What Is SMMA? What a Social Media Marketing Agency Does and How It Gets Paid

What is SMMA? SMMA stands for Social Media Marketing Agency, the kind of business companies pay to win them customers and sales through social media. It has nothing to do with the SMMA on a trading chart, a moving average that shares the same four letters.

To understand what that means, let's look at the monster which devours free time in terrifying fashion: social media. Social media puts the SM in SMMA. An SMMA is the type of business you reach out to if you want to increase your social media presence. Are you some old cafe, founded in 1976, that has noticed a dwindling customer base? An SMMA might be the one who can reverse your dwindling sales trend.

What Does an SMMA Do?

What an SMMA does is simple to understand. You have probably made a social media account before. You have probably made a social media post before. An SMMA starts in the same place. The difference is the professionalism and objective-oriented nature behind each post, and the amount of work wrapped around it. A "marketing agency" is a group of people who work to identify, anticipate and satisfy a target market's needs. A "social media marketing agency" does this task using social media. What they do is like what average social media users do, but with purposeful intent.

In practice, an SMMA sells some mix of these services:

• Strategy. Who the business needs to reach, on which platform, and what each post is for.
• Content creation. The images, videos and captions themselves (more on these below).
• Paid social ads. Paying Instagram, TikTok, Facebook or LinkedIn to show a post to the people the business picked, then tuning the targeting and budget until each new customer costs a sensible price.
• Account and community management. Posting on schedule, answering comments and messages, keeping the account alive between campaigns.
• Analytics and reporting. Which posts and ads brought people in the door, in plain numbers every month.
• Influencers and lead generation. Bringing in creators who have their own audience, or building the pages and forms that turn a click into a name and an email address.

Each is a skill on its own, and the posts and ads at the center of the list are what members practice in the lessons inside The Real World.

Why One Social Media Post Is Harder Than It Looks

A social media post seems simple, but it contains a lot of components. There is the image, video or text itself. Then there is the timing of the post, the objective behind it and a wide variety of different algorithms to appeal to. Snapchat is different to Instagram, which is different to YouTube, and so on. Each social media algorithm has its own goals for what content it rewards, and those goals can change every single day. A post that goes viral and gets 100 people in the door today might flop and get no new customers tomorrow. Knowing how to make posts viral is very much a skill, and this is why businesses go to SMMAs to rent that skill set.

You may scroll social media mindlessly, eating all the new information that flashes before your eyes. Advanced social media marketing agencies create entire new accounts which try to replicate target customer behavior, to see what posts the algorithms put on their feed. You scroll, they scroll, but there is a massive difference in intent. A cafe in New York doesn't care to end up on a farmer's feed in California. The new driving simulator game doesn't care for its posts to end up on a feed full of wedding planners. Social media algorithms are quite good at making sure posts go to their intended audiences, but they can always use some help.

Let's Go Viral: How Platforms Decide Who Sees Your Posts

Social media algorithms start putting you in a box from the very moment you make an account. Platforms use location, among many other signals, to decide who sees your content. Made an account in France? Your reach will likely lean toward France, so hopefully that's what you wanted. It isn't a death sentence for an account, but it takes time to convince the algorithms you've "moved". If you want to act like a professional, you need intent from the very first moment you begin to interact with the algorithms. You need to understand who you are trying to reach, so you can give them what you think they want.

Creative Assets: The Letters Social Media Delivers

"Creative assets" is a general term for any content you create, whether it's an image, video, GIF or anything in between. Social media can be seen as a distribution network for your creative assets. Social media is the delivery driver. The creative asset itself is the letter. Let's take a pretty familiar creative asset, the selfie video. Good selfie videos feel "natural", as if it's just another person talking to a camera, but you'd be surprised how synthetic what you're watching might be. Lighting, hidden microphones, specially purchased camera equipment and, in the extreme, completely AI-generated speakers. SMMAs do not half-try when it comes to the creative assets they deploy.

Three Kinds of SMMA, by Where the Letters Come From

An interesting note about creative assets is that how SMMAs acquire them can vary. Some SMMAs just fine-tune the delivery vehicles. They make sure the letters you want sent get to the people you want reached, without caring too much about the content of the letter. Other SMMAs make custom letters in house, designed specifically to reach a business's target audience and to massively impact them once they do. Others partner with creative asset creators and buy the assets from reputable and trusted partner agencies instead of making them.

When you scroll online, you are usually witnessing the work product of many different competing businesses working with a variety of SMMAs. You may think it's just another day scrolling Instagram, but you're witnessing the winners of large battles over who gets to control the pixels on your phone.

How the SMMA Business Model Works

Social media marketing agencies are the newest branch of a very old business: marketing agencies that have followed people's attention from newspapers to radio to television. Social media is currently what people put eyeballs on, so social media is where the agencies have gone.

The way they get paid is just as traditional. A business usually signs on for a retainer: a fixed fee every month for an agreed amount of ongoing work. GrowthGear, a marketing agency, puts the typical retainer a business pays an SMMA at $1,000 to more than $10,000 a month, rising with the number of platforms, the amount of content and whether paid ads are included. Some SMMAs charge per project instead, for a launch or a seasonal push, or tie part of the fee to results. That is what the business pays the agency, before the agency pays for its editors, designers and software.

An SMMA needs no shop and no stock. It can start as one person with a laptop who brings in freelancers, an editor here and a designer there, as the client list grows.

That leaves the part no service list mentions. Before an SMMA posts anything, a business has to agree to pay it every month. Finding those businesses and getting the yes is a skill of its own, and it is the one the Client Acquisition Campus is built around. SMMA is the newest flavor of a traditional business that has stood the test of time, and it is one of the businesses members learn to build inside The Real World.

Learn This Inside The Real World

Everything in this article is taught in practice inside The Real World. The Strategic Marketing Campus is where members learn what makes a post, an ad or a page sell. The Client Acquisition Campus is where they learn to land the businesses that pay for it, the job every SMMA lives on. Each is led by an expert who runs this work for a living, with a chat full of members using the skill this week. One membership, every campus, $99 a month.