10 benefits of hiring a content marketing agency

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10 benefits of hiring a content marketing agency

Hiring a content marketing agency can immediately boost your brand presence on the Internet by streamlining your operations and giving you a more professional touch. Although the debate whether a business should hire in-house content writers or outsource content marketing to an outside agency has been going on since time immemorial (or at least since content marketing began to be known as a potent tool) the benefits of hiring a content marketing agency are so overwhelming that even big businesses who have all the resources at their hand to hire complete teams of content writers and content marketers, now and then work with outside agencies.

Why is there this debate about whether to hire a content marketing agency or to work with in-house content writers and content marketing specialists?

There is nothing special about this debate. It normally originates from bigger companies and as smaller companies have this tendency to follow big business, they also begin to get into this loop of indecision. Whether it makes sense to hire an in-house team of content writers and content marketers or not is a different issue, but the thing is, big businesses have enough money and resources to play around with various whims. They have complete departments costing them millions of dollars, practically doing nothing. Most of the big businesses are no different from government bureaucracies. So even if they hire a complete team of 50 people taking care of their content marketing needs and even if this team of people doesn’t show any tangible results for months and years, nobody is going to bother.

A small business on the other hand needs to be very careful about where it spends money and what results that spending brings. It cannot afford to first assemble a content marketing team and see how it performs, and if it fails to perform, then assemble another team. But there are many small businesses that want to emulate big businesses. They think that if the big businesses are doing something, it must be right. Yes, most of the big businesses know what they are doing, but since they have already crossed a particular threshold level, they can afford to commit mistakes, multiple times and still survive. This is something small businesses cannot do.

Here is a list of 10 benefits of hiring a content marketing agency

  1. You can avail the best talent in the field: This is one of the biggest benefit of hiring a content marketing agency rather than having your own in-house team. You don’t need to settle with what you have. You are not totally dependent upon the people you have hired. Aren’t satisfied with the performance of your current agency? It’s just a matter of moving on to someone else.
  2. You pay for what you get: You’re just paying for the services. Since people involved with content writing, content production and content marketing aren’t your employees, you don’t need to spend money on infrastructure, legalities and other benefits. You don’t have to arrange office space. You don’t need to buy new computers and new software. They won’t be using your electricity and your bandwidth.
  3. You save time: You can save a ton of time when you outsource your content marketing needs to another agency because then you can totally focus on your own work. You don’t need to worry about how many blog posts have been published, what sort of updates are going to social networking websites and whether your content is reaching the right people or not. All these issues are taken care of by the content marketing agency that you have hired. Just now and then you need to monitor the results and that’s it.
  4. You work with the professionals: People working in the content marketing agencies are not like the babes lost in the woods. They know their stuff. They have already carried out successive marketing campaigns for multiple companies and have gone through different situations. They have gotten opportunities to solve even the most complex problems while working for different agencies. They will bring all this experience to you when they come to work with you.
  5. You get the right content writers for you: Sometimes you need specialized writers. A content marketing agency may already have access to such writers. When you are hiring expert writers on your own many vested interests are involved and hence there is a great chance you may not able to hire someone you actually want. With the case of the content marketing agency all you need to bother about is telling them your requirement and then rest assured of a timely delivery.
  6. A business can understand a business:
    Most of the writers can be whimsical. They are not very professional and they don’t understand the demands of running a business. People working in an agency on the other hand know what all it takes to run a business. So they will be in a better position to understand your constraints and your requirements.
  7. A content marketing agency can give you a turnkey solution: Content marketing isn’t just about knowing how to write. It requires a mindset. It requires a certain comfort level with contemporary technologies and tools. What’s the use of having a prolific writer if he or she doesn’t know what he or she has to write about? Can he or she do data mining? Can he or she carry out extensive research? Can he or she come up with highly compelling topics that are really relevant to your business? Is he or she intelligent enough to align the demands of your business with the content that is being produced and distributed? What about using the right channels to broadcast your content? Maybe your business needs to focus on LinkedIn but the content writers that you have hired think that Twitter is more exciting or worse, Facebook. People working in a content marketing agency put their emotions aside and give you the best solution in terms of content production and content marketing.
  8. You get all the flexibility you need as a small business: Sometimes you have budget and time for content marketing and sometimes you don’t. The benefit of hiring a content marketing agency is you are not stuck with it. When you want to go into a hiatus (which is by the way, not advised) all you need to do is inform them, and there, you are not spending anything on content marketing. Then, after let us say five months, you can afford to resume your work, all you have to do is, contact your agency and it will be able to pick up things where you had left.
  9. Your content is continuously streamlined: As I have mentioned above, the content marketing agency brings you everything you need in order to make your campaign successful. Analytics is a big part of content marketing. What sort of keywords you are using right now? What sort of keywords you should be targeting? What sort of traffic is attracted to your website or blog? Are you producing the right sort of content? Are you targeting right people or wrong people? These are the issues, and many more, that can be understood using advanced web analytics tools. These tools are normally available with a content marketing agency.
  10. You can have uninterrupted content production: One of the biggest hurdles faced by businesses trying to implement a workable content marketing strategy is a regular, uninterrupted production of content. It is very difficult to produce quality content on an ongoing basis. It requires a dedicated team. It requires lots of exposure to niche content. For example, if yours is a realty business someone constantly needs to monitor relevant trends and topics and keep on creating content everyday if need be. A content marketing agency is in a better position to maintain an editorial calendar which is often not possible for an in-house team.

