Content Marketing Archives | Page 3 of 3

Planning to hire a content marketing agency to manage your company’s content? Whether you need landing pages, blog posts, infographics or other types of content, it’s important to find the right fit.

Do you think all content marketing agencies are the same? We’d like to tell you different—every content agency develops and executes on campaigns differently. Each agency also has a unique team that brings a diverse mix of knowledge, skills, and creativity to the table.

There are two things to consider when searching for the “best fit” agency—the nature of your business and the kind of content an agency can produce. Overlooking these runs the risk of failing to add value to your brand.

Before we share tips for selecting the right content marketing agency, let’s first discuss what the role of content marketing agencies should be.

What Does a Content Marketing Agency Do

The name itself is self-explanatory – “an agency that creates content”. However, its goal isn’t just limited to content creation. It should, through its expertise, help your business to leverage the content to establish your online presence.

Content pieces (i.e. blog articles, videos, landing pages, social media posts, etc.) may help spread a positive brand image across the Internet for your business.

A content marketing agency should also work on marketing initiatives for the created content to help your business achieve the following:

Generate traffic
Attract new leads
Keep customers engaged
Increase conversion rates
Track and monitor progress
Update the content strategy

So now that you’re aware of the role of a content marketing agency, let’s tackle something more interesting. Below are four tips on finding a content marketing firm that best matches your specific needs.

How to Choose a Content Marketing Agency

1. Examine Their Strategy

Content marketing needs to be planned and strategized. With an effective strategic direction in place, your business will gain more clicks, follows, and other profitable customer actions

According to CMI, 72% of B2B marketers said that content marketing strategy is a critical factor in content marketing success. The respondents with a documented strategy report more successful campaigns than those with a verbal strategy only, or no strategy at all.

Source: CMI

When looking for an agency, ensure that they can develop a specific strategy that meets your business’ needs and goals. During a pitch, you can request for a general content strategy for your industry and analyse their response.

Examine the proposed content marketing strategy and check if it addresses the following questions:

Who are your target customers and what content types best suit them?

The strategy should take a stab at defining your target audience, customer touchpoints and the content types needed to reach them.

What goals can you achieve using content marketing?

An agency should identify the goals that your business can attain through their content marketing strategy. Typical goals include increased website traffic, more leads, greater social media engagement, and so on.

How content marketing-related processes are streamlined?

The content marketing pitch should discuss who will be producing and managing your content. It should also present the tools needed and give an overview of the workflow and processes if you were to work together.

See: 3 Ways to Self-Learn Content Marketing

2. Assess Their Team

Great things in business are never done by a person; they’re done by a team of people. This popular Steve Jobs quote may come in handy when doing an agency search.

You should spend some time chatting with the agency’s team members to check whether there’s rapport. Doing this will also let you know if they have the needed expertise to achieve your goals.

For example, if you want to increase website traffic via search engines, social media and email marketing, the content marketing agency should have staff who specialise in those platforms with proven past results.

You can’t expect a content writer to develop SEO-optimized content if he or she lacks knowledge about key SEO requirements. That’s like asking a pastry chef to prepare the main course in a restaurant—it’s possible but the results aren’t guaranteed.

Besides focusing on achieving your goals, it’s also nice to work with professionals who can market your content without making a cultural faux pas.

Remember the Pepsi advertisement that featured Kendall Jenner? Pepsi wanted to project a global message of unity, peace, and understanding. Unfortunately, many people were offended by the video and viewed the brand frivolous because of how they painted protests in today’s political climate.

Your content marketing agency should anticipate any sort of misinterpretation during the ideation process.

The Pepsi commercial mishap also proves the need for a content team with different opinions, cultures, and beliefs. The more diverse a team is, the greater the chance to spot probable misconceptions and complete tasks efficiently.

Souce: CoSchedule

3. Measure Results

Without proper tracking, it’s hard to determine whether your content marketing efforts are working. You would not be able to analyse whether your different content supports your overall marketing and business goals.

