arnaud
Having a business account and sold social media marketing strategy requires a lot more than opening an app, scrolling, liking a few posts, and posting a story from time to time.
“We know how to anticipate things. We know how to propose organizational models, also because social media is very time-consuming, so you need an organization that is really solid, and I think that’s the added value we have as a structuring agent.
Conclusion
A lot of social media marketing agencies work on much more than just social media. In large majority, they are digital marketing agencies that focus on a variety of online marketing strategies.
This allows them to have both an in-depth and broad overview of what the current marketing environment looks like and what kind of value social media marketing has amongst it all.
So are you ready to invest in your company’s success?