Being a content marketing agency it would be but natural for me to tilt towards hiring an outside agency but that’s not the case. Hiring in-house content writers and marketers has its merits but they cannot be outweighed by merits of going the other way.

How to write content for humans but optimize for Google and other search engines

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The greatest objective of your content should be that it appeals to your human readers and provides them the information they need in order to decide in your favour (that is, when they seek something that you provide). But for many businesses, search engine optimization takes precedence over the relevance of the content they are writing. How do you create a balance? How do you make sure that you write content for humans but you optimize it for Google and other search engines? How can you make both the parties happy?

SEO chart that explains the entire process of SEO content writing

Can you ignore your search engine rankings?

There are many online marketers and in fact, even content writers, who will tell you that don’t worry much about search engine rankings because if you have great content, your rankings should automatically improve. Ideally, yes, they should automatically improve. But do they? No. We don’t live in an ideal world. In the world we live, there are people who can manipulate their search engine rankings and search engine algorithms can be manipulated. Not just that, you are constantly facing competition. Someone or the other is going to get better of you no matter how hard you try.

Sure, it is the quality of your content and the regularity with which you publish your content that has the biggest impact on your search engine rankings but optimization also plays a very important role, so you cannot ignore your search engine rankings if qualified and targeted traffic matters to you.

In his recent blog post the renowned online marketer Neil Patel has explained how you can create content that is both human friendly as well as search engine optimized.

SEO content writing to improve your search engine rankings

Neil says that in order to search engine optimize your content you first of all need to understand what all helps you improve your SEO, and the first stress he makes is SEO copywriting. Many content writers and content marketers are of the opinion that every piece of content that you produce and publish must have the ability to “sell” something. I have used quotes because selling doesn’t always mean selling products and services. You can sell an idea. You can sell an opinion. You can sell an action. For example, if you want people to subscribe to your newsletter, for you THAT is selling. If you want people to download your e-book, then that is selling for you. If you want people to click your ads than that is selling for you. When you are making people do something, you are selling to those people. So even convincing content writing is like copywriting. How do you convince people? By writing logically and convincingly, of course. So this automatically makes your writing human-friendly.

How do you make your content writing SEO-friendly? By writing in the language used by people who are looking for solutions rather than products. By actually using the words and expressions people use in order to find what you have to offer.

A peculiar thing about search engines like Google is that their crawlers and ranking algorithms study bits of text at particular locations. For example, your page or blog title must contain your keywords. It helps if even your description contains some combination of your keywords. Then, the algorithm also studies your first paragraph and checks for the appearance of the main words. It also looks for your relevant words in the headings and subheadings that you use while writing your content. The bulleted list also gets some sort of importance and also does the text inside the hyperlinks.

These are small things that are often ignored by content writers but they can make a big difference. The above-linked blog post also contains some tools that can help you significantly improve your search engine rankings. Do check it out.

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5 beginners’ mistakes in content marketing

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5 beginners' content marketing mistakes

I have mentioned in one of my previous blog posts that 94% B2B small businesses on the Internet are using content marketing in one form or another. So naturally, if so many people are using content marketing more people want to use it. But the problem is, there are some beginners’ mistakes that people commit when they don’t understand the true meaning of content marketing and simply try to ape people who might, to be frank, be aping someone else. Listed below are the 5 major beginners’ mistakes in content marketing.

