Blizsocials, a social media management, brand strategy and web design agency in Lagos, Nigeria.

What you are actually paying for

A monthly fee is not rent on somebody's time, and it is not a bulk discount on graphics. It covers five separate jobs, and most brands who try to do it in-house end up handing all five to one already overworked person and wondering why the account looks tired by March.

The first is strategy, which sounds grand but really means deciding what the account is for before anybody opens Canva. Who is this for, what do we want them to do, and how will we know if it worked. Skip it and everything downstream becomes guesswork with good lighting.

Then production: photography, video, graphics, captions. This is the biggest cost line by a distance, and the one clients underestimate most reliably, because it is the one you cannot rush without it showing. Then publishing, which is less about scheduling software and more about holding a rhythm through the six weeks when nothing exciting is happening at your company. Then community management, which means replying, in your voice, quickly. And finally reporting, which we will come back to, because it is where most agencies quietly stop trying.

If a quote does not tell you how much of each of those you are getting, you have not been given a quote. You have been given a number.

What moves the price

Four things, roughly in order of how much they matter. Volume and type of content comes first: twelve graphics a month and twelve properly edited reels a month are not remotely the same job, and any agency charging the same for both is either overcharging for one or about to disappoint you on the other.

Second, the number of platforms. Nobody should be pricing a fourth platform as a copy and paste, because it is not one. Different format, different audience, different posting rhythm, and a TikTok audience can smell a repurposed LinkedIn post from a scroll away.

Third, whether production is included. A shoot day with lighting, sound and a crew is a separate cost from running a page, and it should appear as a separate line. Fourth, whether ads are being run, because managing paid media is its own discipline with its own reporting and its own ways of going wrong.

A price you have to ask for is a price that changes depending on how wealthy you look.

Three things nobody should be charging you for

Your ad budget is the big one. The money that goes to Meta or Google is your money, spent on your account, in your name, and it should never be folded into a single figure you cannot pull apart. If somebody quotes you "₦400,000 a month, ads included" and will not tell you the split, walk.

Related: a silent markup on boosting. If they spend ₦100,000 of your money and invoice you ₦140,000, that is a perfectly legitimate arrangement, as long as you were told before it happened rather than after you asked.

And the report. Telling you what happened to your own money is part of the job. We have seen it quoted as an add-on more than once and it still surprises us.

How to tell a real quote from a guess

Four questions. A real quote answers all four without going quiet:

• What exactly is delivered each month, in numbers?
• Which metric are we judging this on, and when do we first look at it?
• What is the minimum term, and what happens if I want to stop?
• Who is actually doing the work, and will I ever speak to them?

That last one catches more bad agencies than the other three put together. Plenty of shops sell you a director and staff the account with whoever is free.

The cost of getting it wrong

Here is the part that does not appear on any invoice. Average marketing does not cost you the fee you paid, it costs you the customers who never found you. You never learn their names, so the loss never lands on a spreadsheet, and that is exactly why it can run quietly for years while everyone agrees the branding looks fine.

Where ours sit

We publish our prices instead of quoting privately, which is not a moral position so much as a practical one: a price you have to ask for is a price that changes depending on how wealthy you look. Monthly management starts at ₦85,000. Website builds, campaigns and studio days are priced separately and listed in full, and clients outside Nigeria get the list for their own market in their own currency.

First: are you talking to the person who actually buys?

Most accounts are written for the whole internet, and the whole internet is not your customer. When Marvgallup Group came to us they had five subsidiaries speaking in five different voices, none of which was aimed at a specific person, and the effect from outside was of a company that could do anything and therefore stood for nothing.

Deciding who you are for is not a branding indulgence. It is the decision that makes every later decision obvious: what to post, what to ignore, which trend is beneath you. Here is the test. Could a stranger read three of your posts and tell you who you are for? If not, start here, and do not let anybody sell you content until you have.

Second: is the content worth stopping for?

Not clever. Not beautifully polished. Useful, honest, and worth three seconds from somebody who was not looking for you. The purpose of content is not to be admired, it is to make you the name a person already trusts on the day they finally need what you sell.

Most brands post about themselves, which is understandable and almost always wrong. The accounts that convert post about the customer's problem and let the product turn up as the answer, usually late, usually quietly.

Reach was never the point. Reach was the by-product.

Third: can anyone find the next step?

This is where the money leaks, and it leaks silently. Somebody reads three posts, decides they are interested, and then has to work out how to contact you. If that takes more than one tap, most of them are gone, and you will never know they were there.

