How Licensing The S3 System™ Finally Made Social Media Profitable for Our Agency
This is a first-hand account from an agency that licensed our system, driving game-changing results – for both the agency and its clients.
Tens years working as a marketing agency lead during the rise of social media – running teams of different sizes – and one thing has remained consistent: social media is a profit killer. You burn through unscoped hours, and burn out your team in the process. That’s how agencies do social.
But if you're running an agency in 2025, you also know that offering social media to your clients is non-negotiable.
Brands – whether for-profit or non-profit, product or service, ecomm or brick & mortar – need to put social front and center in their marketing strategies. Whether your goal is awareness, conversion, retention, or all three, social media is your biggest growth opportunity. It’s where customers are finding, learning about, and buying from the brands they come to trust.
So in 2025, if you want to be seen as a credible partner, offering social media services is a non-negotiable.
That’s the conundrum:
You need a social media arm to stay relevant. But your margins can’t afford it.
That was us. And that’s why we licensed The S3 System™ – to turn social media from a profit killer to a profit driver for our business, building uncommon trust and retaining very happy, very lucrative clients along the way.
Here’s the story.
The Client That Forced a Reckoning
We licensed The S3 System™ when we were under pressure.
We had just landed a high-profile, high-stakes account. A lot of stakeholders, the type of client that gets media attention.
Our task? Take over and dramatically level up their social media. Fast. The client needed growth – major growth – before a critical campaign launch.
We had done social media before. But it wasn’t our strong suit. And it was never profitable. We were always scrambling, putting in too many hours and watching our margins evaporate.
So licensing The S3 System™ was supposed to help us execute more efficiently. We weren’t looking for breakthroughs. We just needed to check the boxes on the scope we'd promised without blowing hours and margins. If it improved the client relationship, great. But we weren’t counting on it.
That was what we expected. Instead, The S3 System™ actually changed everything for us, transforming how we approached content and social media as a service line. And making it profitable, for the first time.
The System That Changed Everything
When we got started, I was impatient. The client was breathing down our necks, and I just wanted my team to start producing content.
But Strong Brand Social has a mantra: Strategy first. Always.
Introducing The S3 System™ strategy process, we realigned the project around demand generation – the client’s true business objective. Instead of “what platforms?” or “how often should we post?”, we started with: “why is the organization on social media and what are the real business outcomes they want to achieve?”
This laid the groundwork for a content strategy aligned to outcomes. We identified our target audience, crafted a differentiated message, and developed a playbook that mapped out platforms, frequency, and formats. Last but not least, we built a measurement model to ensure that every piece of content we posted was driving toward our goal: awareness.
This strategy? It didn’t sit on a shelf. It ran the show. And it turned social from a guessing game into a performance engine.
Execution became easy. Volume skyrocketed. Not by throwing more people at the problem, but because we had a system.
We went from struggling to post a few times a week, to confidently executing multiple high-volume campaigns at once. The strategy-led roadmap told us exactly what, where, and how to post. No curveballs, no scope creep. We had clear direction and knew exactly what to deliver. And as importantly for this multi-stakeholder account, the client always understood exactly why.
The Payoff
In just 12 months, we took that client from 20,000 to 150,000 followers. We beat every growth goal we set – sometimes months ahead of schedule. We even had to raise the bar midway through because we hit our original goal so quickly.
But more than that, we transformed the client relationship. Social media went from being the thing they trusted us least to do… to the thing they trusted us most to deliver. It became a relationship of mutual respect and mutual trust because of what we did on social media. And, ultimately, The S3 System™ was the foundation of that trust.
Internally, we streamlined processes, exponentially increasing our capacity for content planning and production with the same levels of staffing. No more burning through unscoped hours just to meet minimum expectations. Same team, way more output. Same budget, way better margins. And that moved social from a cost center to a profit center on the agency’s balance sheet. For real. For the first time.
As importantly, my team stopped spinning. They weren’t burned out anymore. They were proud of the work we delivered and the trusted relationship we made happen.
It was this shift in trust that was the biggest win for my team. And it served as a decisive factor in securing our next contract with this client, the largest contract in our agency’s history.
From Profit Killer to Profit Driver
Licensing The S3 System™ didn’t just fix one client project. It fixed our entire approach.
Because when you license The S3 System™, you get a model that’s fully replicable and scalable across your business.
We didn’t become a different agency. We just finally had the system for delivering our best work profitably and predictably.
That’s the power of a repeatable system rooted in airtight strategy. And it transformed social media from the thing we had to do – profitably or not – into something we could sell confidently. Social media as a growth driver for our clients, and a growth-driver for the agency.
If You’re Facing the Same Conundrum
Strong Brand Social is currently accepting new agencies into their licensing program. If you're facing the same conundrum we were – how to sell social without sacrificing your margins – catch a recent info session to learn how you can license The S3 System™.
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