Once you have created the site, the next step is to deal with social networking and advertising on the Internet.
- Agency or freelancer?
At the very beginning, it’s important to choose who you will be entrusted with to manage your social networking and advertising campaigns. The first dilemma that you will encounter is the Agency vs Freelancer and there is no final answer here. The advantage of the agency is that there are more people who have different skills (designer, communite manager, web designer, programmer, etc.) and depending on the complexity of the job, you can get everything in one place. In addition, there is always a person in the agency who can jump into the place where he is in charge of you, while you are connected with a freelancer for one person.
On the other hand, the advantage of the freelancer is that it is more flexible, it is easier to adapt to your requirement, you can dedicate yourself with more desire and ambition. The agency in the agency often has a fixed salary and whether you will continue to be a client tomorrow is not vital, you are the freelancer, the person who pays his bills, brings food to the table, allows you to buy a new soft noise …. The last item is that on average, the freelance are cheaper than the agencies, so you can also be a motive.
- How to choose an agency or a freelancer?
There is no best agency or best freelancer, there are only those that are optimal for you and your business. When choosing an agency, it is very important to choose the one with the largest number of clients in your business rankings. But what does that mean? If you are picking up an agency that covers big clients, and you are a small business with a modest budget, it may happen that you are the last hole in the game, because if Coca Cola needs something urgent or a crisis situation, the butcher will have to wait.
When choosing a freelancer make sure that there is some work history behind it, I know that this does not go hand in hand with young and new freelancers, but the last thing you want is to start with someone, and for the month, two get a permanent job or realize that the purpose of life a trip to the exotic destinations of Southeast Asia. Then watch out which industry has had the most clients, often a freelancer is one type of business and you will see that most clients have exactly the same industry.
- How to arrange a deal? As with making the site, it is very important to prepare well. Define the goals that you want to achieve, precisely agree on who creates content (photos, video text), how much you plan to post that weekly / monthly, who answers messages and comments. Define the dynamics of reporting (weekly, monthly) define the dynamics of meetings with the agency / freelancer. For example, every 3 months we make a cross-section of activities, what it did, and what not. How much we managed to achieve from the planned, whether we exceeded our expectations, etc.
It is very important that in the beginning you communicate well everything that matters to you and your business, what are the values you represent and believe in, who your ideal target group is, whom you want to achieve. If you have a business service, it is very important that your future associate comes to you several times to get to know your business, with your clients, with the atmosphere in your facility. Everything will help him to successfully present you on social networks. I would be worried if someone led me to the site of my restaurant, and never came to me and spent a good time.
If your budget is limited, watch that you focus on those channels that are most important to you. There’s no need to have active campaigns on all social networks plus Google Adwords for 500 euros a month. Focus and rent on several social networks.
Price is a very sensitive category and generally avoid extremes, no one can manage your orders on social networks for 50 euros a month. On the other hand, 500 euros for running the fly (unless there is a production of some complex content) is mostly too small for small businesses. (I’m not counting on advertising budgets here)
How can you not be deceived?
Now we are going to talk about one ugly but very present phenomenon in the market, that is, it happens that the Agency or individuals do not spend the very budget you gave them for advertising, but part of it put it in your pocket, and apart from taking it money for the service, ie fee.
It sends you some monthly reports in excel or PDF, and even invoices issued by FB or Google do not mean that they are not “refurbished” and “comprehensively”. Yes, the photoshop is a program that solves everything.
So what to do? Insist on giving you access to an advertising account, whether Google or FB. Ideally it would be your orders and that you give access to the contractor, but if you are not enough in this story, then look for this first. If they refuse to give you access, they are very likely to hide something, because another good reason does not exist.
If they tell you they can not give you access because they have more clients under one order, avoid that agency / person because they do not know what they are doing. Both Google and Facebook have solutions to open a new advertising account for each client. If they tell you they do not give you access because it is a company policy (they are afraid to “pick up” knowledge and continue to lead yourself) avoid such an agency because they also do not know what they are doing. Anyone who deals with this business knows that a customer can not recreate what he has done himself, because only the part is visible from the outside, much more that is not visible on the first ball.
Do not give administrator access to anyone, it’s enough to give the agency / freelancer editor access to your pages, google accounts, etc. For some things, it is necessary for the contractor to have an administrator approach (installing an application on the FB, linking adwords and analytics accounts, setting FB pages, etc.) in such cases give Admin access and return to editor after completion. For daily campaign management and site maintenance, the editor is the ideal level of access. It is unfortunate that the client remains completely without the change of the agency / freelancer, especially if the cooperation did not finish well.
Trust your agency / freelancer and do not mix too much
Trust is important in every business, and here. If you already hire someone, that’s because you can not do it yourself, believe in his ideas and way of realization. Do not stand above your head and make a problem for every post. It is up to you to keep track of the work and to ensure that your company is properly represented, and not for each post you change the order of words in the sentence, or look for editing the image for practically the same. In one word, avoid the micromanagement of your campaigns.
That’s it, I want to hear you in comments. And pass this on to one person that you think would be useful to her.
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