The internet has changed marketing for both consumers and marketers. For starters, audiences now have a lot of control over their marketing experiences and they can easily avoid communications they don’t find relevant or compelling.
What does this mean for brands and businesses? Mostly that marketing services are becoming a significant investment for companies who want their strategies to get noticed and make a real difference for their bottom line.
Content marketing has evolved by leaps and bounds through the years and the techniques used have become increasingly sophisticated as well. Due to this rising influence and evolving complexity, managing campaigns effectively and consistently in-house can be quite challenging. To that end, outsourcing critical marketing tasks to more experienced teams or individuals allows companies to focus on their core operations more instead of getting bogged down by marketing tasks. According to statistics, content creation is one aspect of content marketing that businesses often choose to outsource for this reason, with 84% of organizations indicating that they’ve hired external content marketing help. Additionally, recent numbers indicate that over half of businesses say they’ve engaged a content marketing team to help with executing their overall marketing plans.
What Can a Content Marketing Agency Do For Your Company?
When you choose to outsource your marketing, you gain access to a team of creative writers, editors, strategy consultants, SEO strategists, project managers, videographers, graphic designers, and more. Their various skills and expertise all combine to create and execute a cohesive marketing plan that you can track and measure to determine its success and reach your key objectives.
A content marketing agency can:
- Generate Leads: A business’s success depends on continuously growing its customer base. New leads to feed that growth are critical.
- Increase brand awareness: Even if a company’s main objective is to sell, communicating the brand’s identity, mission, and vision are an important part of meeting that goal.
- Craft an actionable brand strategy: An agency can flesh out a strategy and the steps needed to reach your marketing goals.
- Provide their experience and expertise across different facets of content marketing: Many content marketing tasks require very specific skills that an agency can provide.
- Track and manage the customer life cycle: An agency can provide in-depth audience analysis and industry insights to ensure that customers are nurtured through every stage of the marketing funnel.
- Streamline content marketing workflows: Agencies will have established content processes that streamline workflows.
Specific Marketing Agency Products and Services
Different agencies will have varying service offerings, as well as different areas of specialization. Generally, however, they will be able to provide:
1. Copywriting Services
Creative and strategic writing to engage audiences and drive potential leads is critical. This can include everything from ad copywriting, blog writing, email marketing copy, website copy, how-to guides, newsletters, and so on.
2. Automation
Automating key marketing tasks such as publishing content can ensure consistency in your marketing efforts. Marketing agencies likely have access to tools and software that can help automate repetitive tasks to improve efficiency and provide a more personalized experience for customers.
3. Graphic Design
Graphic design services are a key component of effective content marketing and can significantly boost your engagement. Professional graphic design can help brands boost their visibility in their space, push traffic to their website, and increase sales.
4. SEO
Professionals can improve SEO efforts through careful content optimization, keyword research, advertising campaigns, and other initiatives designed to boost traffic. Keep in mind that SEO is composed of several elements that require specialized knowledge—so tapping the expertise of an agency will be incredibly beneficial for improving your search engine visibility.
5. Video Production
Generating more leads and improving your engagement rate are important for brand growth. Agencies can help you produce highly shareable videos designed to attract your core audience.
6. Measure Results
Tracking metrics and analytics gathered from content marketing efforts is crucial to determine their impact. With insight derived from real data, you can improve your content marketing efforts to ensure your campaigns have tangible results.
7. Marketing Strategy
Crafting a cohesive marketing strategy that can drive brand objectives forward requires an in-depth understanding of the different elements of content marketing as well as the brand you’re working with. Content marketing agencies, with their experience and specialized skills, can help craft a comprehensive strategy to help you reach your goals.
8. Social Media Marketing
Content marketing agencies can create a strategic social media marketing plan that is aligned with overall brand efforts. This ensures your brand voice and tone are consistent and all key messages are communicated efficiently across all relevant channels.
9. IT Support
While not necessarily their primary focus, content marketing agencies can readily provide IT support if needed for basic troubleshooting of the usual platforms that you use for content marketing.
Delegating these tasks to a reliable content marketing agency can free up time and resources you can dedicate to actually running your business.
How To Find The Right Content Marketing Agency To Fit Your Needs
Your content marketing agency will be a valuable partner who can help you manage important marketing tasks, but finding the right partner is crucial to getting the results you need. Consider the following:
- Do they have defined workflows and processes? Ask potential agencies to explain how they do things. This can help you understand if their processes are a good fit with your current workflows.
- What best practices do they follow? This can help give you a clear idea of what kind of skills and expertise they can provide in executing marketing strategies.
- Do they offer personalized service? Ask about the people who will be handling your brand. How will the team members working on your account be selected? What skills do they bring to the table?
- How familiar are they with the industry? An agency may be the best at a certain content marketing function, but remember that their expertise should extend to the nuances of your particular industry as well. They have to know and be familiar with the ins and out of your specific niche to be effective.
- Are they able to communicate clearly and effectively? Your content marketing agency will be your partner. Prompt, efficient, and reliable communication is critical for your partnership to work and for your efforts to deliver results.
It often takes trial and error to find the right partner for your business—someone who really understands what you need and can deliver on all their committed targets. So, our advice is to talk to as many agencies as necessary and don’t rush the process. If they offer a free trial service, take it—it’s a good way to determine if they can deliver on all their claims.
If you want to learn more, reach out to us. Book a consultation or get started with Leadspanda to find out how we can help you with your content marketing.
For any questions, leave a comment below or check out our LinkedIn or Twitter.
your content marketing agency is very useful to me.
I just read your blog on content marketing agencies, and it’s spot-on! The pros and cons you mentioned were quite helpful in making a decision. I’ve been on the fence about hiring one, and this post has certainly clarified things for me. Great job explaining the benefits and potential challenges. Thanks for the guidance!