19 Nov What Questions You Should Ask Your Social Agency During Q1 Planning

Posted at 09:30h in Social Media Marketing by

How quickly Q1 sneaks up on us. Just as we’re pre-heating the oven for turkey, it’s time to plan out the new goals and accomplishments for the next year. Whether you’re working with a new social media agency partner or an internal copywriting team, there are several key questions you should ask your social agency once the new year has begun.

Below is a list to get your started. While this is a pretty long list, it’s not exhaustive and at the end of this exercise, you and your agency should come out of the conversation with clear expectations and goals for the upcoming months/year and align the brand’s social media roadmap.

Questions to incorporate in planning:

  1. How do the social objectives align with (and support) the marketing and business objectives?
    • More than anything, this is to ensure the social media partner understands you and your organization’s perspective and is looking at the bigger picture.
  2. What are best practices we can implement immediately and will have impact immediately?
    • Most of the changes that will be made to your social media channels will show their true impact over time, but some immediate actions may be able to move the needle in different ways.
  3. What are the long-term goals (with #’s)?
    • What are these based on?
    • How often are we checking progress?

Questions to get a stronger understanding of day-to-day operations:

  1. What sort of out-of-pocket costs do you expect to incur and how much?
    • Coming from the agency perspective, there are usually unexpected expenses that pop up throughout the year. If you’re able to set aside the budget to address them as they arise, the better prepared you’ll be. This includes things like props for photo shoots, travel, and maybe even surprise gifts for your brand’s most loyal fan.
  2. How are you learning about new trends? How can I learn (at a high-level) about these trends and how they impact my business?
    • Being up-to-date (even at a high-level) makes it easy to quickly execute new opportunities and fresh trends as they are being discovered.
  3. How are you managing access to and security of the social channels?
    • Your social media partners no doubt have security measures they’ve put into place to cover a wide variety of unfortunate scenarios. Make sure you understand them. Also, be prepared to talk about how access and security is managed on the brand/client side.
  4. How are you managing and ensuring compliance with liability, limitations, copyright, and trademark laws?
    • Your social media partners are expected to understand laws that apply to the social media industry at large, but they may not be as familiar with the laws unique to your industry. Help ensure your industries laws and guidelines are being communicated to the agency and followed.
  5. When will we have status? Who owns that agenda?
    • Your brand needs to move at the speed of social media, so staying connected with your social media partners is key. This ensures new developments on both sides of the table are communicated regularly and brings you two closer to being in lockstep.

Questions to better understand the competitive landscape and benchmarks:

  1. How do we look compared to our competitive set?
    • Online, consumers have every opportunity to compare every aspect of your business to your competitors. As such, you and your social media partners need to know what and how your competitors are communicating to their social media audience.
    • Let your competitors be an initial testing ground for your social media presence. Make sure you and your social media partners are also taking notes on what the competitive set is doing in social media to create some initial do’s and don’ts.
  2. What are brands are good examples of where you’d like to take our brand? That we should use as role models and why does that make sense for our brand/audience?
    • Knowing who your social media partners sees as a role model gives you a better idea of what they value in social media. Make sure they explain why.
    • Do the examples provided by your social media partners align with your brand in any way?
    • Be prepared to give examples of which brands you admire and why (outside of the competitive set). This gives your social media partners a stronger sense of what you’re trying to achieve.
  3. What are the most relevant metrics for measuring and comparing competitors?
    • Think about the evolution of digital advertising metrics from 20 years ago (back when Gigapets ruled the earth and impressions were king) to now. There were tons of agencies offering silver-bulleted metrics to show you how great your campaign performed. As with any evolution, the strongest metrics survived (and tracking capabilities improved). All of this led to a more cohesive vision of digital advertising success. Social Media metrics are no different, but the dust hasn’t officially settled and there isn’t an irrefutable, strong consensus on “success.” But now is the time to be a part of that evolution. Help define what success means to your brand, how you want to be compared to your competitors, industry standards be-damned.
  4. What does our competitor’s strategy look like?
    • I guess the first question is really, “Does your competitor have a social media strategy?,” but I suppose “Post social media content” could be considered a strategy, albeit a weak one.
    • Are your competitors using an identifiable social media tone or an advertising tone?
    • Are your competitors engaging with customers?
    • Are customers engaging with your competitors?
    • Do your competitors run promotions?
    • Are your competitors skilled social media marketers?

Questions to level-set expectations and start an open-dialogue early:

  1. Based on other clients you work with, what are the most common pitfalls and false assumptions about social?
    • Watch out for that TREE! This is to help make you aware of potential misconceptions other brands had and how to avoid them (or dig deeper to get a better understanding of why those perceptions are false).
  2. Do you have existing agency briefs? If so, what my (the client’s) role in those briefs?
  3. Layout your own expectations.
    • Describe your ideal working relationship and how you’ve been working with other agencies. Include positive and negative examples.
    • Describe the expectations of the agency from the overall organization (your boss, your boss’ boss, the marketing department, etc.).
    • Describe how all of your other advertising, marketing and PR agencies will work together and keep each other informed.

I warned you it was a long list. What’s more is that I know you can add plenty more of your own questions to the list before these conversations happen. Stay hungry for knowledge and you will never starve.

When you hear from me again, I will address questions to ask your agency on an ongoing and campaign basis, and I’ll finish the series with questions to ask at the end of the year. Bon appetite, mes amis!



Ignite Social Media