Why a 12-month contract, you ask? Because statistically, clients who stick around for at least one year tend to get the best results.
Sometimes, the grass isn’t greener on the other side; it’s greener where we water it! In many industries, retaining clients and fostering long-term partnerships is paramount. However, it’s especially crucial in social media management’s fast-paced, ever-evolving world. For agencies like Socialistics, client retention is not just about preserving revenue. It’s about deeply understanding the client’s needs and delivering superior results. This is why a 12-month contract is often emphasized.
This article will explore the value of signing a 12-month contract with your marketing agency. We’ll delve into the merits of commitment and relationship building, weathering challenges together, gaining expertise over time for improved results delivery, and minimizing disruption costs associated with transitioning to a new firm. Let’s unpack every layer behind this worthy commitment.
The Value of Commitment and Relationship Building in a 12-Month Contract
Commitment is no small thing. It holds a significant place in the operations of any social media agency. When you, as a client, commit to a year-long contract, it speaks volumes. It means you have faith in the agency’s abilities to help your business grow.
Above all, it encourages deeper relationship-building beyond mere contracts and transactional activities. This partnership yields several key benefits:
Improved Communication
Remember when you made a new friend or started working with a colleague? As time passed and you got comfortable with each other, communication became smoother and more productive. The same is true when an agency collaborates with a client for an extended period.
Professionals often have years of experience and understand the importance of clear communication. They work hard to keep those lines open; this commitment strengthens over time.
Streamlined Processes
A lot of hard work is involved in setting up processes for any new project or onboarding new people into your life. Learning curves are unavoidable. But as you strive together through this year-long journey, streamlined synergies emerge.
Marketing agencies perform better when systems are fine-tuned and well-oiled. That includes your internal processes and the strategies for your business’s social media presence. Streamlined workflows translate into effective social media management strategies, saving time and resources. Trial and error are reduced to a minimum during a long-term relationship.
A Better Understanding of Unique Needs
Perhaps one of the most important benefits is how intimately your agency gets to understand your business over these 12 months. Some agencies might promise to put their best foot forward immediately. How can that be possible without truly understanding your business’ unique landscape?
A good partner believes in taking the time to understand your business, your market, and where you want to go. The longer you partner with them, the better solutions they can offer. Just like an employee, it takes time to get up to speed and acclimate to the unique aspects of your business, products/services, and industry. But given time and with a good agency, it will happen.
Weathering the 12-Month Contract Storm: Navigating Challenges Together
You should also look for an agency that believes in growing through challenges rather than falling apart. Problems arise; it’s the nature of business, and marketing isn’t immune to this. It’s in these tough moments that a team’s resilience shines brightest. They can learn vital lessons and become more adjusted to your business goals and how best to attain them.
To drive our point home, let’s look at some examples from our experience.
The Burwood Case
Burwood is a B2B client whose niche lies in the complex field of IT consulting. Their IT consulting niche compelled us to navigate a labyrinth of technological jargon and complex industry-specific concepts. Getting the right advertising targeting for such a unique industry was especially challenging, further underlining the need for our advocated 4-month rule.
The 4-month rule subscribes to the idea that sufficient time must be given to see results over the first few months of a campaign. It allows us to dive deep into the nuts and bolts of the business, its dynamics, and the marketing channels. In the Burwood case, adhering to this principle proved instrumental.
Despite a rocky start, we turned those initial difficulties into a driving force. We absorbed the lessons taught by early learnings and continuously tweaked our approach to better fit their marketing needs. We had the time to see what worked and what didn’t. The results began to show as we started handling ad management across platforms.
Engagements skyrocketed past 15k while keeping our cost per engagement incredibly low. It was indeed a fruitful partnership.
Baptist Health
Partnering with Baptist Health, a non-profit healthcare organization, presented its challenges. We had to increase job applications through organic and paid social media channels. The difficulty here was the lack of data we had to work with. Thankfully, we like to use the initial period as a learning phase, an opportunity to gather vital, early-stage data. This critical information filled our knowledge banks about Baptist Health.