  1. When you are publishing blog posts and articles, you’re doing content marketing. Publishing blog posts and articles means you are creating content, which is good, which is a first step in the direction of content marketing. If you don’t have content, what do you market? And marketing here doesn’t mean that you are trying to sell content, it means through your content you’re drawing people to your website. You publish high-quality content so that people come to your website to make use of it. But by merely publishing that content doesn’t turn you into a marketer. For that you need to use various channels to distribute your content and make sure it gets found on social networking websites as well as search engines.
  2. Just focusing on SEO content. Don’t publish content just because you want to improve your search engine rankings. There is nothing wrong in trying to improve your SEO, but if that is the only motive behind publishing content, you are not going to experience much success. So what do you do if you don’t publish content for your SEO? Publish content for the sake of its quality, for the sake of the value it provides to your audience, for the sake of helping your prospective customers and clients. Once you can create useful content, it automatically becomes SEO content. After that, what remains is, making sure that there is no excessive code on your website that stops the search engine crawlers from accessing the actual content.
  3. Not being consistent with content publishing and distribution. Content marketing is an ongoing activity. It is not a “campaign”. It is a strategy. Strategy is always long-term. You may have a one-week goal, but you normally have a one-year or a five-year strategy. The search engines are constantly looking for new content to crawl and index and relegate the existing content to lower rankings. Millions of updates are posted on various social networking websites on a daily basis. This is the reality of our times. With so much content constantly being pumped into the Internet, if you are not producing content on an ongoing basis, you’re going to be run over by the content being published and promoted by your competitors.
  4. Neglecting search engine and social media optimization. Fully focusing on the quality of your content without overtly worrying about search engine optimization doesn’t mean that you totally neglect it. Remember that most of your traffic will come from search engines and social networking websites. Better make them an integral part of your content marketing. Pay attention to the sort of keywords you use within your blog posts and articles. Use the language used by your prospective customers and clients. Create compelling titles that can attract people on social media and social networking websites. Wherever possible, use attractive images or videos. Create your social media updates in such a manner that it is easier to share them.
  5. Neglecting your existing content. If you have had a website for a few years then you already have some content on it. You have the homepage. You have the company page. You have the products and services page. There might be an about us page. There might be big and small articles that you may have gotten yourself written a couple of years ago that still hang around. Whether they are performing well or not, they are your existing assets and you shouldn’t ignore them. Carry out an audit of your existing content and see what all improvements you can incorporate. Can you optimize your titles? Can you make your content crisp? Can you incorporate more keywords without indulging in keyword-spamming? Can you put a couple of more photographs? Can you improve the language? Can you add more content – maybe a couple of more paragraphs – to existing pages and blog posts? There is no sense in carrying out new content marketing activities if you haven’t gone through your existing content and worked on it.

There is an exhaustive list of content marketing mistakes that one can commit but these are basically beginners’ mistakes. If you can take care of these mistakes in the beginning, you are not going to encounter the crushing problems that many people encounter later on.

How to create content your market will love

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A few weeks ago I wrote about knowing your audience before writing content and starting your content marketing campaign. This can help you save lots of time and effort. But how do you know what sort of content your market is looking for? This Marketing Land blog post explains 8 ways you can create content your market will love. These eight ways are:

  1. Develop your strategy keeping the big picture in mind – what you eventually want to achieve with the content you’re planning to produce.
  2. Interview people as well as other stakeholders to get ideas about what sort of content you should create. You can invite the employees of the company. You can carry out surveys on your website. You can talk to people on social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter. You can directly talk to your customers and clients. Ask them what they want. Note down the questions they raise while talking to you.
  3. Create your content according to the preferred format. Not everybody wants written content. Not everybody wants slides and presentations. Not everybody wants to see videos. Every business has its own type of audience that prefers its own type of content format.
  4. Optimize your content for search engines and social media. In order to love your content people need to first find it and how do they find it? They will use the search engines as well as social media and social networking websites to come across your content.
  5. Measure the effectiveness of your content. Unless you know that your content is really working, how can you improve it? Improving your content means streamlining it according to your target audience’s preferences. By closely analysing your content and audience behaviour you will be able to make out exactly what attracts people to your content and hooks them to it.
  6. Maintain constant contact with people who access your content. You can maintain a mailing list. You can encourage people to follow you on Facebook and Twitter. You can use various online forums.

Some of these points are not included in the above-mentioned link and they should have been, so I have added them on my own. Instead of focusing on creating content that is loved by your audience, they have focused on how to make your content more effective and how to streamline it. That is different from creating content your audience loves.

Why your content marketing strategy might be failing

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Wondering why your content marketing strategy isn’t working the way it should have? This Inc.com article uses some advice from Joe Pulizzi to throw some light on why many companies fail at their content marketing.

Content marketing, as Joe rightly puts it, isn’t just about creating content and publishing it indiscriminately on your own blog/website or on social networking websites. It means a regular broadcasting. It means ongoing interaction with your audience. Here are a few things that make your content marketing strategy click:

  • Let people subscribe to your updates: No matter how great your content is you cannot assume that people will come to access your content on their own. You need to remind them on an ongoing basis simply because there is too much content on the Internet to get their attention. This can be achieved by encouraging them to subscribe to your regular email updates. They can also like your Facebook page, or follow you on Twitter or even subscribe to your RSS feeds. The basic idea is, getting people to subscribe to your updates is an important ingredient of your content marketing strategy.
  • Create brand evangelists: Take for example Apple. Most of its business happens because it has got millions of brand evangelists. When you create brand evangelists for your content marketing strategy, people promote your content on their own. But of course, in order to create evangelists your primary focus must be not just creating high-value content but also making sure that the content reaches the right audience.
  • Help your content writers coordinate with each other: If your business employs or works with multiple content writers, make sure that there is coordination between them, otherwise they will end up producing lots of duplicate content or something totally irrelevant to your core content marketing strategy.
  • Content marketing, keep in mind, is a different specialty: Just because a person has had a career in advertising and marketing doesn’t mean that he or she knows a lot about content marketing. Content marketing is a totally different ball game. Rather than marketers, as the above-linked article says, put your trust into the hands of publishers because content marketing on the Internet is more about publishing and distributing high-quality content rather than stuffing it down people’s throats.

You can read the remaining points in the original article.