Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing, has 6x the ROI of other marketing methods, and generates up to 3 times more leads, making it an ideal strategy to grow your audience, improve search traffic, increase conversions, and boost your sales.
Most enterprises know the value of content marketing and 90% of them are blogging, posting on social media, creating the random ebook here and there, etc. But does your content deliver the results you want? Are you spinning wheels with a lack of progress, purpose, agreement, and results? If not, you might want to consider hiring a content marketing agency.
According to the Content Marketing Institute, more than 70% of businesses outsource content but only 10% outsource content strategy. And this probably means that they don’t have a strategy, or the one they built before hiring the writer is gathering dust on the shelf.
But even the best content can’t fulfill its potential without a solid strategy behind it. A content marketing agency plugs this gap (and you don’t have to hire a full-time content strategist).
A content marketing expert will do these 11 business critical things for you:
- Align your content efforts with your business objectives. Do you need more leads? Better brand awareness? More calls booked? The content you create, how you distribute it, and how you measure it varies depending on your goals.
- Bring together the right stakeholders and make the right connections to make content work for you. Are sales and marketing talking to each other? If not, then someone needs to make this happen.
- Help you figure out the right topics to cover for your audience and what formats they should be in.
- Help you truly understand how to reach your buyers through content by building buyer personas.
- Build a process and a calendar that allows you to complete high-quality content on a regular schedule
- Distribute and promote yourself and your content on the channels where your buyers hang out to maximize reach.
- Figure out a social strategy that helps you make the most of relationship marketing on the most relevant platforms.
- Define and deploy an SEO strategy so you are getting found online for the keywords you want to be found for.
- Help with measuring the effectiveness of your entire content program.
- Figure out other brand awareness and lead gen channels that may make sense for you – podcast guesting, for example.
- Build a reuse strategy so you can message consistently and get the most out of your content creation activities.
It’s easy to understand why content development is the most outsourced content-related activity. It makes sense: content development is time-consuming and requires specific expertise.
But yet SEMRush found that only 19% of companies who create content rate their efforts as “very successful.” In fact, the largest number of respondents say their results are only moderately successful. That’s a huge miss!
The numbers suggest that enterprises place too much focus on content creation and not enough on creating a solid strategy first. Hiring a quality content marketing strategist is the best way to put that strategy in place and be confident in the impact it will deliver for your brand.
