In order to stay competitive, many businesses have started investing in creating the right content strategies. According to statistics, 82% of digital marketers actively use content marketing, which makes it an essential part of business growth.
However, it’s not easy to build an online presence in the competitive landscape of today. Even though you might get substantial and valuable marketing insights through authoritative online sources, this may not be enough.
Businesses that have limited resources and marketing experience can take advantage of the reliable and creative services offered by a content strategy agency. If your business wants to focus on developing and building a product or service instead of trying to understand Google’s algorithms or you simply don’t have the expertise necessary to make your business visible online, then working with a content strategy agency might be exactly what you need.
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What Is a Content Strategy Agency?
If you’ve read up on any online marketing theory, it probably looked easy to understand and implement. However, content marketing requires much more than simply uploading pictures on social media and writing a couple of blog posts.
There are parts of content marketing that can get highly technical for the average content creator, and this is where a content strategy agency can help out.
A content strategy agency is a specialized marketing company that helps businesses create and implement effective content strategies that attract, engage, and build trust with potential customers. Moreover, a content agency can also provide guidance on how to optimize current content for maximum impact.
As part of their content marketing package, these agencies produce and share videos, graphics, and written materials on behalf of other businesses as a part of their content strategy, helping them generate leads and close sales.
When you hire the right agency with content strategy expertise, experienced professionals will work with you to understand your business goals, target audience, and what sets you apart from competitors. They will do content audits, create a carefully considered strategy tailored to your business needs and research ideal blog post topics relevant to your industry, while some agencies will also create engaging and meaningful content, and optimize existing content for search engines.
Finally, content strategy agencies can help you measure the success of your campaigns by tracking metrics such as website visits, social media engagement, and customer conversions. By leveraging these insights, they can help you refine your approach over time and ensure that your content efforts are delivering results.
Why Is Content Strategy Important?
Creating a detailed, solid plan for your content marketing can be tiresome and complicated, and that’s why some businesses don’t dedicate enough time to creating a marketing plan. But here’s the thing – if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. So why would you struggle to create a content strategy and risk creating an unsuccessful one when you can hire an agency to create a custom content marketing strategy for you?
Content strategists implement various practices and step-by-step processes to build detailed, defined, and documented marketing plans. Moreover, they can create content calendars or editorial calendars for you to follow, which will keep your content distribution and publishing schedule on track and define crucial aspects of your content campaigns.
What follows below are some of the most obvious and important ways a content strategy agency can help your marketing take off.
1. Develop Strategies (Both Short-term and Long-term)
Having a content plan is not an option but a necessity. As a matter of fact, as much as 97% of companies have some kind of content strategy they follow.
When it comes to campaigns, they typically last anywhere from six months up to a year (but sometimes even longer), and they target certain content goals, such as making X number of customers, driving X amount of traffic, or generating X number of leads. Content strategists should make sure that your short-term plans line up with your long-term content goals, and they should do this through a quarterly or monthly evaluation.
2. Access To the Latest Technology and Tools
A proper content strategy agency should offer you the resources you need to improve things like pay-per-click advertising, search engine optimization (SEO), link building, and social media strategies.
If you’re a small business with a tight budget, you can always use free trials and free versions of various tools. And while these tools can help you effectively perform competitor site benchmarking, keyword research, social listening, content promotion, and other marketing tasks, it’s all going to be on the most basic level.
In other words, if you want to employ more advanced features or scale up your business, you need to invest in premium tools. Some of these applications offer intelligent and actionable analytics, streamlined campaign and accounts management, automation, and other helpful functions.
However, to use these features, you would have to rework your budget and plan ahead of time for these expenses. But luckily, working with agencies means that you can have access to any premium software they use, or at least have them use the software for your campaigns.
3. Establish a Strong Online Presence
Having a strong online presence doesn’t have to mean having millions of followers on Instagram or ranking first on the search engine results page, even though this can provide a huge benefit to your business. Rather, a solid online presence means that users will find you whenever they look for you online.
You should already have created accounts according to the search behavior of your target audience. These include Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google My Business, and other platforms where your audience usually spends their time.
Some agencies will help you create powerful PPC and social media, as well as SEO and link-building campaigns that will help you build your online presence. They will aid you in growing your business with the help of the content creation process for different platforms (including social content), targeting the right seed and long-tail keywords, and building social communities.
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4. High-Quality Content
Content experts need to stay up to date with the latest news and happenings that can have an influence on your business. They study your target audience segments in order to create content that addresses the concerns of your market.
These experts give you insights into how the content on your pages and social media accounts is consumed by users.
- Do your posts on social media drive enough engagement?
- Does your downloadable content attract enough clicks?
- Do your on-page blogs get more traction than your how-to videos?
This information will help you craft more compelling and high-quality content.
Plenty of content strategy agencies will plan your content marketing strategy for every platform, whether it’s in the form of PPC ads, social media posts, or on-page and off-page SEO.