Go and look at your own profile the way a stranger would, cold, on a phone, in a hurry. Can you enquire from the bio without leaving the app? Ezee Logistics came to us with no brand identity and no online presence worth the name. Fixing the identity mattered, but fixing the path to enquiring is what produced the hundred per cent rise in enquiries.

Fourth: does anyone actually reply?

An unanswered comment is a lost customer with a public record of being ignored. Community management is the least glamorous line on any proposal and the one most directly tied to revenue, because it is the only part of the account where somebody is already talking to you and all you have to do is talk back.

The order matters more than the work

Better content aimed at the wrong person is wasted. A perfect funnel sitting under content nobody stops for has nothing flowing into it. And paying to promote any of it before the first three are right is the most expensive mistake on the list, precisely because it works. It brings you more of the wrong people, faster, and the numbers look like progress while the bank account does not move.

This is the whole reason our method ends where a lot of agencies stop. Attention is not the goal. The last step, turning attention into an enquiry, is the one that decides whether any of the earlier work was worth paying for.

What it looks like when it is right

Gemona West are an award winning interior architecture studio whose presence was not pulling the calibre of client their work deserved. Nothing was wrong with the work, the work was the best part. What was wrong was that an expensive buyer did not feel safe enquiring, which is a strange sentence until you have watched it happen. A rebrand, a rebuilt feed and a managed landing page produced a seventy per cent reach lift in four months, and, more to the point, a sixty per cent profit increase in the first year.

What to bring to the first call

Five things. Written down, even roughly. Bring them and the first call stops being an interview and starts being work.

What you sell and who buys it. Not the mission statement, the actual thing money changes hands for and the actual person who hands it over. What you want to change: more enquiries, better enquiries, a different calibre of customer, a reputation problem you are tired of. Pick the one that matters most, you can have the others later.

What you have already tried, including what failed. This is the single most useful thing a client can give an agency and the thing most clients hold back, usually out of embarrassment. Nobody is judging the ₦200,000 you spent on the influencer who posted once. We just need to know so we do not spend your money learning it twice.

What you cannot say: regulatory limits, claims you are not allowed to make, subjects the brand stays out of. And who signs off, and how quickly. An account with a four day approval loop cannot post daily. That is fine, but it needs to be known on day one, not discovered in week three.

Describe the outcome, not the output

"We need twelve reels a month" is a shopping list. It tells us what to make and nothing about what it is for, which is how work gets delivered in full and lands wrong.

"We want more of the customers who book the full package rather than the trial" is a brief. It can be argued with, planned against and measured. It might produce twelve reels. It might produce four proper films and a rebuilt profile, and you would probably prefer the second one.

Nobody can hit a target you have not described.

What belongs in the contract instead

Four things, and a decent agency offers all four before you have to ask. Named deliverables in numbers, with dates. Ownership of files, footage, logins and the ad account, all of it yours, in writing, and you should be able to walk away with the lot. What happens to your ad budget: held separately, reported separately, spent in your name. And a notice period you can actually use, long enough that the work gets a fair run and short enough that you are not trapped with people you have stopped trusting.

What to expect every month

A report you can read in five minutes that answers three questions: what moved, what did not, and what changes next month because of it. A screenshot of a dashboard is not a report. A dashboard is data, a report is a decision.

And if the month went badly, that belongs in the report too. An agency that only sends you the good months is managing you rather than the account, and by the time you notice you will have paid for two quarters of it.

Your half of the bargain

The accounts that work best are the ones where the client answers questions within a day, sends us the raw material only they have (the new stock, the finished project, the customer who said something worth repeating) and resists the urge to rewrite every caption into the voice of a press release.

The biggest single cause of average work is a slow approval loop. Content is perishable. A post approved eleven days late is not a late post, it is a different post, and usually a worse one.

How to tell in month one

Not by the follower count, which will do whatever it wants for the first six weeks. Look at this instead. Are they asking you questions you had not thought about? Does the work look recognisably like you rather than recognisably like them? Have they told you something you did not want to hear? And did the first report actually change the plan, or just describe it?

Four yeses and you are in good hands. Four noes and month two will look exactly like month one, which is the real thing to be afraid of.

The three numbers that flatter you

Reach, impressions and follower count. All three go up when you post more, all three go up when one post gets lucky, and none of them tell you whether a single person moved closer to buying. They are worth watching as a trend over months. They are worth almost nothing as a monthly score.

The reason they persist is that they are the easiest numbers to put in a slide, and a rising line is a pleasant thing to show a boss. Which is fine, until the quarter ends and somebody asks what the line bought.

