Services — Creative, Content & Advertising
Social Media Marketing Agency
Ellington & Vale is a social media marketing and management agency working with Indian brands on strategy, content production and paid social — built on the brand system rather than invented separately from it.
Most social media work fails at the strategy layer, not the content layer
The usual arrangement is a monthly deliverable count: twelve posts, eight stories, four reels. It is easy to price, easy to invoice, and it answers no question anyone asked.
A post count is not a strategy. It produces a stream of individually acceptable content that accumulates into nothing, because nothing underneath it decides what the brand is for, who it is talking to, or what it wants believed.
The questions that actually matter come first: which platforms your buyer is genuinely on, what the brand sounds like, what content earns attention in your category rather than in general, and what you want someone to think after six months of seeing you. Then the calendar.
Organic and paid are one budget
Treating them as separate line items is how brands end up boosting whatever performed best organically and calling it a paid strategy.
Organic builds the thing paid amplifies. Paid social bought against a weak brand and thin creative is expensive and stays expensive, because the ads have to do all the persuading themselves.
We plan the two together — mechanics of paid buying, targeting and measurement are covered on our performance marketing page — and what changes on social specifically is that the creative carries far more of the outcome than the targeting does.
Platform choice, honestly
Instagram dominates consumer attention in India and is where most brands should start if their buyer is a consumer.
YouTube is the largest platform in the country by reach and the most under-used by brands, because long-form is harder to produce and does not fit a monthly post count. It also compounds — a video from two years ago still earns views.
LinkedIn is where B2B decisions are influenced, and where most Indian B2B brands publish corporate announcements nobody reads. More on our B2B marketing page.
X, Facebook and Pinterest matter in specific categories and are a waste of effort in others.
A brand active on five platforms and good on none is worse off than one that is genuinely good on two. Pick where your buyer actually is and where you can sustain quality.
Content production
Where the work actually is, and where most agencies quietly under-invest because production is expensive and templates are not.
Photography and video direction, design that carries the brand system rather than a parallel social identity, copy that sounds like one brand across every post, and a system that lets volume get produced without each piece being invented from scratch. That last part is why our social work sits inside a design practice rather than beside one.
Community management
The part clients notice when it goes wrong. Response times, tone under pressure, and having decided in advance how the brand handles a complaint in public — before there is one.
Social is the only marketing channel where customers answer back in front of an audience. A brand without an agreed position on that is improvising in public.
What we measure
Not follower count. It is the vanity metric of this channel, it can be bought, and it correlates poorly with anything commercial.
Reach and engagement quality as leading indicators — whether the right people are seeing it and responding meaningfully.
Traffic, enquiries and revenue where the funnel allows attribution.
Share of voice and sentiment where the objective is genuinely brand rather than acquisition — and saying so plainly instead of dressing awareness up as performance.
What determines the cost
No published rates. What moves it: how many platforms are active; how much original photography and video is being produced, which is usually the largest variable; whether paid media management is included and at what budget; and whether community management is in scope.
Tell us what you sell and where your buyers are, and we will tell you honestly which platforms are worth your budget — including when the answer is fewer than you are on now.
FAQ
- What does a social media marketing agency do?
- Strategy, content production, publishing, paid social and community management. The distinguishing question is whether an agency starts from what the brand needs to achieve or from how many posts fit in a month.
- How much does social media marketing cost in India?
- No published rates. Production volume is usually the biggest driver, followed by paid media budget and number of platforms. A retainer priced purely on post count is pricing the wrong thing.
- How many times a week should we post?
- Less than most agencies will sell you. Consistency and quality beat frequency, and a brand posting three times a week well outperforms one posting daily with nothing to say.
- Which platform should we be on?
- Wherever your buyer actually is, and no more than you can sustain properly. Being present and mediocre on five platforms is worse than being genuinely good on two.
- Do you handle photography and video?
- Yes — and in social it is usually the highest-leverage part of the budget, because the creative carries more of the outcome than the targeting does.
Your Next World
Let's create something distinctive.
Tell us what you are building. We will help give it the clarity, character and presence to be recognised.