This is where you should consider the ability of content marketing agencies to measure, interpret and analyse your content performance. A good content marketing agency should have analysts and the right tools on hand to perform such activities.

During your assessment, ask how they would measure your content performance and work towards aligning with and achieving your goals. They should be able to provide you with an effective measurement plan with metrics that help gauge your goals.

This chart from CMI’s Vice President of Marketing, Cathy McPhillips, can serve as your reference:

Source: CMI

Typically, content marketing agencies utilise measurement tools like Google Analytics to track, analyse, and report on performance. Examples of such reports are Site Content reports. This report lets you look at your website’s traffic and further segment it to determine which source the traffic came from.

Behaviour > Site Content > All Pages report

4. Know Who You Are Working With

It’s important to know who you will be working with before entering into any new business relationship. Evaluate first the agency’s reputation and the work they do to ensure a fruitful partnership.

Ideally, it should be free of ethical or legal problems, have relevant industry experience, and most importantly—have a roster of happy and satisfied clients.

It also helps to look at their website. As a content marketing expert, their website should be filled with timely, helpful and excellent content. They should practice what they preach and use content marketing to market their own agency’s services.

While browsing through their website, check for past clients vouching for their work. Positive client testimonials are proof that the agency and/or their services offer great value. If they don’t have any public testimonials, ask them if they can provide you with a pitch deck consisting of their present and past clients.

Lastly, have a conversation with them. An in-person or virtual video meeting will make it easier for you to gauge their transparency and confidence. Ask them questions such as “Who will handle the campaigns?”, “How often would the status meetings be held?” and so on.

Content marketing experts should be able to respond to your queries and enlighten you on their work procedures. They should brief you about how they research and plan out content, produce the content pieces, and monitor or analyse the performance.

Summing It Up

Content marketing isn’t just a buzzword—it’s a tried and tested approach that can drive profitable customer actions. So if you want to drive content marketing success, tie-up with a content marketing agency that understands your needs and goals.

Whether it’s to drive more website traffic, capture the audience’s attention, increase brand engagement, or improve brand recall, 2Stallions can help you out. We will run an analysis of your website and develop a plan based on your existing analytics data and your desired outcomes.

Transform your online approach with 2Stallions! Discover the ultimate content marketing solutions and enhance your brand’s visibility with our top-notch content marketing agency. Seize the opportunity to collaborate with us today!

Keep Reading

As the use of the Internet grows every day, so does the popularity of content marketing as well as content marketing myths. It should be a priority for you because every website, social media campaign, and even Adwords campaign, thrives on content. As a digital marketing agency, we’ve noted how clients have reaped long-term benefits from creating and publishing quality content. They enjoy an expanding reach, grow their new customer base, and have established brand authority through content written years ago.

Content is the heart of any digital marketing campaign. Without it, the beautiful aesthetic of a website or an expertly edited video is ultimately useless in converting a visitor. However, there are some myths that have proliferated over time as well. Some content marketers still espouse and back these statements, which we’d like to dispel. Want to know what they are?

5 Content Marketing Myths and Expectations

Myth 1: Quantity of Content Trumps Quality

This wasn’t a content marketing myth just a few years back. Back in 2011, when you published more content, you would expect a much larger reach via organic search. As a result, marketers sacrificed quality for quantity to rank for more keywords on Google.

The Google Panda update in 2011 started penalizing “thin content” sites and every new update to the algorithm since has further clamped down on poor quality content. Today’s marketers have realized that pushing out a high volume of content doesn’t help them achieve their goals.

Why is quality content attractive? It is information people are searching for and provides well-researched depth on the topic. If you spend the time and effort to research the facts and put it together coherently in a quality article, people will love you for it, and your reach will widen for sure. Remember, a single blog post that reaches thousands of people is more valuable than a thousand blog posts that reach a handful of people.

