I’ve seen x3 interesting changes off the back of some *big* changes to the social media landscape, and I wanna share them with you today;
1️⃣ I’m blown away by how much the landscape has changed in *such* a short space of time, and it really does feel like so much of that is attributed to most platforms adopting a video-first user experience.
2️⃣ For marketing professionals like us [agency setting], that’s meant entire redesign[s] of social media strategies … and so subsequently, retainers [because oh my goodness, it’s becoming more and more expensive to not only design standout strategies, but implement them].
3️⃣ Those retainer increases have meant some clients can no longer justify that agency retainer [that’s a-ok!], and instead look for freelance marketing support, or their very first in-house marketing professional etc. On the flipside, so many of my agency-owning friends have said, “we can no longer afford to offer full service management, in that the retainer is too high for our client/s … and we end up 3k+ in the red each month”.
For TDP? 80% of our client portfolio is performance marketing-based activity/ies, and for the small chunk of full service management we offer? We have a particular niche we’re best suited to serving [i.e we’re best suited to supporting marketing teams who look at agency retainers and quickly see that we come in at the same price – or less than – them appointing a junior marketing professional between 60-80k per annum, and so it’s a “no brainer” for them to justify our yearly spend given they get an “agency unicorn” for the cost of a social media coordinator].
But yes, my gosh, the landscape is changing … and our Managing Director has only needed to look at the last 6 months of spreadsheets to pivot our services *much* more towards performance marketing, and away from full service management [expensive for most of the enquiries we receive, and barely profitable for us, so, uh … nobody wins 😅].
It’s my prediction that the future of full service management sits with specialist freelance professionals, or a team of in-house professionals who can pool together to become “the unicorn” social media needs them to be in this current landscape.
Thoughts? Let us know in the comments!