Content marketing is one of the most powerful ways to build your brand and connect with customers online. It’s also time-consuming! For this reason, many businesses hire a professional content marketing agency to handle it for them.
When you aren’t sure how to optimize your content and strategy, you risk dedicating a lot of time in exchange for mediocre results. In fact, a recent SEMRush report states that only 19% of businesses felt their content marketing was “very successful.”
Image Source: SEMRush
What does a content marketing agency do to correct this problem? In short, the firm works with you to execute a content strategy that earns you search rankings, organic traffic, and new customers. An agency also helps to ensure you get the highest possible return on investment from your content.
If you’re considering hiring a content marketing agency, you’ve come to the right place. We help our clients get millions of website visits every month and can help you boost your online visibility.
Key Takeaways:
- Content marketing earns 3x more leads and 6x more conversions than traditional marketing at a 62% lower cost.
- Over three-quarters of high-performing content marketers had a documented strategy behind their efforts.
- Content marketing agencies support businesses in both content creation and strategy.
- Hiring an agency can be more affordable than executing content marketing internally.
- The best content marketing agencies provide frequent, detailed performance reporting.
How Does a Content Marketing Agency Help Businesses?
A content marketing agency works with you to build your brand through positive attention. Before you can appreciate what an agency does, you must understand the power of marketing through content.
What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing involves creating consistent, high-value content that drives organic traffic to your website and ultimately earns new customers. Content itself is nothing new; brochures, catalogs, flyers, guidebooks, and other traditional marketing pieces all fall under the category of marketing content.
However, digital content that you tailor for search engine optimization has more power than any other kind of traditional marketing. Here’s why: authenticity.
SEO content naturally attracts the right users to your website and your brand. You provide value to those users and build trust in your brand before your audience ever makes a purchase, leading to stronger customer relationships.
SEO content also demonstrates your expertise and value proposition, and it helps you establish your brand reputation. Ultimately, your content drives more traffic, leads, and conversions to your website, resulting in more sales and revenue for your business.
The numbers speak for themselves: research shows content marketing generates three times the leads and six times the conversions of traditional marketing methods. SEO-optimized digital content does all this while being 62% more cost-effective when using a content marketing agency.
Such results are not out of reach for your business. Content marketing can unlock many new opportunities and transform how your brand connects with potential customers online. You just have to know two things: how to get started and how to execute a content strategy correctly.
That’s where content marketing agencies come in.
What Does a Content Marketing Agency Do?
Content marketing agencies create content for businesses that attracts new customers through SEO. This content usually includes blog articles but could also include ebooks, infographics, videos, white papers, and more. These marketers work directly with their clients to learn about their target audiences and develop content ideas that will resonate and create a following.
Content marketing agencies like Marketing Insider Group offer a more comprehensive set of services along with content creation. Such services include keyword research, SEO audits, content calendar development, publishing, and frequent performance reporting.
These services are the primary benefit of hiring a content marketing agency over freelance writers or putting together your own in-house team. With an agency, you get content, expertise, a customized strategy, and support in the execution.
The strategy piece is especially important. Brands with a well-developed, documented content marketing strategy consistently perform better than those without. For example, one study recounts that 78% of marketers who reported successful content marketing efforts had a documented strategy. Conversely, 81% of those that were unsuccessful did not have one.
Image Source: SEMRush
Of course, hiring a content marketing agency is an investment. Working with the experts still requires time and energy on your part to build and maintain your strategy, and you’ll have the obvious ongoing cost for services. Still, for businesses needing content marketing support, the ROI far outweighs the time and financial expenses.
What Are 7 Good Reasons To Consider Hiring a Content Marketing Agency?
Look at seven reasons to consider taking the leap and hiring an agency.
1. Focus on Your Core Business
Running a business is a full-time job, as is creating high-volume, high-quality content on a consistent basis. When you try to do both, unfortunately both often suffer.
