Be Careful With Digital Marketing Agencies, You May Be Wasting Your Money
You can read this article in Spanish from here
Regularly a company / brand hires these agencies for having “experts” in social networks, due to lack of time and total ignorance of the subject.
In recent years, I have seen many digital marketing agencies born and die that offer to administer and manage advertising campaigns on Facebook Ads and Google Ads for $ 600 — $ 1000 per month.
THE PROBLEM
What these agencies are looking for is to have the largest number of clients to be able to ensure the collection of the service month after month. But you will tell me: This is good, right? We all seek to increase our income. Yes and that is perfect, the problem comes when the quality of the service offered is lousy due to the lack of time or people to do a good job.
These agencies are regularly made up of marketers, designers, and interns (very poorly paid). Many times these work groups do not exceed 5 people for 10 different accounts, so delegating the work is not an option and all their work is referred to a: “This is delivered as for yesterday.”
Now I will tell you what on average all these agencies give you when hiring their services:
- Monthly they give you between 10–15 posts for your social networks.
- They run a campaign to promote your brand or generate new customers.
- They track the results and are in charge of answering your messages and comments.
- At the end of the month they deliver a report of the results in networks.
Now I will tell you what really happens, assuming that an agency has an average of 10 contracted brands:
- The posts that this agency will have to deliver will be around 100 posts between changes and extra publications.
But let’s see what it’s like to do this, the creative process to make images, videos, layouts, and ads takes time. Finding resources, designing and testing the posts takes just as much time. Between changes and modifications, the time of creatives and designers is consumed. What ends up being a copy — paste of a post with other colors and another logo.
- Online advertising, Facebook Ads or Google Ads as the case may be.
Well we have a lot to talk about here, but I’ll take up all this in another article “What online marketing agencies don’t want you to know.” In summary, many of these agencies only advertise advertising without thinking about the objective that the brand seeks. Due to the volume of work, the analysis and monitoring of the campaigns is not adequate.
- Reply to comments and messages.
Hundreds of messages to answer, a lot of information to share. To save another salary, the managers of these agencies choose to place a person to do this.
Now suppose that this agency has 10 pages where they all have a paid campaign. To give some examples, these companies are: A restaurant, an online clothing store, a beauty salon, a real estate agency, among thousands of other examples. Well now suppose that per page 20–30 messages arrive per day from interested people, there are around 250 messages between all these companies. The response times that we look for when asking something on social networks are usually almost immediate. Many potential customers simply walk away or lose interest because of not being served.
DISCLAIMER: this is not the fault of the people who work on this, from experience people almost never rest for trying to answer all the requests, this is only the result of poor management by the agencies and their managers.
- Social media results reports.
Usually this is just a Power Point with screenshots of the commercial administrator and some statistics that Facebook or Google gives us, only ambiguous information. But for someone who has no idea of networks it sounds very concise, although it does not really say anything. The digital strategy can be a waste of money.
THE SOLUTION
Now, what do I do if I want my business / company / brand to have a presence on the internet and social networks?
I have two alternatives for this:
- If you have the possibility to hire a team for this, do it. In this way you will have a complete team focused on your brand / product / company so that all your investment in social networks works.
- Learn about social networks and online advertising campaigns, you understand your product, now you understand how the current market works. Facebook and Google itself offer free courses and certifications but if you want to learn more, I recommend taking courses on platforms like Udemy.
Tell me, what do you think about the topic?