The ones that actually predict money

Saves and shares, first. A save is somebody saying "I will need this later", and a share is somebody staking a bit of their own reputation on you. Both are far closer to intent than a like, which costs nothing and means nearly nothing.

Then profile visits and link taps, which measure the thing most accounts never check: whether the content made anybody curious enough to go looking. Then DMs and comments that are questions rather than compliments. And then the only one that finally matters, which is enquiries, and which almost nobody bothers to connect back to the post that caused them.

You do not need attribution software for that last one. You need to ask people where they found you and write the answer down.

A number with nothing to compare it to is not a result. It is a rumour with a decimal point.

Compare against yourself, not a screenshot

The fastest way to make a good month look bad is to compare it to somebody else's carousel on LinkedIn. Different industry, different audience size, different amount of money behind it, and quite possibly a number that has been quietly rounded up.

Compare this month to your own last month, and this quarter to the same quarter last year, because most Nigerian businesses have a season and yours is probably in one right now. A December that beats November means less than a December that beats last December.

The five minute monthly review

Three questions, in this order, and nothing else.

• What moved, and can we say why? Not "engagement was up", but which posts, and what those posts had in common.
• What did not move, and did we expect it to? A flat month you predicted is information. A flat month that surprised you is a warning.
• What changes next month because of the two answers above?

If the third question has no answer, the review was a status update, not a review. This is the single most common failure we see in reports written by other agencies, and it is why we insist a report ends in a decision.

The honesty tests

Two, and both are uncomfortable. First: if a number cannot change a decision, stop reporting it. It is decoration, and decoration in a report is how a bad quarter hides.

Second: write down what you expect before you open the dashboard. Then open it. The gap between what you expected and what happened is the only genuinely new information on the screen, and it disappears the moment you look at the numbers first and decide afterwards that you knew all along.

What we report, and why it is short

Our monthly reports run to a page or so. What moved, what did not, what changes, and the numbers that support those three answers. Not a screenshot of a dashboard the client can open themselves, and not forty slides of context nobody reads to the end of.

When a month goes badly it says so, with the reason and the fix, because an agency that only sends good months is managing the client rather than the account.

The obvious answer, which is only half right

The obvious answer is money. Cut out the production company, keep the margin, charge the client less. That is true, and it is genuinely part of it, and it is not the reason that matters.

The reason that matters is that the people who planned the campaign are the people holding the camera. When the strategist who decided what this month is for is standing in the room while it is shot, the shoot changes as it goes, and it changes in the right direction.

Speed, which is really about relevance

Outsourced production runs on other people's calendars. You brief in the last week of the month, they shoot a fortnight later, you get files a week after that, and by the time it goes out the reason you wanted it has moved on.

In-house means shooting on Tuesday because Tuesday is when it matters. A client's competitor does something worth answering, a product sells out and there is a story in it, a partner posts something you should be part of. None of that survives a three week production cycle, and all of it is where the actual growth lives.

You are not paying for the shoot. You are paying for the argument before the shoot.

Consistency, which is the boring one that wins

Feeds do not fail dramatically. They fail by drifting: a slightly different blue here, a different caption voice there, one month where the reels look sharp and the next where they look like somebody else made them, because somebody else did.

The same room, the same lights and largely the same three people is what stops that. It is not a creative advantage so much as an administrative one, and it is the single thing clients notice six months in without being able to name it.

The argument before the shoot

This is the part clients are actually paying for and never see. Four people around one laptop, disagreeing about whether the concept is any good, an hour before anybody touches a camera. Somebody says the hook is soft. Somebody else says the audience will not care about the second half. It gets rewritten. That hour is worth more than the shoot day, and it only happens if the people in it are on the same team and can be honest with each other.

You do not get that hour from a freelancer you briefed by email. You get exactly what you asked for, which, as any client who has briefed badly will tell you, is not the same thing as what you wanted.

When outsourcing is the better call

We will say this plainly because a lot of agencies will not. In-house is not always right. A national TV commercial needs a crew and a director who does that and only that. A specialist shoot, whether surgical, industrial, or anything requiring access we do not have, needs specialists. We subcontract for those, we say so, and the client knows who is doing what.

An agency that claims it does everything itself is either much bigger than it looks or not being straight with you.

What it means for what you get

In practice: a shoot day produces a month of content rather than one campaign's worth, because it was planned by people who know what the month needs. Reshoots are cheap, which means the bar for "good enough" moves up. And when something changes in week three, it can change, instead of becoming an awkward conversation about scope.