5. Expand Your Reach
It goes without saying that compelling content is essential if you want to expand your reach. It helps with building trust and credibility with your audience, it can be used to engage them in meaningful conversations, and it also helps to drive organic traffic to your website.
With regular content posted by your content strategists, you will create more and more opportunities for search engines to list your website in the top results. Each new piece of content added to your website is another page that Google can index and rank.
Agencies follow the best SEO practices, so search engines will be able to find your content month after month after you’ve published it. The reason for this is that organic traffic provides leads on a relatively regular basis at little or no cost.
6. Cost Reduction
Content strategy development requires having dedicated staff on board. Doing so with an in-house team means added expenses in the form of operating costs, benefits, and salaries. If you need to downgrade your strategy, this also means less flexibility for your team.
Fortunately, content strategy agencies can meet your changing needs by adjusting their offerings. Moreover, agencies are also able to leverage their expertise and resources to create more effective campaigns at lower costs than if you were to do it yourself.
And finally, agencies can also use partner discounts that give clients additional benefits. For instance, content agencies are often able to negotiate better rates with media outlets, which can further reduce your overall costs. Also, if your content marketing agency partners with software providers, you can save money on marketing software.
7. Fresh Ideas
Introducing new talent and ideas can be extremely beneficial to your business. However, when all of the ideas come from within, it’s easy to get caught in narrow views or groupthink. And if you don’t have a dedicated team of content marketers and content writers working on your campaigns, it can be especially difficult for your team to find enough time to research and experiment with innovative ideas and find a fresh approach to content strategy.
Luckily, content experts have many unique experiences in finding success with clients, and they can bring new perspectives to your business. They can present brand-new ideas that you haven’t considered previously, or they can improve on the ideas and strategies you already use.
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8. Stay on Top of Marketing Trends
Content marketing is evolving at a fast pace. And as it evolves, it’s important for businesses to stay up to date with the latest trends. With the ever-changing landscape of digital marketing, understanding what works and what doesn’t can be a challenge.
The key to success is staying ahead of the curve and adapting quickly to new trends. But keeping up with the changing content marketing trends while being a business leader at the same time is almost impossible. If you don’t have proper support, you might be missing out on a lot of opportunities.
This is where a content strategy agency is of great help. If you don’t have time to keep up with the latest trends in the industry, an agency will make sure that you get the best marketing experience and follow all the important trends that can level up your content marketing game.
9. Save Time
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You can always produce content on your own. However, creating content and seeing results can take a lot of time. It’s easy to feel burned out, dedicating hours upon hours every day to produce a video, write a blog post, or create some other type of content, be it short-form or long-form content. And in a lot of cases, thought-out content strategies are disregarded because the return doesn’t seem to be worth the effort.
However, when you’re working with professionals, you’ll have a better chance of portioning out your day and finding time to do almost everything. A content marketing agency will do the research for you, write, and publish the curated content while you’re able to focus on your business. As time passes, you will begin to see your business become more authoritative and established.
10. Support Sales
Having attractive, relevant, and updated content helps the sales team do their job properly and gain the trust of prospective clients. Content production agencies can provide invaluable assistance to sales teams by creating content that engages customers and drives sales.
An agency can create a variety of content formats, such as blog content, social media posts, or videos, that help to inform potential customers about a company’s products or services. This content can then be used to generate leads and build long-lasting relationships with potential customers.
Furthermore, content agencies can provide guidance on the best ways to use digital marketing channels such as email marketing campaigns or social platforms to further boost sales efforts. They can work with salespeople to provide better support and get feedback, making them more effective and reliable. Finally, they can support your sales team by creating their email scripts, one-pages, leave-behinds, branded sales decks, and more.
11. Instant Expertise
Content marketing is a field that requires a lot of time, effort, and expertise if you want to do it right. The problem is that even if you have the expertise and are willing to make the effort, you probably don’t have that time on your hands.
With a content strategy agency, you get access to all the expertise and skills you need to implement a successful marketing campaign. Agencies specialize in identifying content opportunities as well as content execution and development across different channels.
12. Regular Tracking
The performance of your campaigns shouldn’t matter only to you but to your content agency too. When creating content for clients, a professional agency will carefully consider the success of content marketing efforts. It will proactively track content performance and provide you with the metrics on a regular basis.
This means that you’ll never be in the dark about how your content performs and what can be improved. Working with your agency should help you to continually improve and find new opportunities for using content to grow your business. We would go so far as to say that you shouldn’t consider working with an agency that doesn’t regularly track your content campaigns.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, outsourcing your content marketing offers a heap of opportunities for your brand. Experts in this field can provide you with the resources, knowledge, and tools you need to scale up your business, create meaningful business relationships with customers through a powerful and innovative digital campaign, and reach untapped markets.
When you choose the right content strategy agency, you’ll benefit from having a successful content strategy, expanding your audience reach, publishing high-quality content on a regular basis, staying on top of marketing trends, as well as saving money on all of that, and getting a great content ROI.If you’re interested in working with a professional content strategy agency, take a look at Shortlist’s content marketing services and get in touch with us to discuss your content plans for the future.
