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.