We explored the landscape of their target demographic to identify patterns and trends that could aid our future campaigns. The early data collection also allowed us to create look-alike audiences comprising warm leads—an audience category that mirrors existing customers’ characteristics.
This powerful targeting tool proved vital in Baptist Health’s paid social media campaign. As we moved beyond the first month, the snowball effect became apparent—each successive month’s data layering atop the previous, adding more depth to our understanding and sharpening our approaches.
We started observing a significant upward trend within just one month in late 2022. Over 533,259 impressions were recorded, with landing page views and clicks also growing considerably, up to 1,388 and 3,470, respectively. All with a lower CPM than expected!
Building Resilience
Just as players forge their bond on the sports field through victory or defeat, successful partnerships follow suit when both parties are determined to overcome any obstacles towards achieving your business objectives.
It becomes a shared experience of knowing that no problem is insurmountable when tackled together. You’ll build unwavering faith in each other’s abilities, proving that your partner is more than a social media agency. They’re allies dedicated to fulfilling your vision regardless of how big the challenges may seem.
Building Expertise and Delivering Results with a 12-Month Contract
Patience is a virtue, especially in the world of social media marketing. We all dream of instant viral success. But the reality is that getting to know your business from top to bottom, understanding your particular audience demographic, and discovering the most receptive methods towards engaging them takes time.
By committing to an online marketing agency for at least one year, you give them ample opportunity to delve into the core of your brand’s identity. They can fully grasp those distinctive characteristics that set you apart from your competitors.
Understanding Your Business Landscape
The more time a digital marketing agency spends collaborating with you, the better understanding they gain about specific aspects of your brand’s objectives. Challenges can sometimes be unique sub-industry hurdles you aim to cross. In others, it may be complexities with client requirements that need custom solutions. All these learnings add up.
Deeply Dive Into Audience Analysis
Understanding the audience is crucial in designing successful marketing campaigns. And this understanding deepens over time. As months pass by, your partner progressively decodes what makes your audience tick and resonates best with them.
The more data they accumulate, the more accurately they can fine-tune their approach. This, in turn, increases the effectiveness of campaigns and translates to higher ROI for you.
The Cost of Transition: Making a Shift to a New Agency
Moving from one paid advertising firm to another is no walk in the park. It entails more than just signing off paperwork. It brings along possible interruptions, a learning curve, and lost time costs.
There can be various reasons for the transition, such as diverging values, budget constraints, etc. But, keeping those reasons aside, changing agencies is often not the most preferred option. Your workflow will be upended, and many processes must be restarted from scratch. Plus, all the knowledge learned from the previous agency will be lost.
Working through the onboarding process with another advertising company could significantly push back your growth clock. Yet, it’s not just about timelines. There’s also an increased risk of momentum loss during this transitioning phase, which may lead to missed opportunities.
This is why it’s better to work through the problems and grow together most of the time rather than cutting ties at the first sign of trouble.
The Employee Analogy: A Learning Curve and Loyalty
Some people see their marketing firm as additional employees within their company. When new employees come on board, they need time to adapt, learn, and grow. Loyalty is demonstrated through their work ethic, willingness to persist in the face of challenges, and dedication to improving themselves for the betterment of the organization.
In much the same way, agencies view their role. They are here to help you succeed and grow, offering their services and strategies. Their commitment is to your long-term success. And that requires investment on both sides of the partnership.
So wouldn’t you consider it wise to be patient with them? Like with a valued employee who has your organization’s best interests at heart, substantial rewards are tied to allowing them to celebrate victories together and grow stronger from learning experiences.
Partner With Us To See For Yourself
Signing a 12-month contract with Socialistics is a partnership destined for exponential growth.
Remember, the longer you stick around, the better we get at tuning our services to resonate with your unique needs. We get well-acquainted with your business landscape and notice things about your target audience that enable us to transform campaigns into wide-scale successes.
Excited about starting this journey? Then, let’s take the next step together! Get in touch with us today, and let’s start crafting something amazing.
