If you’re a business owner who is looking to hire a social media marketing agency or maybe you’re not quite ready yet, but you’re looking at some for guidance from them until you can.

Here are the 5 things we got wrong as a social media marketing agency..

The Makery Co. was originally just a media production company who had a renaissance background in the creative industry. As Instagram Reels were starting to gain traction one of our clients asked if we could produce and post  ‘A Reel A Day’ to their profile. 

As every business owner does, we said yes. And from there, all of the social media marketing mistakes began.

We did promise you 5 mistakes, but rest assured there were many more and for the sake of brevity we just picked the top five.

Our Social Media Content Goals Weren’t Supported By Systems

So was there a plan for how we were going to accomplish this?

Why no! Who needs a plan when you have a goal and the creative firepower like us?

It became clear, very fast, that we bit off more than we could chew.

So you stick with us and keep reading. We should tell you that we have posted ‘A Reel A Day’ for this client for over a year. Also, as this blog post publishes they are also still a highly satisfied client!

After 90 days of producing a reel a day, we were burnt out. We were trying to use trending audios for every post and that was a nightmare because any third-party scheduling software couldn’t post a reel yet, so everything was manually posted. This is not how you scale content.

Thus, we took a hard look at ourselves and started to develop systems and templates!

We became obsessed with the question, “How do I never have to do this again”?

This lead us to start creating resources like a content library, reels templates for our editing software premiere pro, reels thumbnail templates, etc.

The takeaway from this. See the value in the content, but realize the value of the system that will allow you to produce better content.

We Chased Social Media Trends without a Strategy

In the beginning our content was ONLY trending audios that were just copycats of what other creators and businesses were doing.

Sure our clients were in them, showing their personality, and in a round-a-bout way relating them back to their business. 

Then came the Hormozi style reels, with the bright flashy captions and emojis… those were the worst to make by hand. They were painstakingly the worst thing to replicate before any AI editing software.

Meanwhile, our clients had a very successful podcast that we didn’t talk anything about. We totally missed providing value beyond the platform or even that the platform could support more than just funny skits.

Our social media clients own business had tons of resources we could have been sharing and promoting, but instead we were using Instagram as a cheap motel for one night stands and quick wins.

From there we started looking at our content as an investment portfolio. Not just in the kind of content we created; skits, how-to’s, podcast clips, etc. We started to see the opportunity to use different platforms for different types of content. 

Better late than never, we developed our own content strategy.

Creating Content without SEO

We were never huge believers in SEO; Search Engine Optimization. Especially for creative content! As a creative it seemed like the dark side. Like the only people using SEO were just there for the traffic, but didn’t care about the content.

All of this was before we started making YouTube videos for our clients as part of our ‘larger organic marketing strategy’.

Did you know that YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world?

Did you also know that the number one thing to piss off a creative content creator is to see their content get blown out of the water by content made on a cracked iphone?

After going down a rabbit hole of SEO, YouTube, and blogs we came to one conclusion.

SEO matters for your content and we needed to get way better at it!

With this realization, we began implementing SEO strategies into our YouTube titles, tags, descriptions, and dare we say we even started making out these videos into blogs.

The results speak for themselves.

Content is a Tool for Your Business, Build Something with it

Have you ever seen a business that seems to thrive, but has no idea what they’re doing on social media?

Does it puzzle you to your core and keep you up at night?

We’ve stayed up, done the homework, worked with those businesses, and have derived that answer you’ve been looking for.

They are better business builders..

As a business owner who is in the industry of creating content it’s easy to lose sight of real value amongst the number of followers, sponsors, views, etc.

There are entrepreneurs and business owners out there who have learned what it takes to grow a business. The most frustrating part is that we always seem to think there’s a secret to it. They do these simple things well and they do them consistently.

What are these simple things?

They market their business consistently and know their customers. These are business owners who have an email list of 10,000 subscribers and all they use it for is sending emails once a month to let their customers know that their product is back in stock or that they have a new service.

You probably get a few of these emails in your inbox. You might even look at them and scoff because they aren’t the most ‘aesthetically pleasing’ to look at. 

However, you have to ask yourself this hard question. Are you doing it?

We as business owners tend to neglect simple things like building email lists, writing blog posts, creating digital products, running google ads.

Create everything with the end in mind; content, web pages, emails, etc.