Having a great team of writers is a gem in your business.
However, companies don’t always have the luxury to create their own marketing team that will take care of both inbound and outbound marketing, especially content marketing.
In an article by Longitude, they have enumerated the different challenges in content marketing according to statistics. The top ten of these challenges are the following:
- Producing high-quality content
- Generating content consistently
- Prioritizing content expertise
- Understanding different buyer personas
- Producing content in suitable formats
- Measuring content ROI
- Creating buy-in among stakeholders
- Aligning content with the buyer journey
- Activating content effectively
- Choosing the right channels
Ninety-one percent of the B2B marketers make use of content marketing in order to boost customer reach and brand awareness towards people. Consequently, content marketing is a must for bloggers. And for some who have challenges in content marketing, seeking help from content marketing agencies is recommended.
To further explore content marketing agencies, here are some of the qualities you should not miss when looking for a reliable agency to work with.
High-Quality Website
Content marketing agencies are multi-faceted in nature. You can easily distinguish the reliable ones — they produce results that are proven and tested.
A content marketing agency must have a high-quality website. It serves as their “Exhibit A”. Content marketing agencies with high audience retention stats, social media traction data, trust rating, SEO stats, and other statistics that affect the content score are some of the specifications that should be considered.
Other than these figural specifications, look for content marketing agencies that have the following qualities:
- Content are authentic and purposeful
- Great user experience
- They have readily accessible channels
- The website is functional and well-designed
- The aesthetics are appealing and interactive
You also want these qualities for your own website. Working with a reliable content marketing agency will help you achieve these qualities so make sure you scrutinize their websites.
Client Testimonials
When looking for a content marketing agency, take a look at clients giving testimonials on how the content marketing team distributes and creates a vast amount of videos, graphics, and other forms of materials through several important channels.
Investigating the reliability and trustworthiness of a certain content marketing agency through reading testimonials is a brilliant move towards getting to know the agency more and beyond the surface.
Client testimonials often tell about the clients’ satisfaction or dissatisfaction. In looking for a substantial client testimonial, look at the specificities discussed and the point that the client is trying to portray.
Remember that word of mouth is powerful. You should not simply look for positive testimonials that are generic. What you want to know is how the agency was able to help a client with a particular problem.
Should you want to look for some testimonials about a content marketing agency, you can make use of Clutch, which contains verified testimonials.
High-Quality and Organic Content
The quality and contents of your blog speak for all aspects of your company. Consequently, in ensuring that your topics are well-researched and have a great and established understanding of your target market and industry, make sure to look for content marketing agencies that have high-quality and organic content.
Take note, content marketing agencies advocate for high-quality content that speaks a lot about them and their expertise. If content marketing agencies have low-quality content, you can not rely on them. Look for content marketing agencies that have well-researched, competitor-driven, well-adept in different industries, and target market-oriented contents that can be able to produce different types of content.
In looking for criteria of content marketing agencies deploying a great amount of content, make sure that they possess these qualities:
- They are well-adept with knowing the target audience;
- They are knowledgeable with the topics they are discussing;
- They have a good voice in their contents;
- They include visual materials that add further understanding to their content;
- They include data; and
- They highly make use of examples that initiate further elaboration of the topic discussed.
SEO Expertise
Always remember that when looking for a content marketing agency, you must take into account that they will help you make ways to regularly update your blog site with relevant and interesting content, and add blogs to your site that gives other search engine platforms an opportunity to track your website easily. Should you want to ensure an improved user-experience in your site, make sure to look for content marketing agencies who seek to improve the comprehensibility, readability, organization of structure, search optimization ability of your contents.
In addition, content marketing agencies must also look at teaching you with some basics to target certain keywords in your content that people are typically searching for. You must look for content marketing agencies that help your blog company to become frequently visible and visited online and build trust among the larger audience so that you could rank higher in different search engine platforms.
If content marketing agencies meet all of these requirements where you seek structure-oriented and searchable content, make certain that the criteria mentioned above are met.
Case Studies
Several topics tested in different situations and groups of society are among the skills that every content writer should possess in order to see the effectiveness of one’s content displayed on the blog site. A piece of advice, find a content marketing agency that seeks to discover new things in different or “unusual” situations.
In this way, new things commonly stimulate the interest of the clients. Content marketing agencies that are fond of making case studies are the ones who can suggest to you what is right or not, and what are the strengths and weaknesses that should be taken into especially when looking at different processes and products affecting the topics that you are going to discuss.
Marketing Techniques
Content marketing agencies are concerned with deploying content and resources that ensure further attraction to the readers. As a blogger looking for content marketing agencies that will ensure further market value in your blog contents, always take a look at their features where they are able to:
- Develop marketing strategies that effectively catch different personalities of people belonging to a certain target group;
- Make marketing techniques that help the audience in obtaining further value from your contents;
- Innovate content materials that immediately catch the attention of the wider audience;
- Start on developing catchy and marketable headlines;
- Deploy high-quality content; and,
- Ensure quick and further responsiveness among people in a certain group
Content marketing agencies are highly particular about these things. If you want to ensure that a certain content marketing agency has met all of these qualities, then you can consider it on your list.
Pricing
Typically, content marketing agencies really charge approximately $50,000-$70,000 per month that includes the package of making innovative strategies, creating impactful and striking content, and promoting your content in an efficient manner. As a starter in the blog business, this is really expensive.
As a good start, try to find several content marketing agencies that equate the price together with the things you just need for some time. Remember that prices are negotiable by nature. Make sure that you look both at the price and quality of a certain content marketing agency.
The price of a certain content marketing agency depends on what tasks you are going to need and the people you are going to tap. You can tap a freelance, in-house, or team in a content marketing agency. When considering the price, it must be equivalent to the tasks you need to attend to, the assurance that they can give to you especially when looking at certain improvements of your content, and the satisfaction from their service.
Communication Channels
In looking for content marketing agencies, verify that you can reach them in different channels, may it be online or offline. Sometimes, in deploying content, reaching out for help is needed, especially in content marketing agencies that deploy market-oriented content.
Content marketing agencies must guarantee that they have accessible and responsive communication channels. Seeking further help, they must make sure that their lines are open 24/7 or if possible, they are proactive in terms of catering to different content needs.
In ensuring that you get the most accessible and responsive content marketing agency, bear in mind the following considerations:
- Can this content marketing agency easily book a schedule if ever I want to seek an appointment with them?
- Can I easily see their physical location, or contact them easily on an online platform?
- Can I easily seek help whenever I need something immediately?
- Is this content marketing agency available in different social media channels?
- Is this content marketing agency open for a phone call if I need something to ask for help?
- Do they have a great system of catering to the different concerns of people?
If the answers here are all “YES”, then you can consider them as your partner in building marketable and comprehensive content.
