Outsourcing Social Media Marketing: Overcoming Challenges

Social media marketing is one of the great ways to boost your business, but it can be challenging to do on your own. That’s where outsourcing can come in.

Outsourcing enables you to effectively scale your social media effort to cover more ground in the different platforms by getting you qualified social media experts. Outsourcing also makes it easier for you to adapt to social media trends faster by making your marketing process more flexible and team scalable.

However, social media marketing outsourcing does carry its own challenges. How do you keep your outsourced social media marketing on track? Let’s find out.

The Challenges Of Outsourced Social Media Marketing

Like in any other field, outsourcing offers plenty for your social media marketing efforts. It gives you more range to cover more people and do more novel marketing approaches.

But it does carry various challenges. Let’s discuss the top three challenges of outsourced social media marketing.

The Challenge Of Consistency

You might wonder how this consistency becomes a challenge since outsourcing is supposed to help you amplify your social media marketing message.

Image from Creative Content Company.

This challenge of inconsistency arises when another team works on the marketing effort. While you might provide the same guidelines on tone, messaging, and branding, the external team could still produce different results based on their understanding.

Such inconsistencies will significantly affect the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. It can also cause consumers to be confused about who you are. This will affect your entire engagement with them.

The Challenge Of Control

One way to remedy the above situation is by controlling how the outsourced social media marketing is done.

But it is easier said than done.

Image from The California Aggie.

Outsourced teams often lean toward greater autonomy and trying to micromanage everything can end things up negatively.

Finding the right balance between management and autonomy is the key to making an outsourced social media team work well.

The Challenge Of Company Culture Alignment

You might not realize it, but company culture alignment also impacts the effectiveness of your social media marketing efforts. Outsourced teams not understanding that culture can create misalignments.

As such, you must bring an outsourcing partner that can easily adapt to your work culture who, in turn, can bring your social media professionals who can align with your culture.

Outsourcing Your Social Media More Effective

Increasing effectiveness when outsourcing your social media marketing effort begins with clearly defining your brand guidelines. But that isn’t just about the general flow and angle of the marketing. You want to be clear on the finer details.

Creating a brand bible will help you better bring everything under control and everyone aligned. Outsourced teams can help you build that bible. Outsourced social media marketing experts will help you understand what types of content work for your brand on different platforms.

Image from the Branded Agency.

From there, they can help you devise the processes to create your content.

A tailored content strategy is needed to make this happen, though. Luckily, these outsourced social media marketing experts can help with that too!

Creating A Tailored Content Strategy

At the heart of every effective social media marketing effort is the right content.

And outsourcing can help you create the content strategy that will best fit your brand image.

Image from Pavilion.

Guide your outsourced social media team into bringing all of these into a more cohesive whole. Identify your target audience and their online behaviors and create a strategy around that information. Communicate these to your outsourced team together with the goals that you are setting to achieve with your content strategy.

This ensures that everyone will be on the right page in the social media marketing effort.

Delivering On-Point Audience Engagement With Outsourcing

The other important component of social media marketing is an effective audience engagement strategy. Here, you need to go beyond just delivering the right response. You also want to steer customers’ conversation in your desired direction.

You also need to ensure you remain connected to your audience throughout these engagements. Outsourcing providers will help you by expanding your social media team with members that can connect with your followers 24/7.