In order to stay competitive, many businesses have started investing in content strategies. According to statistics, 82% of marketers actively use content marketing, which makes it an essential part of the growth of your business.
Even though you might get substantial and valuable marketing insights through authoritative online sources, businesses that have limited resources and marketing experience can take advantage of the services offered by a content strategy agency.
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 a lot more than simply uploading pictures on social media and writing a couple of blog posts.
There are parts of content marketing that can get extremely technical for the average content creator, and this is where a content strategy agency can help out. 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.
1. Develop Short-Term and Long-Term Strategies
Campaigns typically last anywhere from six months up to a year, and they target certain goals, such as making X number of customers, driving X amount of traffic, or generating X number of leads. A content strategy agency should make sure that your short-term plans line up with your long-term goals, and they should do this through a quarterly or monthly evaluation.
2. Access To 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), and social media strategies.
If you’re a small business with a tight budget, it goes without saying that you can always use free trials and the free versions of various tools. And while these tools can help you effectively perform competitor site benchmarking, keyword research, social listening, and other marketing tasks, it is all going to be on the most basic level.
You will need to invest in premium tools if you want to employ more advanced features or scale up your business. Some of these applications offer intelligent and actionable analytics, streamlined campaign and accounts management, automation, and other helpful functions. To use these features you would have to rework your budget and plan ahead of time for these expenses. However, getting to work with agencies means that you’d have access to any premium software they’ve obtained at reduced prices with the help of their technical partners.
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 place on the search engine results page, even though these things provide a huge benefit to your business. A solid online presence means that you’re sure that users will find you whenever they look for you online.
You should already have created accounts according to the search behavior of your 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, social media, and SEO campaigns that will help you build your online presence. They will aid you in growing your business by creating user-friendly content for different platforms, targeting the right keywords, and building social communities.
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 audience in order to create content that addresses the concerns of your market.
These experts give you insights on 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 adds, social media posts, or on-page and off-page SEO.
5. Expand Your Reach
With regular content posted by your content strategy agency, 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 are always following the best SEO practices, so search engines will be able to find your content month after month after you’ve published it. The good news is that this organic traffic would provide leads on a relatively regular basis at little or no cost.
6. Cost Reduction
A content strategy requires having dedicated personnel on board and doing so in-house 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. Content strategy agencies can meet your changing needs by adjusting their offerings.
There are also partner discounts that give clients additional benefits. If your agency partners with software providers, you can save money on marketing software.
7. Fresh Ideas
When all of the ideas come from within, it’s easy to get caught in narrow views or groupthink. 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 hadn’t been considered previously, or they can improve on existing ideas. It can be extremely beneficial to your business to introduce new talent and ideas.
8. Stay on Top of Marketing Trends
Content marketing is evolving at a fast pace. Keeping up with the changing content marketing trends while being a business leader at the same time is almost impossible. You might be missing out on a lot of opportunities if you don’t have proper support. Content strategy agencies keep up with the latest trends in the industry to make sure that their clients get the best marketing experience.
9. Save Time
You can produce content on your own. However, creating content and seeing results can take a lot of time. It is easy to feel burned out, dedicating hours upon hours every day to produce a video or write a blog post. 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. An 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 to do their job properly and gain the trust of prospective clients. Agencies can work with salespeople to provide better support and get feedback, making them more effective and reliable. In addition, they can support your sales team by creating their email scripts, one-pages, leave-behinds, branded sales decks, and more.
11. Instant Expertise
With a content strategy agency, you get access to all the expertise and skills you need to implement a perfect marketing campaign. Agencies specialize in identifying content opportunities, and content execution and development across different channels.
Final Thoughts
Outsourcing your content marketing offers a heap of opportunities for your brand. Experts in the field are able to provide you with the resources, knowledge, and tools you need to scale up your business, create meaningful relationships with customers through a powerful and innovative digital campaign, and reach untapped markets.
