In house, agency or a hybrid: the first decision in Copenhagen
More companies here run their channels internally than the agency market likes to admit. A communications coordinator who writes well, knows the product and sits near the people making decisions will often produce a better social media feed than an external team working from a monthly briefing call. The honest question is not whether to outsource social media, but which parts of it genuinely benefit from an outsider.
Three splits work in practice. Strategy and creative direction bought externally, daily publishing kept inside. Production and paid distribution bought externally, voice and community kept inside. Or everything external for a defined campaign period while an internal hire is recruited. Each of those is a different brief and a different supplier shape. Picking one before you browse the agency listings will save a round of meetings.
Danish and English are two audiences, not two language settings
Almost every brand here publishes in both, and the sloppy version of that is one message written once and pushed through a translation step. It reads exactly as it was made. Local audiences are small enough that the same people see your social media posts repeatedly, which raises the cost of sounding generic.
Decide per channel, not per company. A recruitment or employer brand account often works better in Danish even when the company operates in English internally. A product account aimed at international buyers may be better in English throughout, with local language reserved for service and support replies. Whatever you choose, name the person with the final read, and make sure that person is a native speaker of the language the post is written in.
A small market changes what social media performance means
Audience ceilings here are real. A campaign can exhaust its addressable audience quickly, frequency climbs, and results decay in a way that looks like creative fatigue but is arithmetic. A supplier who has worked at this scale will plan for it: broader creative rotation, longer flighting, and a willingness to pause rather than to keep spending into a saturated pool.
Ask candidates directly what they would do when frequency rises and cost per result follows. The answer separates teams who have run accounts in a small market from teams repeating a playbook built for a large one. Ask also how they would handle seasonality, because attention here collapses in the summer weeks and around the winter holidays in a pattern worth planning around rather than fighting.
What a bureau proposal should contain before you take it seriously
Expect a written audience definition that is not a demographic slice, an explanation of which platforms are being dropped and why, a production plan expressed in formats and volumes rather than in posts, and a measurement section that distinguishes platform reported numbers from your own analytics.
Expect also a named team with their share of the hours, and a statement of what falls outside the agreement. The last one matters more than it sounds. Most disputes in social media retainers are about work nobody agreed was included: extra language versions, reactive posts, comment moderation during a difficult week, ad hoc reporting for a board.
Fee models and the incentive each one creates
Retainers are the norm and suit continuous publishing and community work, provided the deliverable list is reviewed each quarter. Without that review the retainer becomes a subscription to last year's plan.
Project fees suit launches and production sprints and keep the scope honest, but leave a gap afterwards: a campaign that builds an audience and ends creates a channel nobody is paid to answer. Decide in advance who picks up the replies.
Commission on media spend rewards larger budgets rather than better outcomes, and in a market where budgets are moderate it tends to underprice the craft. If a supplier proposes it, ask for a minimum fee and for what happens during a pause.
Consent, data and the reporting you will actually get
Tracking consent is taken seriously by users here, and opt out rates change what your dashboards can say. This is not a reason to measure less, but it is a reason to insist on labelling. Every number in a monthly social media report should be attributed to its source: platform reported, site analytics, modelled, or manually counted.
Agree a single primary measure that matters to the business and hold the report to it. Qualified enquiries, trial starts, bookings, job applications. Impressions belong in an appendix, not in a headline.
Contract points that are easier to fix now
Own your social media business manager, ad accounts, pixels and page roles, and invite the agency in as a partner rather than letting them hold the account in their own entity. Get a rights sheet for photography, music and creator content stating territory, duration and whether paid usage is included. Agree a notice period, a handover pack with templates, tone guides, raw files and historical reporting, and a rate for transition support.
Building a shortlist in Copenhagen you can compare
Send an identical brief to four suppliers at most. More than that and you will not read the replies properly. Require the same line structure from each, ask every one of them to name the part of your current social media plan they would stop doing, and give equal weight to the questions they ask you before quoting.
If the website is the weak link rather than the channels, look at web design specialists before increasing the media budget. If the plan depends on regular video, compare motion and animation studios against agencies quoting for production internally. When the brief is finished, ask several suppliers to respond to it together so the comparison is fair.