No amount of content marketing in the world can make your business successful if you can’t consistently provide a great product. When you hire a content marketing agency, you can be confident in the execution of your strategy while you focus on the most critical part of your business: serving your customers.
2. Take Advantage of Cost Savings
This might initially sound hard to believe, but it’s true: Hiring an agency can save you money, especially if you’re choosing between an agency and a new in-house team to handle content.
Hiring in house requires paying salaries and benefits, providing office space and equipment, and managing a team. Once you hire your team, it’s hard to grow it or downsize quickly. On the other hand, you pay a content marketing agency a fixed ongoing fee to handle everything for you.
For example, you would likely have to hire at least two or three people to create SEO-driven content ideas, write articles, edit those articles, provide keyword strategy, generate reports, and offer a strategy review. An agency such as ours gives you all of those features for less than the expense of one salary.
An agency also allows you to easily scale your efforts up or down as your budget or business demands. You’ll never have to spend more than what you need to execute your strategy.
3. Publish Frequent and Consistent Content
Frequency and consistency in publishing are two of the most significant factors in determining how much traffic your content will drive to your site. Did you know getting the best possible SEO results requires publishing 11 to 16 times per month? HubSpot found that companies publishing at that frequency earned 3.5 times more traffic than those doing so less often.
Image Source: Neil Patel
If you consider that it takes about three to four hours to write an average blog post, you’re talking over 60 hours every month spent just on writing. When you’re handling content marketing in addition to other business responsibilities, getting off schedule is easy.
When you hire a content marketing agency, you’ll never experience a lag or gap in your content publishing plan. For example, we help dozens of companies publish an article or two every week without exception.
4. Add SEO Expertise to Your Content
Search engine optimization is about more than just keywords in the modern digital era. Google’s algorithms are smarter than ever, and they’re looking for content that not only checks the right SEO boxes but also provides real human value. A content marketing agency has the expertise and experience to help you strike the right balance.
Keep in mind, too, that Google ranking factors constantly evolve. Google updates its algorithm thousands of times every year. You need to keep up with it for your SEO to work. Hiring an agency means you can be confident that your content aligns with the latest SEO standards.
5. Access to the Right Tools and Resources
Agencies use technology tools such as SEMRush, Ahrefs, and Google Analytics to power your content marketing and carry out functions such as keyword research and performance analytics. In addition, agencies have full teams of writers and SEO experts who contribute to your content strategy and creation.
We’ve collaborated with numerous firms to help them identify the most profitable customers and discover their pain points and what they’re searching for on the internet. We then craft a content strategy that incorporates this knowledge and launch a fitting campaign.
When you hire a content marketing agency, you invest in more than just content. You’re also gaining access to a range of resources that help inform and scale your strategy and boost your results.
6. Acquire New Perspectives and Ideas
Bringing in a new content marketing team gives your brand a fresh perspective on the tactics and approaches that may have become second nature to you. Agencies are both objective (using data-driven research and reports to build strategy and measure results) and creative (developing new ideas for blog topics and other content pieces).
An agency can give you honest feedback and partner with you to come up with new and exciting ways to earn results.
7. Receive Detailed Performance Reporting
Performance reporting is the main way a content marketing agency can demonstrate its value and effectiveness. With reports, you can expect frequent and detailed reporting showing your content marketing performance against KPIs and your overall return on investment from the agency.
We can’t overemphasize the value of getting data-driven insights on a regular basis. This data helps you capitalize on what’s working, pivot your strategy when necessary, and prove the value of your investment to company leadership.
Are You Considering Outsourcing Your Content Creation With a Content Marketing Agency?
If you’re a business owner or leader, you probably don’t have time to spend hours every week writing content. For that reason, more than 70% of businesses today outsource their content creation. Marketing Insider Group can help.
Our team of writers and SEO experts can deliver optimized, ready-to-publish content every week for one year (or more!) Check out our SEO Blog Writing Service or schedule a quick consultation to learn more about our content marketing agency!