Myth 2: Great Writers Come Cheap

Have you ever heard or thought – “Anyone can do the job, it’s just writing!”

A major reason behind a company’s failed content marketing attempt is setting unrealistic expectations of high quality content in a short space of time for the lowest cost. Like any project, the Project Management Triangle holds true for content marketing as well.

You may think it is easy to write quality content that goes viral, and are therefore unwilling to pay for the right content writers. If you hire a cheap writer, chances are your results probably won’t be spectacular. Even if you find a needle in the haystack, eventually, they would be demotivated – so invest in a good, quality content writer.

It is not easy to produce quality content. Writers have to invest time and effort to develop a genuine understanding of your brand and your audience in order to create amazing content that resonates. In the long term, it will be worth it. Looking to work with an agency for your content creation? Reach out to us.

Myth 3: It Costs Too Much!

This content marketing myth can be busted quite easily. First, let’s come to terms with the fact that every major marketing platform today will cost you money to reach an audience at scale.

Therefore, on the surface, content marketing can seem expensive. You can spend a lot just developing producing quality content. Then, you have to invest in SEO and/or online advertising to drive traffic to the content.

However, it is very interesting then, that according to CMI, B2B marketers choose to spend 39 percent of their marketing budget on content marketing. Why do they see the value in content marketing? It is because studies show that 68% of consumers spend time reading from a brand they’re interested in, and B2B researchers do 12 searches on average prior to engaging on a specific brand’s site. Companies who actively market their content enjoy 67% more digital leads. All of these statistics point to content marketing being a great lead generation tool.

It is imperative that you focus on the ROI rather than the cost. Over a prolonged period, your content marketing costs will seem minute compared to your gains.

Myth 4: It’s Not For OUR Audience

Whether you’re selling watches for a niche audience or a mass consumer product like cheese, content is for everyone. It’s simply a matter of what FORM the content takes. While advertisements work for some brands, 70 percent of consumers prefer to get to know a brand through an article instead of ads.

People crave personalized content these days. This is why companies who make their audience feel like a part of their community, through conversation and useful information, see promising yields. Based on your customer persona, your audience may enjoy viewing photography, illustrations, infographics, videos or even slideshows instead of reading long-form blog posts. So mix and match these other formats with your written format to appeal to your audience. However, understand that it’s the content that draws them in.

Myth 5: We Don’t Have What it Takes

Content marketing is still quite young in the digital marketing world. As a result, marketers and companies still have a lot of learning to do before they start seeing results.

In a survey of 1,000 marketers, it was found that the biggest challenge with content marketing was creating the content. Despite this, 80-90% of both B2B and B2C marketers still choose to strive towards creating quality content because they understand its ability to create stronger brand authority and retention among customers.

It can get overwhelming trying to learn content marketing from various sources – hence we suggest finding a course or even reading a book. We’ve recently released our own Content Marketing on Steroids ebook on Amazon that you may choose to learn.

Alternatively, if you have the budget, you can work with a digital agency to run content marketing for you.

Content Marketing For The Long-Term

There are plenty of reasons to allocate a portion of your marketing budget towards content marketing. However, you should always consider your business objectives. If you’re looking for immediate payoffs, then content marketing might not be for you. Investing in PPC advertising and email marketing would be better.

It’s always good to have a mix of short-term and long-term goals. Content marketing may take a longer time to yield results but is certainly a good one. With the content marketing myths debunked, we hope you’ll go ahead with your content marketing strategy!

If you’re looking to learn everything you can about content marketing, I’ve got the perfect book for you! Check out my first eBook “Content Marketing on Steroids” to learn from tried and tested methods. Create a content marketing strategy that works and gets you the ROI you’ve been looking for! Get your copy on Amazon now!

🚀 Ready to elevate your digital strategy? Look no further than 2Stallions – your pathway to content brilliance! Our best content marketing services will skyrocket your brand’s visibility and captivate your audience. Connect with us today to unlock boundless potential and take your business to new heights with confidence!

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