Maybe you always thought that if you outsourced your marketing to a top social media agency you were in set it and forget it mode. But not so fast: What if you could team up with your agency to form an unstoppable social media freight train that would turn your competitors green with envy? You can and here’s how to do it.

Keep an Open Mind

It doesn’t matter if you’ve just signed on with a social media agency or if you have been working with the same firm for years. There are many things you can do to build a team that competes and innovates online. First of all, you and the agency need to keep an open mind. The strategy can be planned together and the day to day tactics can be assigned to the agency, but you can bring a lot more to the table than you realize, and it doesn’t have to cost you a lot of time or monetary resources.

One way of approaching it is thinking of your online assets like a huge closet that’s jammed full of stuff. Most everyone has a closet or at least a junk drawer like that. Sometimes when you go through the articles in those spaces you find things you forgot you had, that you can get more use out of, and there are always a few things to discard. Take a hard look at some of the hidden gems. Here’s an example: What about that YouTube channel you started a few years ago and then didn’t post to since last fall? There are lots of really great video creation tools out there that don’t even require you to be on camera. Try ones like GoAnimate and create engaging explainer videos that your agency can share on your site and on social media. Make sure to rejuvenate your YouTube channel with these videos, too.

Same Old Thing Doesn’t Drive Traffic

Could be you and your agency have gotten into a bit of a rut. Perhaps you remember a time when people couldn’t wait to see the next piece of content on your Facebook or Twitter feeds. Now they give you a kind of lukewarm reception. What happened? Maybe you have played out a certain type of content and it’s time for something new. Varying your content on social platforms is important to keep engagement up. Try a Periscope broadcast where you teach someone how to do something, or break news about your company. Go with some live blogging when you attend or host an event. There are lots of options you can try to vary your content and keep your audience engaged.

Share Before You Share

Help your agency out with their content creation. Hand them product fact sheets, lists of benefits you provide with your services, PDF brochures – any kind of materials that they can use to put together a complete picture of what you’re about. Be prepared to answer lots of questions. Your social media agency will need to play the part of professional sleuth and ferret out every juicy bit of information they can to communicate why people should do business with you. Brainstorm ideas with them and dare to be different! The agency will need all this information to create irresistible posts for sharing on your social accounts.

Give the People What They Want & Lots of It

We live in a visual marketing world. Did you know that color visuals really pique people’s interest? Hubspot reports this amazing stat from Xerox: ‘Researchers found that colored visuals increase people’s willingness to read a piece of content by 80%.’ It’s time to brainstorm some visual marketing goodness that your agency can run with. It depends on your industry, but here are a few hot ideas:

Look for embeddable graphics: A lot of infographic creators provide code for you to embed their infographic into your site or blog. Be sure to give credit, and then create an article around the information.

Tons of studies and reports like this one from Inc.com confirm that tweets with images get way more engagement than those without. Are your images lacking or do you not include them (or does your agency leave them out) in your tweets? It is worth investing in quality images – either high quality stock images (and these have to be really good and relevant) or custom made by a graphic designer (you can buy these occasionally and mix them in your tweet workflow). You could reuse the images as featured images for a blog post later, to get maximum ROI (ask your image service or graphic artist if there is any restriction to doing that, just to be sure).

Podcasts are hot. Yes, podcasts. Moz just put out a great podcasting SEO piece that can show you and your agency how you can derive value from podcasts. They’re increasing in popularity and I bet if you asked your business associates you’d find that many of them have favorites – time to get on board with your own serialized traffic driver!

You and your social media agency can become an unstoppable marketing team. If you even added one of the ideas from this blog post to your marketing mix you should be able to ramp up your referral traffic and get some real results in these last few months of 2016. Go for it, become unstoppable!