How to Interview a Social Media Marketing Firm

Start With Your Company’s Goals

In the last post, we discussed the importance of defining and articulating your company’s offline marketing goals and your social media marketing goals. Together, they serve as the target by which you measure success.

If a social media marketing firm doesn’t first seek to understand certain core fundamentals about your business and competitive environment, they are likely not a good fit for you. You’re looking for a firm that understands savvy, successful business as well as social media technicalities and online campaign execution. That’s a tall order. So it’s important to take time, interview several firms, and find the right fit for you. If you don’t put in this effort upfront, you may waste a lot of time, energy and money.

Example Interview Questions

Keep in mind that YOU are the hiring authority. Even though you may not know a lot about how social media campaigns are run, it is still the social media marketing firm that must pass YOUR scrutiny. So drill the questions at them and hold their feet to the fire.

Gather your management team together for each interview session. Many ears with different areas of expertise will hear the firm’s answers in different ways. Ask these questions:

• How will you incorporate our company goals into online strategies and social media campaigns?
• Do you have actual client campaign examples that got measurable results from your social media campaigns?
• How did you measure results in those campaigns?
• How did you determine success?
• Have you had experiences in which clients did NOT achieve their goals, or were unhappy with their social media campaigns? Why? What would you do differently?
• Do you establish baseline metrics to measure progress? Give me an example from a client campaign.
• What has been your biggest client challenge or problem, and how did you solve it?
• What methods have you used: To identify a niche audience and grow it? To engage that audience? To convert them into customers?
• How will you go about determining the right social media campaign to reach OUR goals?
• How do you price your services?
• What if we’re not satisfied?

I highly recommend interviewing THREE firms. Ask all these questions verbatim. With your management team at each interview, have each person write down all the answers. After all the interviews are over, have your team pow wow to compare notes and discuss preferences. A clear winner will probably emerge during your discussion.

After all this, you will have gone up a very steep learning curve in a relatively short time period. It’s well worth the investment, because social media will continue to grow in importance for all companies around the globe.

What other aspects of a social media marketing firm interview have you found helpful?

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ABOUT Lisa M. Chapman:

Ms. Chapman’s new book, How to Make Money Online With Social Media: A Step-by-Step Guide for Entrepreneurs will be available very soon. With offices in Nashville Tennessee, but working virtually with international clients, Lisa M. Chapman serves her clients as a business and marketing coach, business planning consultant and social media consultant. As a Founder of iBrand Masters, a social media consulting firm, Lisa Chapman helps clients to establish and enhance their online brand, attract their target market, engage them in meaningful social media conversations, and convert online traffic into revenues. Email: Lisa @ LisaChapman.com