Steven: You can say that again. It is indeed a lot more than just that: we guide our clients through every step and area of social media – from strategic planning and consulting, all the way to the operative implementation of campaigns. We cover all fields of paid advertising on social media platforms. It is not about publishing posts on Facebook or Instagram or answering comments. We set up media campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat and so on. While the media budgets are increasing, our share in the media mix is growing continuously.

Steven: Well, all that is co-dependent and doesn’t happen at the same time. Communication is a wide field. For us it merely means understanding our clients and figuring out exactly what they want to reach by means of the social media campaign. The briefings that we receive from our clients vary quite a bit. One client might say something along the lines of “just do something on Facebook”, while the other might tell you to exactly “reach one million views” or “raise the sales of a product by 12, 5 %”.

Katharina: We make sure to ask questions such as: why specifically facebook, what do you want a million views for? As soon as we know exactly what the goal of the client is, we might even recommend a totally different measure. If the client wants to increase the sales of a product, a million views of a video will not be very effective in reaching that goal.

Katharina: I studied journalism and media management and jobbed at an advertising agency during my studies. After I graduated, I worked as an online marketing manager at a company. Part of my responsibility there was to launch Facebook and Instagram campaigns. Those were the jobs that fascinated me the most and that is how I ended up here.

Steven: I studied sociology and market- and advertising psychology. During my studies, I worked as an SEO editor. That meant writing and optimizing copy in an effective way, so that the content is most likely to appear in search engines. That is about the time when I started getting interested in social media and focused my thesis on text analysis for Twitter. After engaging in market research and content development, I started concentrating on the medial aspects of advertising. I then freelanced at Facit Digital, our market research agency here at Serviceplan for a while. That is how I eventually ended up in social advertising at Plan.Net.

Steven: You are right. We usually train our new colleagues from scratch to make them fit for our requirements. You get very few that are already skilled in this area. But a lot of our applicants bring along very useful skills for the job. For example, know-how in the field of online advertising and search or experience in working with clients.

Steven: Communication skills, empathy and patience. Even if social media advertising is your daily bread, you might have to explain it to your clients from scratch, because they have never seriously engaged in that topic before. A handful of self-confidence and positive charisma are helpful when presenting in front of a bunch of people that you have never met before.

Katharina: Correct, things are constantly changing. It is not just the aspect of the quick change in technology that makes the job so interesting. But we work with many different industries and products. That is what makes it so fascinating for me.

Steven: Absolutely! Another thing that I like about the job is our function as a link between the media agencies, creative departments, copy writers and site operators. Dealing and working with such a diversity of people, backgrounds and interests makes our job very versatile.

Steven: Each one of our team members is skilled in everything that we cover. We are eight people and each one of us can consult and advise our clients holistically. Except for the production of content. We do not do that ourselves. In some agencies, the content producer is also the advertiser. I believe that in a set up like that you might lose the focus of whether you are a content expert or a campaigning expert. We believe that mixing up the competencies is not very effective and won’t satisfy the client in the long run.

Katharina: Lately we have been developing a lot of campaign strategies covering the creative and content approach. In these cases, we tell the creative departments and editors what we need from them, not the other way around.

Steven: With a lot of clients we are still at the beginning of our development, but the budget shares are increasing rapidly based on our campaign successes.

Katharina: The users share, like, comment and click on the links that lead them to the campaign landing pages. In the best case, they will immediately order the product. These are great benefits for our clients because the entire customer journey is trackable. Depending on what the campaign goal is, you can take a close look at the response channels.

Steven: Sure, that is true. Especially Facebook offers a lot of possibilities. It has an impact when a user follows a brand on Facebook, but also if a user comments the post of a friend regarding a brand. Or even when a user scrolls slower after seeing a brand posting. All of this information is combinable with demographic data such as “female, between 25 and 40, in a metropolitan region”. It is really fascinating to work creatively with these mechanisms.